Industry City
Industry City is a historic intermodal shipping, warehousing, and manufacturing complex on the Upper New York Bay waterfront in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City. The northern portion, named "Industry City", hosts over 650 office, industrial, creative and manufacturing tenants across of space between 32nd and 41st Streets, and is operated by a private consortium including Jamestown LP. The southern portion, known as "Bush Terminal", is located between 40th and 51st Streets and is operated by the New York City Economic Development Corporation as a garment manufacturing complex.
Founded by Bush Terminal Company head Irving T. Bush in the early 20th century, Bush Terminal was the first facility of its kind in New York City and the largest multi-tenant industrial property in the United States. The warehouses were built between 1892 and 1910, the railroad from 1896 to 1915, and the factory lofts between 1905 and 1925. During World War I, Bush Terminal was used as a United States Navy base, and returned to private ownership after the war. At its peak, Bush Terminal covered, bounded by Gowanus Bay to the west and north, Third Avenue to the east, 27th Street to the north, and 50th Street to the south.
The surrounding area declined after World War II, and by the 1970s, the ports in Bush Terminal had been filled. The complex was rebranded as Industry City during the post-war years, though the Bush Terminal name remained in popular use. In the 1970s and 1980s, sections of Bush Terminal were demolished or converted for other uses, including a shopping mall, a federal prison, a privately operated manufacturing and commercial complex, and a garment manufacturing district operated by the NYCEDC.
Today, the Bush Terminal site comprises roughly, including 16 former factory buildings and 11 warehouses built in the early 20th century. Renovations and expansions began in the 2010s. A major expansion of Industry City, which would add of space to the complex, was announced in 2017. The section of Bush Terminal operated by the NYCEDC is also being renovated into the "Made in NY" campus, a film, TV, and fashion manufacturing complex that was set to open in 2020, but was delayed.
Description
The privately owned Industry City complex includes 16 structures and of land on the Brooklyn waterfront, adjacent to New York Harbor. It is subdivided into eight former factory buildings between Second Avenue, 33rd Street, Third Avenue, and 37th Street, numbered 8 to 1 from north to south. Two more buildings, numbered 19 and 20, occupy the block bounded by First Avenue, Second Avenue, 39th Street, and 41st Street. The structures contain a combined of floor space. All of the buildings were part of the Bush Terminal Company's "Industrial Colony", built in the late 1900s and early 1910s.Directly south of Industry City, between First Avenue, 40th Street, Second Avenue, and 51st Street, is a collection of 11 former warehouses operated by the NYCEDC as part of the Bush Terminal manufacturing complex. These structures were developed by the South Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation starting in 1989. The campus comprises of land and of renovated floor space.
The entire complex was originally called Bush Terminal and formerly stretched further north to 28th Street. The section north of 32nd Street, comprising the former Naval Fleet Supply Base, is no longer part of Bush Terminal. One of the buildings between 29th and 31st Street, called Federal Building No. 2, are a privately owned shopping complex called Liberty View Industrial Plaza. It was bought by Salman Properties in 2011, and before that, it had been vacant since 2000. The site of the other structure, Federal Building No. 1, is occupied by Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn, which was built in the 1990s. Federal Building No. 1 was demolished in 1993 to make way for MDC Brooklyn.
The South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, also owned by the NYCEDC, occupies the waterfront to the north and west, from 39th to 29th Streets.
Factory lofts
By 1918, the Bush Terminal Company owned of waterfront in Brooklyn, and the terminal covered 20 waterfront blocks. The complex ultimately encompassed 16 factory buildings between 28th and 37th Streets, and between 39th and 41st Streets. The buildings were outfitted with the most modern amenities available in the 1900s and 1910s, such as fireproof metal facades and a fire sprinkler system. The floors of the loft buildings could carry loads of up to.The loft buildings had a combined 150 freight elevators. They were mostly U-shaped to facilitate loading at the rail sidings between the two wings of each building. By the 1970s, the facility's buildings had 263,740 window panes in their walls and of fire sprinklers running within them.
Bush Terminal Company Building
Industry City includes the Bush Terminal Company Building, a loft structure located on Second Avenue between 39th and 40th Streets. Construction on the building started around 1911. It was eight stories tall with three distinct buildings connected in U-shaped manner. The primary structure possessed a common courtyard with wings. The structure had a frontage of 460 feet on the west side of Second Avenue. Its wings ran westward from Second Avenue along 39th Street and 40th Street. It extended 335 feet each to a private street located off the bulkheads. The court measured 210 feet by 55 feet.The property on which the edifice was erected was purchased in part from the New York Dock Company for $30 million. The building's completion was part of a plan long contemplated by the Bush Terminal Company's president, Irving T. Bush. Its construction coincided with an improvement in the industrial region between First and Second Avenues. The Bush Terminal Company erected structures like this on both sides of Second Avenue.
Railroad
The Bush Terminal Railroad Company owned about of track within the terminal by 1917, which had grown to of track by 1950. The terminal's railroad greatly reduced shippers' cost to haul freight from their facilities to a rail yard. The rail yard could hold about 1,000 freight cars and was six blocks long. The terminal also owned of double-tracked electric railroad that ran on the streets along Brooklyn's waterfront. The tracks ran along Second Avenue from 28th to 41st Streets and along First Avenue from 41st to 64th Streets, with spurs into every factory building and into the Brooklyn Army Terminal at 58th Street. Eventually, Bush Terminal could handle 50,000 freight railcars at a time.The tracks connected with the Pennsylvania Railroad's New York Connecting Railroad at 65th Street, south of the Brooklyn Army Terminal. There was also a direct connection to the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company's trackage at 39th Street, which is now operated by the South Brooklyn Railway. Around 1913, there were plans to extend the railroad northward along the Brooklyn waterfront via the "Marginal Elevated Railway". The railroad would have used an elevated viaduct, similar to the High Line in Manhattan, between Bush Terminal and the piers at Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn Heights. However, this marginal railroad was never built.
In addition, the Bush Terminal Company ran a car float operation in which freight cars were loaded aboard car-float barges with railroad tracks, which traveled across New York Harbor to and from car float piers in New Jersey. The company had a fleet of tugboats specifically for car floats, each with three crews. Each tug pulled three or four car-float barges, which each measured and could hold up to 17 freight cars at a time. By 1957, two tugboats were still operating, which dated to 1905 and 1906.
Piers and storage
In its most active years, the Bush Terminal/Industry City complex contained seven covered piers, which each extended over into New York Harbor. Each pier measured, and contained a railroad track for loading freight onto ships. Next to each pier were slips that measured wide by deep, large enough to accommodate container ships at the time. Twenty-five steamship lines used these piers, and by 1910, Bush Terminal handled 10 percent of all steamships arriving in New York.Once freight was offloaded from vessels or ready for shipment, it could be stored within one of the warehouses at Bush Terminal. Estimates varied as to the number of warehouses at Bush Terminal. According to The New York Times, the complex had 118 warehouses by 1918, ranging in height from one to eight stories, which could store a combined of goods. However, The Wall Street Journal described the terminal later that year as having 121 warehouses with of total storage space, and a 1920 article in the Bush Company's magazine mentioned that the complex had 122 warehouses. The warehouses were used to store both raw and manufactured goods from Manhattan, in addition to materials offloaded from incoming ships and merchandise headed for distribution. The Bush Terminal Company also maintained a fleet of four steam lighters and seven tugboats that carried goods between the terminal and piers in Manhattan.
By 1920, distribution was controlled from an 8-story steel-and-concrete service building at 39th Street west of Second Avenue. The building had two levels of railroad tracks, one for incoming freight and one for outgoing freight, and each level could accommodate six freight cars.
Historic operations
When the complex was known as Bush Terminal, it offered economies of scale for its tenants, so that even the smallest interests could use facilities normally only available to large, well-capitalized firms. In 1940, tenants used of space. During the 1910s, advertisements for Bush Terminal in newspapers such as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle offered tenants private railroad tracks, a "free waterfront," and "a million-dollar factory at your present rental or less"; they also claimed the complex covered over of land. Other advertisements depicted companies moving to Bush Terminal in large numbers, "boosting" Brooklyn.Bush Terminal employed 35,000 people by 1928. A private court system was created to mediate disputes. There were four tribunals; one each for marine employees, railroad workers, trucking employees, and mechanical employees. These handled civil cases, such as those for job demotions seen as unfair, and criminal cases, such as those for fraud. There was also a "supreme court" that handled disputes between departments, and employees were allowed to appeal cases directly to Irving Bush. The terminal also had a "Pivot Club", which was composed of longshoremen who met twice a week to draft legislation.
Bush Terminal had two coal-and-oil power plants for steam and light. An administration building was built sometime between 1895 and 1902. There was a hall for longshoremen, a bank, restaurants, and a trolley system to transport workers. There was a police force and fire department, as well as a mailbox for airmail. A chamber of commerce for Bush Terminal, created in June 1916, successfully advocated for improvements to the area, such as infrastructure and quality of life cleanup. Other amenities provided at Bush Terminal included social clubs, schools, and community centers.