Captains of Industry

As Election Day approaches, like many of you, we’re wondering what the future holds for New York City, as the Bloomberg Era will soon be coming to an end.

Toward that end, all this Fall we have been looking back on what we have been able to accomplish over the last ten years, and thinking about what needs to be done in the years ahead.

Our report, “Ten Years: A Thousand Buildings Landmarked: One Hundred Blocks Rezoned” catalogues, among other things, the more than one thousand buildings we have been able to help get landmarked over the last ten years.

Among them are some wonderful monuments to our industrial past.  Here are just a few of them from the report’s section on “Industrial Monuments:“

439-445 West 14th Street (Thomas Jackson,1892), Gansevoort Market Historic District, designated 2003. Originally stables for Nabisco (headquartered in the nearby present-day Chelsea Market), this structure eventually housed an innovative fleet of electric cars for the cookie manufacturing giant.

Baumann Brothers Furniture and Carpets Store, 22-26 East 14th Street (D. & J. Jardine, 1880-81), designated 2008. Originally a furniture and carpet warehouse and store, it is also one of the city’s richest and most inventive cast-iron facades.

277 West 10th Street, former Shepherd Warehouse (1894), Greenwich Village Historic District Extension I/Far West Village Extension, designated 2006.  This massive thirteen-story former warehouse is just one of several impressive industrial monuments that line the Greenwich Village waterfront, now converted to residences.

47 Great Jones Street (1895), NoHo Historic District Extension, designated 2008.  This was just one piece of a great wave of industrial development which washed over what we today call NoHo in the 1890’s, when what was once New York finest residential neighborhood was transformed into the center of its garment and household goods manufacturing district.

To see more of our industrial history (and much more) that we have been able to help preserve over the last ten years, as well as where we still have work to do, see the full report.