New York City Factories, Then & Now
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
For decades, developers have been finding new uses for old factories. In this slideshow, view manufacturing spaces before and after their conversions.
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2 Responses to “New York City Factories, Then & Now”
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Wonderful article and presentation. How sad a commentary on New YOrk, and the state of its manufacturing world. Keep the people of N.Y. informed as to what can happen. All the attention has been given to big, high end corporations and housing. The little guy is lost in the shuffle. Again,nothing is so sure as change.
Yes, all three videos and the presentation above are worth watching and quite moving. Yes, manufacturing is an important part of the city though not so important to the tax base anymore. One of the reasons that NYC was so important to American life for so long was the mix of manufacturing, artists, skilled craftsmen, financiers, and small business people all living in very close quarters. Alas, no more.
One of the things that we citizens are just starting to realize–after the fact–is that the deindustrialization of NYC was planned. Lots of forces were at work, yes, but the master plans drawn up, largely in the late 40s and early 50s, and funded by a group of major players in city real estate and politics, set about to de-unionize, deindustrialize, remove the port infrastructure, and so on. The big Ford and Rockefeller Foundation reports from that period, as well as various other players all focused on reinventing the city to focus on finance, insurance, and, doh, real estate. It’s breathtaking to look back at those plans and realize how much of the city was shaped not by community boards and city government but other players. We never really voted to deindustrialize, but the plans were never really hidden from view either.
A good place to start, if you are new to the debates over deindustrialization of NYC, is Robert Fitch’s The Assasination of New York. It’s a messy book but he has such a story to tell that you’ll find yourself googling subplots for weeks after you read it. Fitch’s arguments were controversial when the book was released (basically because Manhattan Institute types screamed “Oh, no, goodness, no, rich people wanted to help the city, not hurt it.”) but most of what Fitch was on to has worked its way into serious histories of the city over the last ten years. Anyway, it’s worth a book worth tracking down.