The Battle for Gotham

by Roberta Brandes Gratz

  But aside from the building interiors, Knoll furniture, a line of furniture designed by Nicos Zographos, and the industrial-design model work, most of Treitel-Gratz business in the 1950s and early 1960s was actually precision sheet metal for electronic equipment, before that field of work moved to California with the aircraft industry. But as can—and often must—happen in any kind of business, especially manufacturing, as one product line diminishes or moves away, another fills the spot. It happened for Treitel-Gratz as the art world was transformed in the 1960s. Isamu Noguchi had long been a customer for many of his metal sculptures since the 1940s, but Alexander Liberman was the first of a new group of sculptors who came to Treitel-Gratz not just for its reputation for skillful implementation and metal craftsmanship but because of its proximity to Manhattan. Liberman often visited the shop and worked alongside one of our machinists.

  People fail to understand the importance of New York City-based manufacturing if they don’t recognize the value that industry has to the fields, like art and architecture, for which the city is famous. For designers, being able to implement ideas locally is critical to their craft. Surely, it was true for the long line of leading artists, architects, and furniture designers who passed through our factory. We’ve always been convenient to a subway. “Urban manufacturing needs to be done where it is used,” observes Columbia University professor Saskia Sassen, who has written several books on global capital and the mobility of labor. “This is not an old, outdated condition but a very contemporary one. This is not about the past; this is cutting edge. The specialized service economy demands it; the new economy needs this kind of manufacturing.” Designers benefit from proximity in many ways but none so important as what architect David Childs calls “the knowledge of the skilled workers who operate the machines, work with the materials and understand what those can do. They know things you can’t put in books. Designers need that knowledge more than ever.”

  THE CHANGING ART WORLD CHANGED US

  In the 1960s Alexander Liberman brought sculptor Barnett Newman to the shop. Newman subsequently brought in a whole group of young Minimalists who were either his friends or protégés, all little known. The Minimalists were changing the nature of contemporary art. Many of them made a big splash with the 1966 Minimalist show Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum. That landmark exhibit defined the Minimalist movement. Donald Judd, Walter De Maria, Sol Lewitt, Robert Rauschenberg, Forrest Myers, Michael Heizer, Robert Indiana, and more—it was a cast of soon-to-be stars.

  Just as the company history parallels the evolution of interior and industrial design of the twentieth century, so does it parallel the evolution of the Minimalist and post-Abstract Expressionist art that emerged in the 1960s when the center of the art world shifted from Paris to New York. In New York, the art scene shifted from the Upper East Side to SoHo with the new trend in larger and larger artworks and the opening of the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1967. Key artists exhibiting there came to us.

  From the 1960s on, office furniture, custom metalwork, and sculpture dominated. As the field of architecture evolved, so did the content of our production. I. M. Pei, Charles Gwathmey, Deborah Burke, Masimo and Lila Vignelli, Robert A. M. Stern, James Polshek, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and others, looked to the company to solve fabrication challenges.

  Change is inevitable in manufacturing. One big change with a company like ours can shift the whole picture. In the mid-1960s, Knoll took its business away to its own manufacturing operation in Pennsylvania. At the same time, a new item for production was added. Romana Kryzanowska, the chosen successor to innovative exercise master Joseph Pilates, came to Donald to produce metal exercise equipment, long before his Pilates Method became the rage. In time, Pilates exercise equipment surpassed custom metalwork and furniture as the company’s primary product.

  6.2 Barnett Newman with his first steel sculpture, Here II (1965), at Gratz Industries. Ugo Mulas, courtesy of the Barnett Newman Foundation.

  Like many New York manufacturers, our work goes all over the country and abroad, more heavily abroad with the weak dollar. But also, like many local companies, our work is part of the fabric of the city, in homes, museums, offices, building lobbies, and the public realm—Maya Lin’s Time Piece in Penn Station, the button and needle in the Garment District, the Martinelli sculpture on the facade of the United Nations, the Robert Indiana LOVE sculpture at Sixth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, and the stainless steel and glass Bank of America sculptural logo hanging in the lobby of its new building at Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue. As the city loses businesses like ours, often unnecessarily, the ability diminishes to design or invent and fabricate locally. As the report Designed in New York/Made in New York noted, “New York is home to a highly evolved manufacturing sector, which . . . retains a strong core of production facilities capable of producing goods for world markets. Many of these manufacturers produce for the design-driven market. Fashion, jewelry, publishing, advertising, and marketing—these are New York City’s best-known industries in which design plays a key role. But designers are also essential in other lower profile but important New York industries such as custom furniture, architectural woodwork and metal, accessories, lighting fixtures and toys.”

  In fact, the whole country still manufactures much more than is popularly understood. America remains by far the biggest manufacturing economy in the world, producing more by half than China and two-thirds more than Japan. This is difficult to comprehend because all sorts of primarily technological innovations have increased productivity and diminished dependency on a large labor force. That labor is now increasingly higher skilled than before.5

  THE INDUSTRIAL NETWORK IS COMPLEX

  Manufacturers form a complex web of similar and disparate operators that function both individually and interdependently. The modest and small scale of most of these manufacturers allows for considerable flexibility, quick production, and innovation. As Scott E. Page, professor of complex systems, political science, and economics and author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, told the New York Times: “New York City is the perfect example of diversity functioning well. It’s an exciting place that produces lots of innovation and creativity. It’s not a coincidence that New York has so much energy and also so much diversity.”6

  The ability of the designer to participate in the fabrication process can be critical, especially since so much of local manufacturing is customized work. In 2007, for example, we fabricated at the behest of Gensler, the national design firm, a rather complicated floor-to-ceiling bronze screen for the lobby of the Park Avenue UBS office building. Ed Wood, the principal at Gensler who designed and engineered the screen, made frequent trips to both the factory and our affiliated space in Harlem where the massive screen was assembled. Most of the fabrication occurred at the factory, but specialized parts requiring machinery we didn’t have were produced by a Bronx fabricator. A patinator in Beacon, New York, another fabricator in New Jersey, an engineer in Massachusetts, a rigger in Philadelphia, and a score of local shops all had a hand in this complex structure. At one time, all of these operations could be found in the scattered industrial neighborhoods of New York. No more. And while most of the work stays local, or not far away, the proximity issue makes a difference at every step of the process and in the final cost. Our complex, mostly local network of suppliers numbers close to 150 businesses.

  While “experts” have long been quick to declare manufacturing dead in New York and other places around the country, many manufacturing companies like Gratz Industries stay very much alive if flexible enough to adjust to changing times and if not undermined by government policies. Too often, industrial districts are declared “blighted” when many diversified businesses exist in the seemingly run-down assortment of industrial spaces.

  In an article titled “The Changing Face of Manufacturing in New York City,” Sara P. Garretson, executive director of ITAC, the Industrial Tec
hnology Assistance Corporation, wrote: “No question, manufacturing has experienced a drastic decline. The cost of doing business here (particularly labor, energy and taxes) has driven away many manufacturers who depend on high value volume and narrow profit margins. Land costs discourage companies that need to expand, particularly those that want large, single-floor production facilities, and environmental regulations have hampered others. The manufacturers who thrive here offer a wealth of lessons the city can use to stabilize, or even expand, its manufacturing base.”7

  Few factory buildings or their districts ever look spiffy. Architecturally, they range from the design worthy to the plain. But together they form a comprehensible pattern built over time as industry evolved. Significantly, industrial neighborhoods contain a mix of scale that accommodates the large factory or the small job shop with residential buildings scattered throughout. The mix of buildings and uses is exactly what sustains the district if not knocked off balance by inappropriate rezoning.

  The uneducated or uncurious observer would be unaware of what productive businesses exist in such areas that play an important role in the city’s overall economy and social fabric. Few city officials or planners comprehend or appreciate the hodgepodge, gritty nature of an industrial district, nor do they want to. As architecture professor John A. Loomis wrote in the Livable City article “Manufacturing Communities—Learning from Mixed Use”: “Mixed-use neighborhoods defy neat zoning categories. They are mature communities with integrated networks of activities and building types, woven together over many years from countless incremental, often spontaneous acts of building. They are often inhabited by one or more distinct ethnic groups, which contribute to a rich cultural life.”8

  The city’s Planning Department is quick to measure an area when it can show a statistical decline in the number of businesses as justification for an already planned upzoning. Rarely are surveys designed to show an area’s hidden strength. One former Planning Department staffer conducted a very revealing survey in the 1990s of Brooklyn’s Greenpoint and Williamsburg waterfronts about to be rezoned. “Don’t show me those maps of job density,” a hostile department boss said. The genuine survey with door-to-door canvassing to really understand what was going on undermined the pronounced assumption that a residential rezoning was in order and would have no negative effect. Honest surveys actually reveal what is needed to improve business rather than replace it. New innovations and new businesses in the incubating stage become known. In fact, one former staff planner says, “They made it clear they did not want to know.”

  “City government needs to protect the opportunity for new things to get a foothold and live,” Jacobs said. “Just keeping things open for opportunity is important. Opportunity, not necessity, is the mother of invention.”

  URBAN RENEWAL INTERFERES

  Manufacturers, like any business, experience many ups and downs but survive if they can change with market demand. But undisturbed was not to be for Gratz Industries. The story of Gratz Industries should not be viewed as unique. Similar tales are found in all cities.

  In the early 1960s, the entire Thirty-second Street block—a mixture of small apartment houses, industrial lofts, and six-story tenements—was condemned for urban renewal to make way for a post office. Because emptying some of the buildings on the site, especially one apartment house around the corner, was a politically hot topic, Senator James Buckley opposed the project. That killed it but not before most of the properties had been condemned as blighted, businesses and residents displaced, and then properties demolished.

  The block had exhibited traditional urban vitality, regardless of its worn look. No vacancies existed. In each building, a new tenant appeared when one moved out. Pedestrians filled the street. Shopping and other uses drew them nearby. But, by law, to be an official “Urban Renewal” site, the block had to be declared “blighted.” Blighted, in this case, as with so many others, simply means the property is wanted for a different purpose from the one for which it is currently used:

  • That the Thirty-second Street buildings were filled with economically viable uses was irrelevant.

  • That the buildings were merely neglected by owners waiting for a lucrative government buyout was irrelevant.

  • That the buildings could have been economically renovated and upgraded, like thousands of similar surviving properties around the city have since, was irrelevant.

  The only relevant fact was, as usual, simple: a new development agenda was set, and manufacturing was not on it. This was just like what was illustrated in the chapters about Greenwich Village and SoHo. Manufacturers and manufacturing districts have experienced this over and over and not just in New York. This is not a natural process; it is about real estate.

  The federal government continued to own the cleared Thirty-second Street site after the post office project died. Empty land is a monumental lost opportunity in cities everywhere. In this case, it was even more: an unnecessary loss of economic diversity. Years later the land was sold to a private developer. The federal Urban Renewal program was notorious for condemning privately owned property for a public purpose with the help of eminent domain, then eventually selling it to another private property owner. This still happens today and is a source of great injustice. The abuse of eminent domain is a scandal of national proportions.

  Until a U.S. Supreme Court decision (Kelo v. New London) in 2005, the purpose of eminent domain was understood to have been primarily for taking private property for a public purpose such as school construction, roads, public utilities, or other clearly public uses. Over time, however, this fundamental idea had been corrupted to permit the taking of private property from one owner to give to another private owner, this time a real estate developer or commercial user.

  All over the country, small businesses have been erased by eminent domain to make way for shopping centers, big box stores, or corporate office parks. Modest, middle-class residential communities have been partially or completely erased for a commercial, so-called mixed-use project of a grand scale or for a stadium or casino.

  One woman, Susette Kelo, a divorced nurse, renovated a falling-down Victorian house. She and her neighbors in New London, Connecticut, had watched neighboring land confiscated for development that hadn’t even materialized, again empty land representing an erasure of economic and social value. This area was once the heart of a downtown community that many cities once had but lost to “renewal” projects over time. These were traditional areas where people walked to work, to shop, to school, or to the movies, the very kind of neighborhoods experiencing great popularity today where they still exist. Susette Kelo and her neighbors sued to stay. The city wanted their land as part of a Comprehensive Plan that included condos, a hotel, and labs for Pfizer, Inc. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, ending with a decision broadening government’s power of eminent domain.9 Jane Jacobs, who didn’t oppose eminent domain in principle, contributed to the brief and noted: “Eminent domain is being terribly abused, almost as a war-making instrument, an instrument of force, not being used decently.” Enormous repercussions have ensued across the country since the decision.

  And, as on Thirty-second Street, this urban renewal project has been another debacle. Eight years later, no construction has occurred. The land is empty. The promised 3,169 new jobs and $1.2 million a year in tax revenue never materialized. Developers, desperate to obtain financing, even applied to HUD for taxpayer-backed loans to build luxury rental housing. So far $78 million in public funds have been spent on the project with nothing to show for it but ninety acres of emptiness and lost businesses, jobs, and retail uses, disrupting lives and erasing a community. Quite a definition of economic development. (In November 2009 Pfizer Inc., for whose expansion the land was cleared, announced the closing of its already huge New London R&D headquarters and made plans to sell or base those offices and leave New London entirely.)

  TO LONG ISLAND CITY

  In 1967, with the impending demolition of th
e Thirty-second Street building, Gratz Industries moved across the Queensborough (Fifty-ninth Street) Bridge to Long Island City, Queens, where it remains today. The first move was to a rental building. Then we purchased the current eleven-thousand-square-foot cinderblock building in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. At the time, Long Island City, on the east side of the East River across from Sutton Place, was primarily a manufacturing district, the city’s most concentrated industrial district outside Manhattan. Three subway lines, the Long Island Railroad, and the Long Island Expressway are all accessible here. Tenements, small apartment houses, apartments over retail shops, and even a one-block designated historic district of brownstones mark the area. Enclaves of classic working-class areas in Long Island City have shops, churches, small workshops, and single-family homes. The majority of firms are like ours with twenty-five employees or less. Within its 330 blocks are twelve hundred industrial firms employing forty-five thousand people.

  6.3 Gratz Industries today in Long Island City. Mural was painted by a local youth organization. David Rosencrans.

  The proximity to Manhattan was critical to the location choice, since our customers are mostly Manhattan based. And Long Island City was filled with the kind of suppliers we used, minutes away as unanticipated needs arose during the manufacturing process. This complex and delicate assortment of seemingly unrelated businesses enables all to network easily among themselves. Even the gas station next door to our present location has found need for our services and we for theirs. Time is money in any business, and these critical connections make this delicate economic network work.