110 Bridge Street ARCHITECT: Louis E. Jallade DATE: 1908-09 The Thomson Meter Co. Building, among the most aesthetically interesting industrial structures in New York City, is a pioneering American building that employs, in part, a frank exterior expression of its concrete structure. It also displays a fairly early use in New York of polychromatic glazed terracotta. The success of the Thomson Meter Co., founded c. 1890 in Brooklyn to manufacture John Thomson’s patented water meters, led to a new 4-story (plus basement) factory, built in 1908-09 to the design of Louis E. Jallade, with the Hennebique Construction Co. as general contractor. Jallade’s use of ceramic ornament, particularly leaf motifs in terra cotta, was clearly influenced by Parisian examples. After Thomson’s death, this building was sold in 1927 to the New York Eskimo Pie Corp., a subsidiary of the parent firm, for the regional manufacture of the first American chocolate-covered ice cream bar (created in 1920). Eskimo Pie products were made here until 1966.

The Manhattan Bridge, viewed from the intersection of Washington and Front Streets, ca. 1978.

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"97 Bridge Street, at the N.E. corner of York Street, showing also the Brooklyn Union Gas Co. tank on York Street." The frame building at the corner was recently demolished. Notice the architectural palimpsest on the building at the left. A palimpsest is traditionally a parchment made from animal hide that has been scraped "clean" again so that new text can be written on it. In many cases the ghost of the original text can be seen faintly behind the text words. In the case of architecture, a palimpsest is the partial remains or outline of a vanished building seen on existing buildings.

View of the Brooklyn Bridge and downtown skyline from Main Street Park, ca. 1979.

Family standing on the stoop at 115 Jay Street, May 22, 1936. These photographs were part of a group Abbott took in “Irishtown,” a slum of pre-Civil War houses nestled under the anchorage of the Manhattan Bridge. Lacking cellars, central heat, hot water, toilets, and bathtubs, many of the houses had been declared uninhabitable by the City. In the only portrait of the Changing New York project, Abbott captured the dignity of this African-American family living at no. 115 Jay Street. She later recalled that the family told her “a dog shouldn’t live in this place.” Vendors like the pots-and-pans salesman in Traveling Tin Shop were a disappearing breed when Abbott took this photograph, but they still serviced the City’s poorest neighborhoods. A public housing project now stands on the site of 115 Jay Street. In 1950, the entry ramps of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway cut through the area and further marginalized it.

View of the Lower Manhattan skyline, past the Brooklyn Bridge, from the intersection of John and Pearl Streets; ca. 1975. The brick building at right is the former Arbuckle Brothers sugar refinery, once responsible for producing a sugar-based coating which protected roasted coffee beans from going stale prior to delivery. The Arbuckle refinery has since been razed, with the site now home to John Street Park, the easternmost section of the Brooklyn Bridge Park development. The park is a landscaped salt marsh with pedestrian crossings, including a small trace of the former Arbuckle empire: the refinery's iron and concrete footings have been left untouched, amid native tidal grasses.

"Brooklyn: Front Street - Gold Street, 1934" At this corner once stood St. Anne's (later Ann's) Roman Catholic Church. Built in 1860 by the well-known architect of Catholic Churches Patrick Keely, the congregation would be combined with nearby St. George's Church in 1986 and the building demolished in 1992.

Traveling Tin Shop, May 22, 1936. "The location of the photograph is unknown but the neighborhood resembles Talman and Jay Streets in the Fort Greene area of Brooklyn, which Abbott photographed on the same day."

Talman Street between Jay and Bridge Streets. Talman Street was demolished to make way for the BQE in the 1950s. The origins of this small street of wood-frame homes date to the late 19th century. By the time the Irish community was being replaced by an African American community in the 1930s, the homes still had no running water, toilets, and central heat.

The Manhattan Bridge opened to the public on the morning of December 31, 1909. It was the third suspension bridge built to span the East River, joining the Brooklyn and Williamsburg bridges. At the beginning of construction, its name was “Bridge No. 3” but that didn’t stick. In the end, the city opted for something simple, christening the bridge Manhattan

View of the Brooklyn Bridge from the Manhattan Bridge, November 11, 1936.

73-83 Sands Street. Did you know that Brooklyn had a red light district? Sands Street, which was close enough to the waterfront and the Navy Yard to be a gathering spot for sailors, catered to this group (and New Yorkers seeking a sordid thrill) with saloons, tattoo shops, gambling spots, and boarding houses. In the 19th century this disreputable area was referred to by locals as the "Barbary Coast" and by the mid 20th century was called "Hell's Half Acre."

Part of a fleet, Sludge Vessel Coney Island was built in the late 1930s during an era of wastewater treatment modernization aimed at keeping sewage out of the City’s rivers and harbor and improving public health. Back then, the vessels carried sludge out into the ocean, but since the 1990s they’ve sailed to facilities that turn it into biosolids, which can be composted, added to agricultural soils, or further processed for other beneficial uses. Decommissioned by NYC’s Environmental Protection Administration in 1972, the Coney Island was intentionally sunk off the coast of New Jersey, becoming a Scuba diving and fishing destination as part of the Shark River Reef!

Empire Stores, 53-83 Water Street, 1980. Long underutilized, the Brooklyn waterfront received a facelift beginning in 2002 when then Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor George Pataki set aside 1.3 miles of waterfront to create a promenade and park. Construction began in 2008 and the park opened to the public in 2010.

"Empire Stores Warehouse. Showing the Empire Stores warehouse buildings with weeds, wooden pallets, and the shell of an automobile on the street in front of the buildings. Partial view of Robert Gair's cardboard box factory building, located at 1 Main Street, 1968."

Brooklyn: Sands Street - Pearl Street.

Bliss Works, Brooklyn,ca. 1910-1915. A building with a long and storied history. Built between 1891 and 1901 it originally was one of a number of buildings in the neighborhood that housed the factories of the E. W. Bliss Machine Company. The former factory is one of the longest remaining artist live/work loft buildings, and the location of a major Loft Law litigation. It housed a paper recycling plant on the first floor until 2014 which also played a part in a major mafia sting operation in the 1990s. Artist such as String, KRS-One and Q-Tip have shot videos here. And it is the first "safe house" location in the dystopian future of the online video game "The Division."

Front Street warehouse, ca. 1958.

Water and Dock Streets, ca. 1890. Opened in 1869, the Empire Stores was the center of operations for the Arbuckle Bros. Coffee Company. One of a number of "stores" that lined the Brooklyn waterfront (for the movement, processing, and housing of cotton, lemons, jute, tobacco, sugar, and coffee), this building is only one of two that survive. These brick warehouses were vast and dark spaces. A number of architectural features facilitated the buildings functions including, the large openings for easy hoisting goods and massive metal shutters that kept the elements, fire, and thieves out. Abandoned in 1945, the building remained empty for decades. In 2016 the building was finally reopened as a retail hub, featuring restaurant and high end stores, as well as an annex to the Brooklyn Historical Society.

A. Zerega's Sons building (background) at 28 Front Street, ca. 1935. Founded by Antoine Zerega, a French immigrant of Italian background, in 1848, Zerega's is the oldest pasta company in the United States. Zerega Avenue in the Bronx is named after the pasta maker. The company moved from DUMBO to Fair Lawn, New Jersey in 1952.

Images of small children boxing are not something we come across every day so when we found this picture in the Brooklyn Public Library's Brooklyn Daily Eagle collection we dove into its history.

View of Lower Manhattan from the Brooklyn Waterfront, east of the Brooklyn Bridge, ca. 1935.

Empire Stores warehouse buildings, viewed from New Dock Street, 1968. The Sweeney Manufacturing Company building, located at 30 Main Street, and Robert Gair's former cardboard box factory at 1 Main Street are visible in the background. Established in 1869, the Empire Stores is a series of seven separate warehouses. Shipping merchant James Nesmith built the first phase of four-story warehouses which were then known as “Nesmith & Sons Empire Stores.” The warehouses stored raw materials such as cotton, lemons, jute, tobacco, sugar, and coffee imported on cargo ships from Africa, South America, and Cuba. Business was so good that, in 1885, James’ son Henry Nesmith built the remaining five-story warehouses on the eastern end. Large openings on the water side facilitated easy hoisting of goods to and from the adjacent piers. During the 19th century, the Brooklyn waterfront was so completely lined with warehouses similar to Empire Stores that it was nick-named the “walled city.” The Empire Stores are among the few that remain. In the 1920s, the Empire Stores became part of Arbuckle Coffee, then the country's largest coffee business, and a significant presence on the DUMBO waterfront. Arbuckle managed every aspect of the Brooklyn coffee business: coffee beans unloaded into the Empire Stores were sorted, glazed, roasted, ground, packaged, and shipped in nearby buildings. The Arbuckle brand Yuban is still in stores today. Abandoned in 1945, the buildings remained empty for decades. The building was rehabilitated as part of the development of Brooklyn Bridge Park, and recently reopened as a retail hub, with restaurants and high-end stores, as well as the Brooklyn Historical Society - DUMBO.

Tenements and wood-frame dwellings on Garrison Street, a single block between Front and York Streets in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, ca. 1938. Arnold Eagle’s photo is part of his “One Third of a Nation” series, shot with David Robbins. The project document the living conditions in poverty-stricken New York City neighborhoods, and shared its name with a 1938 “living newspaper” production by the Federal Theatre Project dramatizing similar themes. Garrison is named for John Garrison, an early 19th century judge who also served as president of the Village of Brooklyn. At right in the middle ground, is Mercein Street, a single-block street named for Andrew Mercein, a political figure of the same era who lived on nearby Sands Street. Both streets were eliminated in the early 1950s to make room a westbound exit ramp from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Today, a parking lot entrance roughly lines up with the former path of Garrison Street.

Vinegar Hill is a quiet, historic pocket of Brooklyn tucked between the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Manhattan Bridge, its Belgian block streets framed by rowhouses and the looming smokestack of a former Con Edison power station. Unlike its heavily trafficked neighbor DUMBO to the west, Vinegar Hill has largely escaped tourist crowds and large-scale development, preserving a rare sense of old New York. The neighborhood's story began in 1748 when the Sands brothers purchased 160 acres and ambitiously dubbed the area the “City of Olympia.” But it wasn’t until 1800 that the name Vinegar Hill stuck, a marketing move by developer John Jackson to attract Irish shipwrights, evoking the 1798 Battle of Vinegar Hill in Ireland. By the mid-19th century, waves of Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Hunger transformed the neighborhood into a gritty waterfront enclave nicknamed “Irishtown.” Known for its illicit poitín whiskey stills and gang activity, most famously the White Hand Gang, it was a hard-edged working-class community with deep roots. Much of old Vinegar Hill was leveled in the 1950s to make way for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Farragut Houses, but the surviving streets still carry the weight of history. Today, as plans move forward to convert the long-dormant power plant into a renewable energy hub, the neighborhood stands at another turning point, balancing preservation and reinvention.

Manhattan Bridge Overpass, ca. 1977. The site that gives DUMBO its name: Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.

"97 Bridge Street, at the N.E. corner of York Street, showing also the Brooklyn Union Gas Co. tank on York Street." The large natural gas tanks seen in this photograph, once dotted the streetscapes of the five boroughs. The most well known were in Elmhurst Queens, which were dismantled in 1996. A pair of tanks in Greenpoint met a more spectacular end in 2001 when they were imploded. It is unknown when the tank seen here was demolished, though considering the density and growth of this neighborhood (in comparison to Elmhurst or Greenpoint), it was likely gone long before the others.

Manhattan Bridge ca. 1936 The Manhattan Bridge, the first suspension bridge to use flexible steel towers, was built concurrently with the Queensboro Bridge. Gustav Lindenthal's technical innovations for the Manhattan Bridge, and his insistence on incorporating aesthetic elements into the design, were disapproved by Tammany Hall politicians and other powerful figures: Such political resistance prevented Lindenthal from acquiring funds or political backing for his design and eventually he and Hornbostel were replaced by designer Leon Moisseiff and the architectural firm Carrere and Hastings, respectively. Moisseiff altered Lindenthal's plan by substituting conventional wound steel cables for nickel-steel chains and by reducing the proposed size of the structure's tall stiffening trusses. It has been speculated that the real cause of Tammany opposition to Lindenthal's design was that it called for nickel-steel and therefore failed to provide business to the Roebling Company, the only one producing steel cables. Various explanations have been offered was to why the completed bridge could just barely support the necessary weight: that Moisseiff neglected to undertake certain critical calculations (he later designed the Tacoma-Narrows Bridge, Tacoma, Washington, which collapsed shortly after its 1940 opening, taking his career with it) or that inferior materials, inadequate to withstand predicted traffic-load pressures, were used. Whatever the cause, the Manhattan is the most troublesome of New York City's suspension bridge, although it has the greatest traffic capacity of the four East River bridges.

York Street at the Brooklyn Bridge looking north along Garrison Street, ca. 1935. Garrison Street was a small, crooked alley that ran from York Street (the road seen in the foreground) to Front Street. It ran parallel to the bridge for only a hundred or so feet then sharply turned to the north (right) where it ran perpendicular into Front Street. Named after John Garrison a butcher who became a judge and was later the first president of Brooklyn Village. While they survived the building of the adjacent Brooklyn Bridge, they were lost in the mid-century urban development and construction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in the 1950s.

Talman Street, no. 57, Brooklyn. In the 19th century Talman Street, a small road between Bridge and Jay Streets in what is now called DUMBO, was once home to wooden rowhouses and a small population of Irish immigrants. By the 1930s when Berenice Abbott photographed the street it was pretty run down. During the urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s, the street was demolished to make way for the BQE and the Farragut Houses, a massive public housing complex. The hand painted signage for Eskimo Pies can be seen on the building (100 Bridge St.) in the background.

Constructed between 1896 and 1915, this 10-acre block complex was home to one of the largest grocers of imported commodities in the United States. Established in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the Grand Union Tea Company moved its headquarters to Brooklyn in 1896. By 1930, Grand Union had over 700 stores nationwide and shipped millions of pounds of coffee, tea, and other goods per year. Grand Union moved its headquarters to Elmwood Park, New Jersey in 1950. Today, the building stands as a reminder of DUMBO's importance to the growth of American commerce at the turn of the 20th century. The building is now condiminiums.

There is no place like New York — and there is certainly nothing like growing up here. This collection will give you a look into the lives of New York City's youngest and cutest, dating from the late 19th to the mid-20th century.

Brooklyn: Sands Street - Pearl Street.

"Brooklyn: Main Street - Front Street. An old wood-frame building at the corner that had been in existence for more than a century in 1922."