Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg

August 21, 2003

Familiar Domino Sugar Refinery Will Shut Much of Its Operation

By DIANE CARDWELL

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/...n/SUGA.650.jpg
The Domino Sugar refinery, which has dominated part of Brooklyn's waterfront since the 19th century, will retain only its packaging and warehousing operations on the site.

The neon Domino Sugar sign looms over the East River like a beacon, visible for miles. Gleaming above the Brooklyn complex where sugar has been refined for more than a century, it has become a symbol of a rapidly fading industrial legacy, a reminder that the city known for high-tech finance and elegant living was built on ships and machinery, brawn and sweat.

Although the sign itself may remain illuminated, much of the work it heralds will soon cease. Yesterday at the mammoth brick refinery, a relic of the time when New York led the nation in sugar processing, office staff members and unions representing the other workers were told that sometime before February, the refinery would shut down. Only part of the adjacent packaging operation will continue.

About 190 workers stand to lose their jobs, with the remaining 60 or 70 staying on in packaging and warehousing or moving to another of the company's locations.

"We can't sell all we can make," said Jack Lay, president and chief executive officer of the American Sugar Refining Company, which acquired the Domino plant on the Williamsburg waterfront in 2001. "The capacity of the refineries exceeds the quantity that we can compete for in the marketplace."

The refinery — once the world's largest, according to a company brochure — and its related buildings fill an 11-and-a-half-acre swath along a quarter of a mile of the East River just north of the Williamsburg Bridge.

Operating since the 1880's, it was built by the Havemeyer family, which became extremely wealthy as New York picked up the slack left by the Civil War destruction of many Southern refineries. The city at one time processed 60 percent of the nation's sugar.

In recent decades, as New York hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs, especially along the waterfront, the plant has been the scene of bitter strikes that drastically cut production. In addition, the use of high-fructose corn syrup instead of sucrose in products like soda and canned fruit severely cut into the demand for sugar, Mr. Lay said.

The Domino plant has the capacity to produce about 950 million pounds of sugar a year, he said, but it produced only 400 million pounds last year. The previous owner, Tate & Lyle, had already shed its operations processing raw sugar, instead taking semiprocessed liquid sugar off a barge from the Domino plant in Baltimore and crystallizing it into granules. Now, even that will stop.

Mr. Lay said there were no immediate plans for the building itself, a hulking factory that smells on different floors earthy, sweet and sharp, and that has attracted its own set of fans. Last year, for example, members of the Society for Industrial Archaeology toured the building, where stalactites of sugar had formed on some of the pipes.

"The short-term impact is not devastation, but it will be very disheartening to people in the neighborhood who have seen jobs leave over two decades," said David Yassky, the city councilman who represents the area. "Long-term, it's part of a trend of the transformation of an industrial waterfront that's going to be used for housing and open space."

For example, the city has been pushing forward with a huge proposal to rezone the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfront to encourage residential and recreational uses where industry once ruled. Officials drew the plan, however, to preserve the Domino site for manufacturing, and yesterday, Richard Barth, executive director of the Department of City Planning, said that the administration remained "committed to finding an industrial reuse for that site."

Still, Mr. Yassky said, the closing is troubling, and underscores the need to protect jobs in places like Sunset Park, which has recently lost hundreds of them to plant closings, and along stretches of the waterfront, where the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Bloomberg administration are considering new uses for mercantile piers.

Andrew Alper, president of the city's Economic Development Corporation, said in a statement that the Department of Small Business Services would work with the company to provide job training and placement services to workers slated for layoffs.

Several workers outside the complex around lunchtime yesterday, all of whom declined to give their names, said that they had not yet received any official announcement and were working "under a cloud of uncertainty," in the words of one.

One man, smoking a cigarette in a yard outside the refinery, seemed fatalistic.

"What do you do when you lose your job?" he said between drags, shrugging and chuckling wryly. "Find another one. Life goes on."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

I thought this plant was supposed to stay open - wasn't this talke about last year? *Hmmm... what can you do, I guess.

It is nice to hear that the City's Department of Planning is supporting industrial reuses for the site. Here are some possible suggestions of mine that would possibly make sense, given area market needs and locational advantages:

1) a bulk cargo handling facility for barges and/or ships. (Of course truck traffic issues would have to be looked into). This facility is not that far from the BQE (I-278).

2) A paper recycling or paper manufacturing company could buy the property and would have to retrofit the factory building with new equipment. The immediate costs would probably be great, but the market for paper in the white collar, office economy of Manhatten would probably be high.

3) Other industries that manufacture products that the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) economy uses (paper, ink, possibly chemicals for cleaning, etc.)

4) Any industry that would relocate to the Domino Sugar refinery would have access to the deepwater East River. The Domino Sugar dock currently has bollards used for vessel tie ups, thus adding the advantage of having maritime infrastructure in place.

NYC needs to maintain and expand its waterborne industries! Let's diversify the economy a little more, please! *

Here are some more suggestions for the re-use of the Domino Sugar site:

1) creation of a sugar-port that would be owned by Domino Sugar OR the creation of a port of entry/distribution for break bulk cargoes, such as food products. This could be owned by interested private entities. Barges/ships would unload their products at the port and trucks could transport goods to eastern Long Island and New England. This would reduce some of the wear and tear on the roads from the container ports in NJ and Staten Island (NYC).

2) retrofitting the refinery into a facility that would produce or process foodstuffs and would receive materials by ship and/or barge.

Some photos of the factory from Kent Ave:

http://www.travelogues.net/Brooklyn/...waterfront.htm

Originally posted by Zippy and Edward.


NY Newsday

Sugar Plant Closes After 148 Years

By LARRY McSHANE
Associated Press Writer

January 29, 2004, 4:45 PM EST

NEW YORK -- It predated the Brooklyn Bridge and outlasted the Brooklyn Dodgers. The borough's Domino Sugar plant, an East River fixture for 148 years, is closing its refinery operation after Friday's shifts.

About 200 bitter employees at the sugar plant will be out of work, many of them people who had spent their entire adult lives working inside the 11-story building with its familiar red neon sign.

"This is how we treat the American worker," said Sal Alladeen, president of the union representing the workers. "They're laying off folks who worked in this neighborhood for 30, 40 years."

The factory workers forged an unusually strong bond over the years, becoming almost like family. They endured an ugly strike that lasted from June 1999 through February 2001; a despondent 22-year factory worker committed suicide during the walkout.

First word of the factory shutdown came in August. But the imminent arrival of the closing day for the 19th-century brick building in the Williamsburg section still delivered a punch in the gut for workers.

"It's depressing," said Alladeen. "It's depressing to watch 200 people lose their jobs."

The plant was bought in 2001 by the American Sugar Refining Co., which decided to close it. Company officials said the Brooklyn plant was not equipped to compete with its plants in Baltimore, Yonkers, N.Y., and outside New Orleans.

American Sugar CEO and president Jack Lay did not return a call for comment Thursday on the closing.

When Domino began operating in Brooklyn in 1856, New York was the nation's No. 1 sugar producer. But the sugar industry fell on hard times in the last quarter-century, with 15 refineries closing nationwide since 1980.

Sugar companies were losing market share to high-fructose corn syrup and beet sugar. By 2002, the Brooklyn plant still had the capacity to produce 950 million tons of sugar annually _ but it generated only 400 million tons.

But Alladeen suggested the closing was more about real estate than sugar. The waterfront property, he said, would be far more valuable if reincarnated as luxury housing in a gentrified neighborhood where lofts can sell for $1 million.

Copyright © 2004, The Associated Press


The Williamsburg Bridge with the Circle Line boat and Domino Sugar Plant.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/bridges/...dge_domino.jpg

January 31, 2004

The Last Grain Falls at a Sugar Factory

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Richard Rednour spent the last week of his 28 years at the Domino Sugar plant in Brooklyn learning how to write a résumé.

"Network'' was among the other pieces of advice Mr. Rednour picked up this week at the employment classes the plant had offered to workers who will soon be re-entering the job market. Yesterday, the plant's owner, American Sugar Refining, ended nearly all operations at the Williamsburg refining and packing plant, which has overlooked the East River since the 1880's.

Some workers, including Mr. Rednour, 50, a shipping and warehouse foreman, will be looking for work for the first time in decades.

"I learned this past week that I'm a dinosaur," Mr. Rednour said yesterday, taking a final drag during his final cigarette break outside the complex of brick and concrete buildings that stretches across more than 11 riverfront acres just north of the Williamsburg Bridge. "Having a job for a long time in one place is not necessarily a good thing. It used to mean I was reliable."

More than 220 others who have reliably arrived for work for years will not return on Monday, leaving fewer than two dozen workers to operate the plant at a greatly diminished level - reduced to packaging sugar cubes and filling plastic toy figurines with cinnamon sugar - until it closes permanently later this year. American Sugar, which bought the plant in 2001, announced in August that it would close because of falling demand for cane sugar in an age of beet sugar, high-fructose corn syrup and other competing sweeteners.

What will eventually become of the plant is unclear, but speculation among those standing outside it in the cold yesterday morning, shaking hands and saying goodbye, was that it would go the way of the soda factory, the knitting factory, the boot polish factory and so many other factories whose brick shells have been transformed into housing and commercial space to make way for the gentrification rippling through Brooklyn.

Williamsburg has changed as the manufacturing plants that once defined it have declined. In Brooklyn as a whole, the average number of manufacturing jobs declined to 33,967 in June 2003 from 88,800 in June 1984. In June 1958, the figure was 222,200, according to data from the state and the United States Department of Labor.

Now, retailers on nearby Bedford Avenue trade on that industrial past. One store, Brooklyn Industries, sells clothing and bags, while another, Spoonbill and Sugartown Booksellers, includes an image of the Domino plant in some of its advertising materials.

A spokeswoman for the Department of City Planning said the plant was not likely to be turned into housing. Under a proposed rezoning of the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfront, the Domino plant site would remain industrial or commercial, possibly with limited retail offerings like a hardware store, or office space.

"We really wish to keep the current mix of zoning uses, which are characteristic of the neighborhood," said the spokeswoman, Katie Maccracken. "We have not been approached to change it."

Florida Crystals, the Florida agriculture conglomerate that is a co-owner of American Sugar, does not have immediate plans for the site when it closes later this year, said its vice president, Jorge Dominicis.

"This wasn't a decision made because we've got some other plan," Mr. Dominicis said in a telephone interview. "We're not that far along.''

He said that while the company was reluctant to lay off workers, a decline in sugar demand had forced it to close the plant, one of two the company owns in the New York area. Some workers may find jobs at the other plant, in Yonkers, he said.

The Brooklyn plant endured the boom and decline of Brooklyn's sugar industry - New York was the nation's largest sugar refiner in the late 19th century - and the end has not come easily. Intermittent strikes since the 1980's increased tension between labor and management, closing the plant for 20 months from 1999 to 2001, and yesterday several workers disputed the way American Sugar was interpreting their severance pay plan.

Brendan McPartland, the union representative for many of the machinists and mechanics leaving yesterday, said that the plant closing was "a tragedy" and that the union would challenge the company's interpretation of the severance agreement.

Jack Lay, president and chief executive of American Sugar, said the dispute would have to be resolved through arbitration.

Mr. Lay, 74, a former manager of the plant's refinery, said the distinctive neon Domino Sugar sign, long a landmark for residents of downtown Manhattan, would no longer shine.

"I think the sign is pretty much out of business,'' he said. "We would love to have it on for advertising purposes, but it's just become too difficult'' to maintain.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Hmmm, 11 waterfront acres looking at Manhattan, in a super-hot area, where pretty much everything around it is already rezoned for residential and retail. Hmmmm...

July 1, 2004

Developers Known for Residential Work Buy Domino Sugar Plant on Brooklyn Waterfront

By DIANE CARDWELL and ROSALIE R. RADOMSKY

Two developers known for residential projects have bought the Domino Sugar refinery in Williamsburg, ending a rich chapter of Brooklyn's industrial waterfront history.

C.P.C. Resources, the development arm of the Community Preservation Corporation, a lending consortium of banks and insurance companies best known for financing rehabilitations of older apartments, and Isaac Katan, a Brooklyn developer who has helped gentrify Fourth Avenue in Park Slope, have bought the land and the buildings of the all-but-shuttered plant, said Lloyd Kaplan, a preservation corporation spokesman.

The developers would not say how much they paid for the property or what they planned to do with it, instead releasing a statement saying that they "look forward to working with the community and the city as we develop our plans for the site."

The Domino plant, with its distinctive neon sign looming over the East River just north of the Williamsburg Bridge, had been operating since the 1880's and was acquired in 2001 by American Sugar Refining.

Donald Brainard, vice president for human resources at American Sugar, also declined to discuss the particulars of the sale, but he said the plant's operations were unprofitable. "We announced last August that we would close it ultimately and had no plans for the facility at the time of the initial announcement," he said.

American Sugar still has plants in Yonkers, Baltimore and Chalmette, La., but the Brooklyn refinery, once the world's largest, according to a company brochure, had been the most inefficient, Mr. Brainard said, adding that only about 25 employees work there now. "We made a decision to close the operation to increase our efficiency and lower our costs," he said, adding that there had been a partial shutdown of operations in January. "I would guess the rest will close later this year."

Although sugar processing ended at the plant last August, news of the sale of the mammoth brick factory and its uncertain future appeared to take neighbors and city officials by surprise. Joseph Markowitz, who had bought the company's office building and parking garage across the street from the refinery about two years ago, said he would like to see it rezoned for residential use, a designation he is seeking for his property. "We have a problem renting to commercial - it's very hard," he said.

But City Planning Department officials, who have been pushing forward with an enormous proposal to rezone the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfront to encourage residential and recreational uses, had drawn their plan to preserve the Domino site for manufacturing, a move applauded by several officials and labor advocates who would like to see the remnants of the borough's industrial legacy - and its blue-collar jobs - preserved.

In August, city officials said they were committed to finding an industrial reuse for the site. "We're not contemplating a rezoning for this site," Regina Myer, the Brooklyn director for the Planning Department, said yesterday. "We're focusing all of our efforts on the rezoning to the north."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Maybe they'll keep that big, main building, but the rest...

This will be a major development and will really open up the waterfront. Can't wait for this... the park/esplanade, the new retail in a rather dead area, hopefully artist lofts. This will be good for the area. It's a real shame to see Domino close. I always liked knowing that NYC had such an instiution still going, but that's the way it goes now. No industrial use will come of this (proabably), so don't jerk around. Let this be developed BIG time and bring 1000s of homes, etc. to the area and continue the amazing BK renaissance.

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Some photos of the factory from Kent Ave:

http://www.travelogues.net/Brooklyn/...waterfront.htm

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Amazing! I gotta get down there.

A great underground magazine about NYC's undeground infiltrates the Domino sugar plant:

http://www.jinxmagazine.com/domino.html

Domino Sugar Plant.


http://www.wirednewyork.com/williams...mino_sugar.jpg

I wonder how many condos will be built on this badboy?

I hope they keep the smokestack.

dose any one have any insider info on how much they paid for this copmplex?????????????

Where Sugar Once Ruled, a Face-Off Over the Future

http://www.nyc-architecture.com/WBG/SUGA.650.jpg
http://www.nyc-architecture.com/WBG/wbg025.htm

NY TIMES

By JAKE MOONEY
October 1, 2006

Williamsburg

The bright yellow Domino Sugar sign next to the Williamsburg Bridge is among the most distinctive features of the Brooklyn waterfront.

Now, the sign may point the way to the borough’s next big historic preservation fight.

Last month, the Waterfront Preservation Alliance of Greenpoint and Williamsburg formally asked the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to consider the old sugar factory for landmark status.

A plan for a project combining market-rate and low-income housing at the site is being drafted by the partnership that bought the property shortly after the factory closed in 2004. It consists of the Community Preservation Corporation, a nonprofit organization, and Isaac Katan, a private developer.

The preservationists, supported by the local City Council member, David Yassky, want any development to conform with the factory, a hulking brick Romanesque Revival structure that dates to the late 19th century and recalls an era when New York was the nation’s leading sugar producer.

Mr. Yassky angered local preservationists last year by helping to override the landmark designation of a nearby warehouse. The Domino plant, he said, is more significant. “It’s an icon,” he said. “It’s a landmark in the popular sense of the word. When I talk to people in Queens or Manhattan about that part of my district, I say it’s right by the Domino Sugar factory, and they know where that is.”

Ironically, Alice Rich, a member of the waterfront alliance, said her group’s efforts had benefited from the rapid development that followed the comprehensive rezoning of the local waterfront in May 2005. “People,” she said, “can see what’s disappearing.”

The developers, who have yet to unveil concrete plans, warn that too much preservation could jeopardize their project and the construction in the area of low-income housing.

“We certainly support preservation,” said Lloyd Kaplan, a spokesman for the property’s owners. But he added, “Our priority is affordable housing, and we want to achieve a balanced plan.”

The Rev. Jim O’Shea, president of Churches United for Fair Housing, made a similar point. “If you look at it in human terms,” he said, “how many families do you want to knock out of housing in the community, at what price, and what are you preserving?”

There may be room for compromise. Mary Habstritt, president of the Roebling chapter of the national Society for Industrial Archeology, said that she would like to see more kept intact than just the distinctive Domino sign. Some of the old factory’s equipment, if preserved, could tell the story of the refining industry that once thrived along the waterfront, she said.

But she, along with Mr. Yassky and Ms. Rich, says that preservation and housing are not incompatible. “There have been lots of industrial buildings put to other uses, including residential,” Ms. Habstritt said. “It just demands creativity and openmindedness.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Landmarking should be reserved for extraordinary circumstances. When you landmark something, you're basically taking away property rights from the onwer. Is it really that hard to find a similar piece of architecture on the east coast or even in NYC? No - it isn't.

I think it should be made more difficult to stop development based on landmarking if people are serious about doing this.

In San Francisco a 19th Century waterfront industrial complex was to be torn down to build an apartment building, but some saw a better idea.

In 1963 architects were hired, according to wikipedia, "to convert the square and its historic brick structures to an integrated restaurant and retail complex, the first major adaptive re-use project in the United States." The complex opened to the public in 1964: Ghirardelli Square ...

http://www.galen-frysinger.ws/us/ghirardelli06.jpg

http://www.galen-frysinger.ws/us/ghirardelli07.jpg

The main brick structure at the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg takes up ~ 1/2 of the Domino site ( MAP attached )...

http://www.shalomnewyork.com/gallery...agment_500.jpg

http://www.shalomnewyork.com/gallery..._sugar_500.jpg

www.shalomnewyork.com/gallery

http://www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com/b...ngs/domino.jpg

www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com/.../index.htm

http://www.shalomnewyork.com/gallery...ges/spacer.gif

The main brick structure would probably make some awesome lofts, with some room for a couple of modern towers.

But really, if it's torn down, I won't be that sad. Before the industry came, there were farms. Are there any remnants of that? Does anyone care? However, with some creativity, this can be an awesome project incorporating historic elements. It's just that creativity is low these days around here.

There actually are some old farmhouses that have survived in Brooklyn and Queens. I think a lot of people care, but before the destruction of Penn Station preservationists didn't have any clout in our country. The industrial past of Brooklyn should definitely be preserved. This building - and the civil war-era buildings Ikea tore down for it's waterfront parking lot - add to the city - and historical buildings add value for property owners.

Ask Lofter about preservation and Soho for more and better arguments.

It should have been landmarked years ago. It's not fair to the developer that he bought it, and then after the fact, has to deal with landmark restrictions. He'll still be able to create housing, but it will likely cost him more money.

It's like buying a lot in the country wanting to build a house. Then a town designates your land as 90% preserved wilderness, adding even more cost to what you just paid a bundle for. It's unfair.

Not too much farming right along the East River in Williamsburg. Back in colonial days almost anyone who did farm in that area was pushed further inland by the Brits.

Just south of where the Williamsburg Bridge stands was Wallabout Bay (now site of the Brooklyn Navy Yards):

http://www.amrevonline.org/museum/im...c/lib_1244.jpg

There on the Brooklyn shore once stood the Wallabout Market, once the second largest market in the world ...

http://www.andrewcusack.com/walla1.jpg

http://www.andrewcusack.com/walla3.jpg

Sugar had been transported to the Brooklyn area from the Caribbean since colonial times.

In the 1690s Captain William Kidd -- later wooed into the pirate life -- supposedly found the Williamsburg shore to the north of Wallabout Bay the perfect spot to moor his vessel between his "commercial" ventures.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13842...s/image-26.jpg

Arrest of Captain Kidd

Commerce has been the story there for the better part of 200 years ...

FAST FORWARD: ABOUT TWO HUNDRED YEARS -- It's the early 1800's and humans have congregated in unprecedented densities in Manhattan. Richard Woodhill begins to offer a ferry service departing from Corlear's Hook in Manhattan. The destination: his recently purchased 13 acre parcel of land - which he named Jonathan Williams. The ferry docks at the foot of what is now N. 2nd Street in Brooklyn.

North 2nd Street in Williamsburg is just a block north of the Domino site.

Right in the area shown here in 1986:

http://www.blockmagazine.com/media/W...hore%20350.jpg
Photo: Joyce George

One hundred years ago ferry operators lobbied against the building of the Williamsburg Bridge, but they lost that fight.


Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (Walt Whitman) :

FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you face to face;
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things, at all hours of the day;
The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme—myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme:
The similitudes of the past, and those of the future;
The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and earings — on the walk in the street, and the passage over the river;
The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away;The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them;
The certainty of others—the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide ...

***

This buyer knew what they were getting into - and no doubt will turn a profit either way. I wouldn't feel bad for them. Your country example is unfair...but mostly unlikely. Historical preservation is not a random, sudden process.

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Originally Posted by sfenn1117

It should have been landmarked years ago.

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You're right, but it wasn't. Time to fix that.

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Originally Posted by sfenn1117

It's not fair to the developer that he bought it, and then after the fact, has to deal with landmark restrictions.

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There are Zoning restrictions on the site that currently do not allow for residential development. The developer bought the property knowing it was a gamble and that he'd have to negotiate with the city to get the re-zoning and get his plan through. The city has leverage in that negotiation. Part of the endgame is that some of the site will be landmarked. That's the world of real estate in NYC.

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Originally Posted by sfenn1117

It's unfair.

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Of course it's "unfair" -- it's business. ;)

Wasn't this site included in the entire waterfront rezoning for high density residential?

Ghirardelli Square was one of my favorite stops in San Francisco. Really a great example of how we don't have to destroy our industrial past, at least not entirely.

I wonder, though: how could a similar idea be applied here? Does Domino's make any candy?

What ... you don't like your sugar straight?

http://graphics.samsclub.com/images/...0004754_LG.jpg

You can even get it in a 50 lb. bag ...

http://www.dekointl.com/product%20pi...GAR%2050LB.jpg

Or you might prefer the new no-spill easy-to-close packaging ...

http://www.packagingdigest.com/artic.../images/63.jpg

Or perhaps you like yours mixed ...

http://i13.ebayimg.com/02/i/07/d0/bf/40_1.JPG

Or on the go ...

http://www.lionel.com/products/Produ...26864_3134.jpg

and it's even in keeping with today's healthier lifestyles ...

http://static.zoovy.com/img/digmoder...m_and_trim.jpg

Does just being old make something historic? There's nothing historic about a rundown old sugar refinery. If they still had all the old factories in Brooklyn, and started firing them up and using then for their intended purposes, the same NIMBYs who want to save this old brinkpile would be beotching to high heaven about it.

Nuke it flat and start from scratch.

I was sifting through the Open House NY program when it occured to me that the Domino Factory would be a perfect site for something like the Chelsea Market, which also was an old factory (Nabisco Oreo). Any type of supermarket/large food retailer is really needed in that area and it already has the layout for heavy traffic.

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Originally Posted by MikeW

If they still had all the old factories in Brooklyn, and started firing them up and using then for their intended purposes, the same NIMBYs who want to save this old brinkpile would be beotching to high heaven about it.

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Nobody is saying "fire up the furnace" ...

The point is adaptive re-use of existing structures.

It works pretty much everywhere.

I like Ando's idea. The neighborhood will definitely need more commercial space with all the condos. This spot is probably too far from the subway, but that didn't hurt fairway in red hook (though the idea of parking lots makes me angry)

I'm sorry but this landmarking of factories is getting a bit inane. If you preserve such old (and decrepit in most cases) relics, I don't know that they will have much function. Many of these places contain toxic elements that would make this a very difficult place to convert into any sort of living, museum or office quarters not to mention whether or not the layouts even allow for these functions. Besides the fact that they are virtually nonfunctional, they are absolute eyesores. :rolleyes:

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Originally Posted by sfenn1117

Wasn't this site included in the entire waterfront rezoning for high density residential?

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No. This site and a few blocks around it were specifically left out of the rezoning to preserve industrial land there (at least, that was the stated reason). You can see a map of the changes on a .pdf document linked here:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/gre...overview.shtml

Just noticed the response. A little after the fact but...

No. Everywhere else, they'd implode this relic and start fresh. Only NYC goes for this nonsense.

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Originally Posted by lofter1

Nobody is saying "fire up the furnace" ...

The point is adaptive re-use of existing structures.

It works pretty much everywhere.

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Originally Posted by MikeW

Just noticed the response. A little after the fact but...

No. Everywhere else, they'd implode this relic and start fresh. Only NYC goes for this nonsense.

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I guess you consider the DUMBO neighborhood sheer "nonsense." I consider it one of the great new NYC neighborhoods.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MikeW

No. Everywhere else, they'd implode this relic and start fresh. Only NYC goes for this nonsense.

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That is not even close to being true.

No, it's pretty true. Anywhere else in the country, if there was a big block of valuable land being taken up by a derelict industrial facility, it would be plowed under and the land used to build exactly what was need (or at least the most profitable). We're one of the very few cities that insists on preserving our dinosaurs.

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Originally Posted by ZippyTheChimp

That is not even close to being true.

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Next time the Yankees go on the road and play the Orioles, make sure to watch the game.

I moved posts relating to the development of the Domino Sugar Plant to the Real Estate Forum, here:

http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/sh...ad.php?t=14450

This thread can still serve for discussions about the existing Domino Sugar Plant although discussions about its future development and related preservation should be discussed in the new thread.

22 Historic Photos of Domino When It Was Still A Sugar Factory

by Jessica Dailey

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With the unveiling of Two Trees' plans for the extreme makeover of Brooklyn's Domino Sugar Factory, a new era has begun for the industrial development, but less than a decade ago, the refinery was still churning out the sweet stuff. What New Yorkers know as Domino was created by Frederick Havemeyer in the mid-1800s; by 1887, the operation was renamed the American Refinery Company, and it was one of the world's largest sugar refineries. Here now, we bring you a look back at the factory's sugary past, with twenty-two historic photos of the refinery in action.

The Domino Sugar Factory: a Relic of the Industrial Waterfront [East River History]

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2013/0...ar_factory.php