Our History: Manufacturing & Industry
Most of us, when we think about business have an image of the local shopkeeper - someone we know and trust. Sadly, there are much bigger forces at work in business and too often GREED is the driving force.
Sunset Park is a fairly unique community - we are a residential community, with a lot of retail businesses, but we are also a "huge" industrial/manufacturing area. What happens in the industrial/manufacturing area impacts our residential area dramatically.
It is important that we understand the nature of our business community. In fact, we need to understand it better than our politicians & City agencies because our future depends on it.
In the early days, Sunset was a rural part of Brooklyn. Brooklyn was far smaller than it is today. Its businesses were farming, fishing & trading.
By 1822 brooklyn had 493 structures:
48 taverns 48 groceries 10 boot & shoe manufacturers
12 tar sheds 26 store houses 92 stables
6 bakeries 5 butchers stalls 7 confectionary shops
5 tailor shops 8 schoolhouses 5 blacksmith shops
5 rope walks 1 windmill 6 house carpenters shops
The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 raised the importance of New York harbor, in 1834 Brooklyn became a City, in 1838 Greenwood Cemetery was founded and shortly after large scale immigration from Europe began.
By 1880, Brooklyn had a population of 566,663 and 5,000 factories employing 49,000 people. In 1883 the Brooklyn Bridge opened and in 1898, Brooklyn became part of the greater New York City
I should point out - I am NOT an expert on this matter. I am just trying my best. And I invite others to add to my words (or correct them).
Industry is Sunset Park in the 1800's included:
rope making leather making (tannery)
blacksmith coopers
beer ship building
fishing/clamming ferry service
recreation services cartwrights
But by 1902 the heart of Sunset Park's economy was "transit" - the movement of raw material & finished products.
Shipping & Railroad were the heart of employment. As a support, it needed buildings - large & small - hundreds to store these materials.
23rd St & 3rd Ave - 1883
Schermerhorn House
Although we think of the waterfront being this great manufacturing center, that is NOT true. For example - Bush Terminal with nearly 40,000 employees at its prime had almost all of them involved in shipping & rail.
We did have industry - plastics (spewing deadly poison in our air - we had I believe 5 of the City's 7 worst polluters here).
We had AMF - bowling alley makers (now Lutheran Medical). We had engineering companies, we had large scale candy manufacturers, wine making, major printing businesses, metal working factories. And they did provide many jobs. But the real jobs were loading & unloading ships, & fixing ships and working on the railroad.
These men are part of that labor intensive shipping industry - handling "Break Bulk" shipping. Goods were shipped in crates & boxes. It took days to empty a ship. (and lots of boxes disappeared...lol)
When shipping died (or at least shipping as we knew it) and the railroad declined (after stripping the west of natural resources to make steel they weren't as much needed) and as trucking and air freight increased Sunset Park's economy changed.
Add to that the low cost of labor in other countries, we were in big trouble.
But our troubles were added to as politicians put our waterfront on "hold" - waiting for shipping to return - at the request of the still powerful (at the time) waterfront unions.
Also, our community became the "go to" place to put garbage projects, and also electrical projects and then also a prison - a huge prison.
An equally awful move by the City was the drawing of a line along 3rd Avenue and declaring that from the waterfront to 3rd Avenue was an "industrial park". They ignored the thousands of Sunset Parkers living there.
Lutheran Medical Center tried to "rescue" Sunset by relocating to the old AMF building and having the zoning modified to create a residential corridor - but that never really took hold.
So where are we today?
1. Manufacturing is not coming back.
2. Industry is not coming back.
3. Shipping is not coming back & neither is rail, although they can play a great role in improving our community.
4. We CAN create businesses that provide jobs, but we have to shake off the old ideas and embrace the new ideas.
We need to recognize that we are becoming a "service" economy and embrace that. We need affordable housing and we need schools. We need to match our businesses to the new technology and not the old (those cranes were the new "technology" in shipping - but not anymore - they have no place in our future)
We need parks and playgrounds and institutions like museums and a college.
And we can do all of that.
