by Sam Roberts
Instead, after consolidation of what became the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898, the newly minted municipality’s blue-and-white ensign waved from the flagstaff, and City Hall became the political centerpiece of a three-hundred-square-mile behemoth with plenty of room to expand for its three million inhabitants. Plans to replace the historic home of local governance with a bigger, more contemporary headquarters uptown were obviated by the construction, beginning in 1907, of the mammoth forty-story Municipal Building (now the David N. Dinkins Municipal Building), with nearly one million square feet of office space, designed by McKim, Mead & White across Centre Street. (One eyesore was removed from City Hall Park: the monstrous post office designed by Alfred B. Mullett, whose Second Empire style survives in the Old Executive Office Building in Washington, was demolished in 1939.)
In the beginning of the twentieth century, Henry James described City Hall in The American Scene as having “the perfect taste and finish, the reduced yet ample scale, the harmony of parts, the just proportions, the modest classic grace, the living look of the type aimed at.” The City Hall that has maintained its dignity for more than two hundred years is largely the same as the one that McComb envisioned. Originally, a wooden statue of Justice (the blindfold was added later) surveyed the city from the cupola, which was twice destroyed by fire. (In 1858, fireworks celebrating the laying of the transatlantic cable set it aflame, and it was rebuilt to the specifications of Leopold Eidlitz, a Prague-born architect who designed a number of Manhattan churches and Temple Emanu-el on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Third Street and was one of several architects who oversaw renovations; and again in 1917, after a blaze started by a worker’s charcoal burner, it was reconstructed to the original prototype.) The current statue, painted to resemble stone, is composed of copper sheets soldered together and supported by an internal frame, the cupola of steel, concrete, and copper. The Governor’s Room on the second floor, last used officially by Alfred E. Smith in the 1920s, is still graced by John Trumbull’s portraits of the Founding Fathers, which the Common Council commissioned when New York was the nation’s capital. Room 9, the storied press room, remains.
Since the Giuliani administration, security has been tighter public access more limited. After the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that the Board of Estimate violated the one-person, one-vote principle, Michael R. Bloomberg converted its second-floor chamber into an open bullpen for the mayor and his deputies. The Bloomberg administration also presided over a $150 million makeover, which was not merely cosmetic. It included fire sprinklers and new exits to comply with safety, environmental, and accessibility. If that sounds like a lot of money, consider this: building City Hall cost about twice as much per capita in the early nineteenth century as repairing it did in the early twenty-first, which, if it survives for another two hundred years, would be an invaluable investment.
City Hall today looks remarkably the same as when it was built and even the immediate surroundings remain largely unchanged. (George Samoladas)
5
DOMINO SUGAR REFINERY
The Domino Sugar Refinery as it looked when Brooklyn was the sugar capital and the waterfront was jammed with commerce. (Brian Merlis/oldNYCphotos.com)
In The Great Gatsby, painted billboard eyes eerily gaze over a wasteland of gray ash in Flushing Meadows, Queens, from behind a pair of framed spectacles. The glasses advertise the practice of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, who may have been F. Scott Fitzgerald’s allegory for God’s eternal vigilance and, perhaps, his displeasure that the human spirit has been supplanted by capitalism. Nobody ever made any such lofty claim for the tilted yellow neon letters that spelled out DOMINO SUGAR over the Williamsburg waterfront in Brooklyn. Still, the four-story-high red-and-yellow sign that glowed for decades, like the chimerical billboard that Fitzgerald immortalized in his book, is another commentary on a profound metamorphosis in New York’s economy that began early in the twentieth century.
As recently as 1950, when the population was smaller, manufacturing employed a million New Yorkers. Today, that number is fewer than one hundred thousand—representing perhaps as little as 2 percent of the city’s private-sector workforce. But New York still makes—and innovates—plenty of products, adding enormous value to knowledge and wealth through what John Sexton, the former New York University president, refers to as the ICE economy (intellectual, cultural, and educational, in addition to the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors that make up the FIRE component).
But the painted names of forgotten companies peeling from building facades and the grander displays (like the 147-foot-long Pepsi-Cola logo on the East River in Long Island City and the KENTILE FLOORS sign that towered until recently over the Gowanus section of Brooklyn) are poignant, if spectral, reminders that New York, which began as a trading post, predominated as the nation’s leading manufacturer by the nineteenth century. “The central lesson of the rise of New York in the early nineteenth century is that manufacturing congregated around a port,” Edward Glaeser, the Harvard economist, wrote. Ready-to-wear clothing production, printing, and publishing would follow, but sugar refining came first.
Columbus was said to have introduced sugarcane from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean, and crude refineries were already operating in New York by the end of the seventeenth century. Before the American Revolution, Nicholas Bayard, a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, dominated the sugar trade in New York. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, refined sugar accounted for about one-third of the goods produced in the city. Ships from New York carried flour to the Caribbean and returned with raw sugar that was refined and then delivered to Europe or elsewhere in the United States. Refining the sugar in New York was more economical for several reasons: one was the availability of fuel; another was the imperative of processing it close to urban markets where it would be consumed, to keep the crystals from coalescing.
In 1799, two German-born brothers, William and Frederick Christian Havemeyer, immigrated from London and opened a sugar refinery on a twenty-five-by-forty-foot plot leased from Trinity Church on what is now Vandam Street in Greenwich Village. They imported sugarcane from the Caribbean and the South, primarily from Louisiana (where it was cheaply harvested by slave labor until 1865), and later from Cuba. William Jr., who ran the refinery from 1828 to 1842, won the mayoralty of New York in 1845, a post in which he generally opposed the extension of slavery to new states and territories. In 1856, the family opened the Havemeyers & Elder Refinery on South Third Street and Kent Avenue, on the Williamsburg waterfront between Wallabout Bay and Bushwick Creek, where the East River was deep enough to accommodate freighters carrying sugar directly from Brazil, Cuba, Egypt, Hawaii, and the Philippines. Within a little more than a decade, their company was processing over half the sugar consumed in the United States. After a spectacular fire in 1882, the Havemeyers rebuilt the refinery into the massive reddish brick complex that would dominate the Williamsburg waterfront for more than a century, which expanded potential daily refining capacity from three hundred thousand pounds of sugar to three million pounds. The filtering house was thirteen stories tall. The refinery walls were four feet thick at their base, the windows were small and evenly spaced, and the 250-by-150-foot complex stood 155 feet high, not counting its 200-foot-tall smokestack, which was emblazoned with the company’s name. The family built a freight depot and a cooperage to manufacture and repair its own barrels. The Havemeyers considered the plant to be so fireproof that they viewed insurance as an extravagance. (In 1917, though, an explosion blamed on German saboteurs obliterated part of the plant, which was producing sugar for American allies in Europe.)
The Havemeyers also improved upon the refining process. They replaced cast-iron kettles, in which a grimy emulsion of water and sugar had been boiled, with closed containers called vacuum pans, which used less fuel and distorted the color less. Instead of filtering the syrupy mixture through blankets and bull’s blood, they introduced boneblack (a porous, granular carbon made by cha
rring animal bones) to remove inorganic impurities. Some twelve hundred tons could be processed daily by combining water with the raw sugar, then straining and filtering it through canvas and boneblack. The solution was boiled until it was as thick as honey, then delivered to one of dozens of centrifuges, which expelled the water and separated the mixture into sugar and molasses. In the finishing house, granulating machines ground the sugar, which was then roasted and dried to produce loaves, cubes, tablets, powdered, brown, confectioner’s, granulated, golden syrup, and other forms for homemakers, cooks, and restaurateurs and in bulk as ingredients for candy, soda, and other food products.
At its peak, the plant occupied eleven acres—about the size of eight football fields—and employed forty-five hundred workers. Most were immigrants, originally Germans and later Irish, Danes, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and, much later, West Indians, who labored under torrid conditions that the New York Tribune described in 1894 as “perpetual torture.” (“It is claimed that the temperature can be kept down to 100 degrees in warm weather on account of the perfect ventilation given by so many windows,” the Brooklyn Eagle reported.) The plant’s incredible capacity produced an economy of scale that enhanced its competitive edge so that by 1887, the Havermeyers’ Sugar Refineries Company became the centerpiece of the so-called nationwide Sugar Trust. Four years later, King’s Handbook of New York pronounced the newly minted American Sugar Refining Company, a consolidation of some twenty firms into a monopoly that controlled a jaw-dropping 98 percent of the nation’s sugar production, as “the greatest and most important manufacturing industry in the United States.” American Sugar was among the dozen companies whose stock figured into the original Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896. In 1901, the Havemeyers inoculated themselves against Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busters by outflanking potential competition. The company introduced its “Domino” brand, named for the rectangular tiles identified with the game. The sugar cubes came individually wrapped and packaged in signature bright yellow boxes emblazoned with the Domino logo, to distinguish the brand from its competitors. In 1902, F. N. Barrett, editor of the American Grocer, reported in the New York Times that despite antitrust legislation and a proliferation of rival firms, American Sugar Refining was thriving. Between 1887 and 1902, the company’s share of total sugar output declined from 85 percent to 58 percent, but it was still refining and selling well over one hundred thousand tons annually.
Within a decade, the Times described “the selling of sugar under a trade name, especially the granulated variety” as nothing short of a “revolutionary a step in the merchandising system.” After all, the article explained,
the products of all the refiners in the country is [sic] equally good, is sold at practically the same prices and is handled by the grocer at so small a profit that very often he wishes he didn’t have to bother with it at all. Sugar has been sold with a scoop out of a barrel for generations and the sign “five pounds for so much” has graced the front of the corner store for so many years that the housewife orders her quota for the week without a moment’s thought of possible bargaining. In other words, the exploitation of the commonest form of sugar in an identifying carton entails the breaking away from the firmest mercantile and domestic traditions.
(The brand-savvy company launched subsequent advertising campaigns to promote its granulated brown sugar and other confections and, in 1954, even a “Stay Slim and Trim” diet, which, to be sure, was not sugar-free.)
But a name brand could carry the company only so far. America’s growing infatuation with losing weight, coupled with the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup as a substitute for sucrose and the proliferation of artificial sweeteners, reduced demand for sugar. In 1988, Tate & Lyle, a British concern, bought Domino. A decade later, the new owner’s decision to disregard hard-won seniority guarantees when it let workers go precipitated one of the longest strikes in the city’s history—a twenty-month walkout that finally ended in 2001 in a defeat for the nearly three hundred strikers, many of whom drifted back to work and agreed to the company’s demand to pare 110 jobs. By 2004, sugar production at the Brooklyn plant ceased; the refinery unceremoniously closed after operating at the same location for nearly 150 years. Before developers demolished the ninety-thousand-square-foot interior, the photographer David Allee captured what he described as “the physical residue of the messy, chaotic, and seemingly violent” manufacturing process—evidence of the brutal conditions that workers endured in harvesting and refining products whose hidden provenance mocked the most expansive definition of “sugarcoating.” Nearly a decade after production ended, Allee wrote, the plant still smelled of “crème brulee mixed with mold and rot.” The last shipment of sugar arrived in 2014—eighty tons donated by Domino for a monumental sculpture by Kara Walker, an eighty-foot-long sphinx on display inside the refinery for two months and titled A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.
In 2007, the gargantuan Filter, Pan, and Finishing House was designated as an official city landmark. Not included in the designation was the adjacent building just to the south, on which the iconic Domino sign was first mounted a half century earlier. By 2007, much of the original plant has been obliterated, replaced by 380,000 square feet of office space and 2,800 apartments (87,000 people applied for 104 apartments in the complex at 325 Kent Avenue, which were being offered at below-market rents) and an innovative six-acre Domino Park sprinkled with artifacts from the old plant.
In the decade between the last delivery of sugar to be processed at the refinery and the eighty tons donated by Domino for the commemorative sculpture, New York City lost, on average, more than eight thousand manufacturing jobs a year. While the introduction of 3-D printing and the expansion of metal and wood fabrication and food manufacturing produced the first sustained growth in factory employment in decades, the share of New Yorkers working in manufacturing continued to decline, from about 9 percent of all private sector jobs in 1990 to less than 6 percent in 2000 and barely 2 percent by 2016. While jobs in sugar refineries and other factories are gone forever, some vestiges of the city’s lunch-pail past will return. The developers promised that when the Williamsburg waterfront housing and office project is completed, they will reinstall the yellow neon DOMINO SUGAR sign on the rooftop of a barrel-vaulted glass addition.
The Domino plant, like much of the waterfront, has been repurposed. The iconic sign is supposed to return. (George Samoladas)
6
TWEED COURTHOUSE
The New York County Court House behind City Hall on Chambers Street. (Moses King, ca. 1892)
Boss Tweed’s name had a certain ring to it. More people knew that he was called Boss than that his first name was Bill, although most of the confusion was caused by his middle name. More often than not, it was given as Marcy instead of Magear, which is the middle name he was given by his Scottish-immigrant parents and which he inherited from his mother’s family. (“Magear” is pronounced “Marr” in Scotland; “Marcy” was popularized by Thomas Nast, the cutthroat, widely circulated cartoonist, apparently as an homage to Governor William L. Marcy, who was credited with coining the philosophical foundation for political patronage: “To the victor belong the spoils.”) Finding just the right word to characterize Tweed’s career could also become an exercise in ambiguity. When Tweed presented himself at the Blackwell Island prison to begin serving a one-year jail term, a warden, who knew perfectly well who his new inmate was, indifferently asked his profession.
“Statesman,” Tweed replied.
An unbiased observer, and there were few to be found in mid-nineteenth-century New York, would more likely have said “politician,” and, given his latest circumstances, would invariably have prefixed the adjective “crooked.” While it was true that the younger Bill Tweed had gone bankrupt manufacturing chairs, he
later proved remarkably adept at making money—once he insinuated himself into a cushy seat of power. Just five years after Tweed filed for bankruptcy when his chair-making business collapsed, he owned a Manhattan brownstone and a Greenwich, Connecticut, mansion. He built things and bought things, dipping into the municipal coffers to pay contractors who kicked back a hefty portion of the bills—including the cost of printing their inflated invoices—to Tweed and his cronies.
They pilfered a fortune, astronomical sums in today’s dollars. Exposure of their thievery galvanized a brief episode of progressivism. But the Tweed Ring also left a physical legacy, part of which outlasted all the reformers and to this day stands gloriously in the very shadow of City Hall, several of whose chief executives had vainly sought to obliterate it as a vulgar symbol of civic shame—the evil twin of the gilded statue of Civic Fame (the city’s second tallest, after the Statue of Liberty) atop McKim, Mead & White’s Municipal Building across the street. If Tweed preferred to think of himself as a statesman, and others would remember him as a crooked politician, he also could, legitimately, have described himself as a builder.
His most notorious visible legacy was the New York County Courthouse. It was conceived by others and others would eventually complete it, but no individual would be more associated with the building than Tweed himself. It replaced a poorhouse and would make well-placed politicians and their cronies wealthy. And while it was envisioned by good-government groups as a shrine in which to sanctify justice, most of the boodlers among the public officials and private contractors who soaked the city with inflated bills and phony invoices from concocted companies for its construction would never be brought to justice themselves.
