Austin, Nichols and Company Warehouse, April 6, 1915. The Austin, Nichols and Company Warehouse was constructed in 1914 and 1915 for its namesake, the largest importing and manufacturing wholesale grocery business in the world. Critics at the time described the Cass Gilbert-designed, massive, reinforced concrete building, as an outstanding example of Egyptian Revival architecture rarely found in New York City and the United States. The warehouse utilized piers, railway tracks, freight elevators, conveyor belts, and pneumatic tubes for the production of foodstuffs under the Sunbeam Foods label. The building remained the headquarters for Austin, Nichols & Co. until the late 1950s. The building was acquired by 184 Kent Avenue Associates in 1986 and rented to residential and commercial tenants.

Austin, Nichols and Co Warehouse In 1915, Austin Nichols & Co., the largest wholesale grocers at the time, moved from lower Manhattan's wholesale food district-- today's TriBeCa-- to a new superblock site on the Williamsburg waterfront. The imposing structure was designed by Cass Gilbert, architect of the just-completed world's tallest skyscraper, the Woolworth Building. Developed as a warehouse and production plant where goods were prepared, processed, and packaged under the Sunbeam Foods label, the immense plant provided 450,000 sq. ft. of floor space on four floors. Financiers Havemeyer & Elder, who owned the nearby sugar refinery, directed Gilbert to make the Manhattan (west) façade monumental in appearance to publicize the factory and the expanding rail terminal. The reinforced-concrete structure, built by Turner Construction Company in the Ransome patented system, was lauded as a "Model of Modern Construction and Efficiency" (Brooklyn Daily Eagle) and won praise from European Modern architects, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius. In 2009, the building has been redeveloped as a 300-unit residential complex.

“An old home some what modernized.” P.L. Sperr, September 1, 1936. The wood-frame building appears on insurance maps as early as 1868.

They were built over the first half of the 20th century. They dotted (some might say dominated) the landscape from Alphabet City to Harlem, Greenpoint to Elmhurst to Coney Island. Most were more than 200 feet in diameter and more than 200 feet tall. The ones on Maspeth Avenue in Greenpoint were more than 400 feet tall. They most often came in pairs. Sometimes you could catch a glimpse of them in movies filmed in New York. The natural gas tanks of New York City were the large storage facilities for local utility companies, including the massive Brooklyn Union Gas Company, Consolidated Edison, and a number of smaller companies. In the very late 19th and early 20th century these utility companies began building facilities all over the city, some in areas already densely populated, others on land surrounded by potato fields. Generally speaking each tank or "holder" was constructed of riveted steel plates that inside looked like five face-down cups or levels. The levels telescoped up as natural gas was pumped in by engine-driven compressors. The bottom of the tank was a shallow pool of water, which, is some cases, was used to float a small rowboat for internal inspections. The holders provided constant pressure in residential gas lines during high demand. In 1992 the entire Brooklyn Union Gas system used 906 million cubic feet of gas on its busiest day. The few holders that remained functioning at that time (all in Brooklyn or Queens) were able to hold less than one percent of that total. They had outlived their usefulness. Most of the holders in more densely populated neighborhoods had been dismantled in the previous decades, but a few remained. They were decommissioned and then deconstructed piece by piece. The final two tanks, the twin, red-and-white checkered, 400-foot-tall ones, in Greenpoint along the Newtown Creek, had quite a different send off. On the morning of July 8, 2001, a Sunday, at 7:00 A.M., with the nearby Brooklyn-Queens Expressway closed down, the towers were imploded and in less than 10 seconds came crumbling down, with tens of thousands of New Yorkers watching.

"In the fall of 1975, Williamsburg-Greenpoint residents faced plans to eliminate schools, libraries, police stations, fire stations, bus lines, and hospitals. Angry about the planned cuts, as well as about noise and pollution from the expressway and leaking sewers at the derelict Brooklyn Navy Yard, residents conducted a series of dramatic protests. Encouraged by \[Mobilization for Youth (MFY) social worker Jan] Peterson, Northside residents mobilized a long-term campaign to save their local firehouse, No. 212, which the city planned to close in November 1975 when it reduced its firefighting force by 900…With the aid of the local firefighters, residents organized an eighteen-month-long civil disobedience campaign designed to keep the firehouse open. On Thanksgiving Day 1975, when fire commissioner John T. O’Hagan sent a crew of twenty-four to remove Engine 212, more than 200 residents occupied the station, holding the engine and the firemen hostage. The next day, after negotiations with O’Hagan, the residents set the firemen free but continued to occupy the firehouse, which they renamed People’s Firehouse No. 1." For more on this story, check out this excerpt from Tamar Carroll's Mobilizing New York in Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History.