NOTE: Thanks to input from coauthor Mike Smith and some intrepidly truth-seeking New Yorkers, the information below has been updated for accuracy.

Forty years ago, in 1976, the United States of America was rapidly approaching what I like to refer to as GABDDO, the Great American Beer Diversity Die-Off.

Within three short years of 1976, the country would be facing its post-Prohibition low of active breweries and available, domestically-produced beer brands.

In 1979, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, The Dukes of Hazzard debuting on network TV, and The Knack’s “My Sharona” reigning at the top of the pop music charts, the USA hit bottom with just 44 active breweries that produced an even smaller number of flavors and styles.

(To what can we attribute this horrific mass extinction? Well, you can read all about it in Chapter 7 of The Comic Book Story of Beer).

The country was fast losing its grip on its national and regional beer cultures. And this erosion most definitely wore away at the zythophilic infrastructure of New York City.

Four decades ago on this day, the headlines were reporting the demise of the last struggling breweries in the so-called “Capital of the World.”

Thanks to the still-snowballing Craft Beer Movement, we can take it as granted that the brewing industry is soaringly more healthy today than it was in the 1970s. We also all know that the Big Apple is, besides being a world unto itself, the leading edge of arts and culture in America. It wields a great deal of influence on how the rest of the country (eventually) eats and drinks. Contemporary Brooklyn alone is the metonymical center of hipsterism, where, one imagines, if you’re not drinking some mass-production beer for its ironical value, you’re drinking some artisinal brew conceived by fellow hipsters on the next block.

But, of course, commercial real estate prices aren’t what they were in 1976. In Brooklyn that year, “the best situated” industrial buildings rented for $2 a square foot. What will that run you today? About $39 a square foot, according to the New York Daily News. That’s up a whopping 1,950%!

And in 1976, the owner of a former Schlitz Brewery compound in Bushwick couldn’t find another brewing industry tenant for love or money. So he had the approximately 325,000 square foot facility demolished. And all that brewing equipment that went with it? Reportedly, it was worth more as scrap than it was on the resale market.

So if the the state of the art was at such a nadir in 1976, with zero breweries upon the closing of the Schaefer and Rheingold plants, what is the number of breweries in New York City today? What would a comprehensive list of New York City breweries look like?

I have been wondering for a while. And that 40-year anniversary seemed to me like the perfect time to officially pose the question and investigate.

After tabulating the data available from the Brewers’ Association, the number of breweries in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island, and Queens seems to be — if you include microbreweries and brewpubs — 32 37 38.

We can quibble over this, and I certainly invite your comments.

One potential point of controversy I already recognize and anticipate is the fact that this list includes eleven contract brewers, whose products may or may not (most likely not, I would venture) actually be produced in one of the five boroughs. It would almost surely be an uphill battle to even determine where those beers are made, since at least one of the beer concerns listed above publicly avoids being referred to as a “contract brewer” at all and instead shrouds the terroir of its products under the supposedly mystery-adding term “gypsy brewing.” (For coauthor Mike Smith’s take on “gypsy brewing,” allow me to refer you in the direction of our Comic Book Story of Beer podcast.)

One thing we can be certain of, though, is that this number will change soon. According to the same Brewers’ Association data, there are another 23 20 New York City breweries in the planning stages. Think they can all hold on long enough to get that overall number to 56 57?

Here’s to that!