Vintage wooden seltzer bottle carrier, J. P. Bottling Company

This 24x9x6” wooden crate has remarkable joinery - the only nails are in the bottom planks and on the metal strip around the ends. It’s stenciled with the address J. P. Bottling Co., 60 Sheriff St., NY 2 NY, the phone number CA (for CAnal) 8-7670, and the word “home” (denoting home delivery). Sheriff Street in Manhattan consisted of tenements with mostly German Jewish residents, and had several seltzer bottling businesses before the area was razed between the 1940s and 1960s for larger housing projects (only one block of the street remains, with no buildings fronting it). Given the 2L-5N phone number and the prewar 1-digit postal code (before ZIP codes were introduced in 1963, which for NYC rendered that area 10002 by adding 100- in front of it), I estimate the crate- or at least the stenciling- dates from between the 1940s to the early 1960s. However, I can’t find any specific information on the J. P. Bottling Co.