Church of the Ascension, 1935. Designed in Early English Gothic style by noted church architect Henry Dudley, the Church of the Ascension hosted its first mass in 1866. Funding for the church was donated by two notable parishioners: J.W. Valentine and Thomas Fitch Rowland, the owner of Greenpoint’s Continental Iron Works. Following the devastation of 2012's Hurricane Sandy, the church became the logistical base in North Brooklyn for the 'Occupy Sandy' relief efforts.

St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church, October 19, 1958. This German-Gothic style church was designed by the Brooklyn-born architect Theobald Engelhardt and completed in 1897 (some records list an earlier date of completion). Engelhardt was a prolific in the late 19th century, designing breweries, banks, factories, and mansions across Brooklyn, especially in neighborhoods with established German populations.

144 Franklin Street Alonzo B. Jones, ca. 1895 This Renaissance Revival structure features a rich texture comprised of rough-cut brownstone at the base and brick and red terra cotta on the upper floors. Its bays consist of impressively scaled arches separated by equally monumental pilasters with Corinthian capitals. Separating the arched bays from the bracketed cornice is an ornate frieze. Attention is drawn to the Greenpoint Avenue façade, whose central bay is flanked by oval windows that further accentuate the building’s Renaissance inspiration.

The American Manufacturing Company was an important part of North Brooklyn's rope industry. Like other rope manufacturers in the area, it supplied nearby shipbuilders with marine rope in is early years and later produced rope for both World Wars. Neighboring factories of the then-industrial portion of Brooklyn included the Chelsea Fiber Mill, the Knickerbocker Ice Company, and Continental Iron Works. Originally, the American Manufacturing Company occupied the single block between Franklin, West, Noble, and Oak Streets. The facilities quickly grew to occupy buildings facing the waterfront, expanding to cover a total of six blocks with a total of 16 buildings. The factory employed thousands of workers who lived nearby: primarily women of Polish descent. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle's description of the plant's workers in 1910 is as follows: "The employees of these mills are Pole and Lithuanians. They came to this country through friends who preceded them. With but a few exceptions, they went to work on their arrival at Ellis Island at these mills and have never worked elsewhere. Year after year, they have plodded on, working industriously, saving a little and sending it back home...Very few of them know any English even after eight years of residence, because they do not need it. They live in little Poland set down in the midst of Brooklyn and with a long workday, can have little energy, even if they have the opportunity to Americanize themselves. And yet, judging from the abundance of the American flags in their rooms, they count themselves not foreigners, but Americans." This article came out on June 13rd as an introduction to news of the worker's strike. Faced with increasing prices and stagnant wages, the workers banded together to form a union. The company ignored their demands, leaving them no choice but to strike. The strike led to violence when the company chose not to close its doors but instead employ hundreds of Sicilian women as scabs. One morning, strikers pelted police and scabs with sticks, rocks, and coal. The scabs retaliated by coming at the strikers with clubs wrapped in newspaper. In October of the same year, a boiler explosion was blamed on the strikers. A reported over-accumulation of gas blew six-men out of windows onto the street and into the river. The Brooklyn Standard Union wrote that "some of the girls who had seen the bodies...fainted and there was a wild scramble." Despite the gruesome incident, the business carried on. The American Manufacturing Company would supply the Navy with 15,000 miles of rope during World War I. A shortage of workers following the strike forced the American Manufacturing Company to look elsewhere for laborers. Long-time Polish residents of Greenpoint were unwilling to accept the 56-hour work weeks and low wages, and the new restrictive immigration laws that passed in 1920 slowed the influx of new immigrants from Eastern Europe who would typically be willing to take on such work. However, a new law would bring a new wave of hardworking immigrants to New York: The Jones-Shafroth Act. The Jones-Shafroth Act, passed in 1917, gave Puerto Ricans living in the territory U.S. citizenship, albeit with very limited rights. This change meant the American Manufacturing Company could sponsor the migration of hundreds of Puerto Rican laborers with relative ease. One migrant recounted his voyage to the states, "when I reached seventeen years of age I went to San Juan, borrowed twenty-five dollars for the fare and disembarked on one of the steamships that sailed weekly." One account reported that at one time, 130 Puerto Ricans were brought over by steamship to work at the American Manufacturing Corporation. Puerto Rican laborers were housed near the factory, had transportation to work paid for, and were put in contact with "chaperones" - already-establish Puerto-Rican families already living in Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Greenpoint became one of the earliest Latino hubs in New York City. The company transitioned to making shoelaces before going out of business in the 1960s. From then on, the building was left mostly abandoned, save for a warehouse for storing used clothes and a small shipping facility. In the early 2000s, developers looked for options to convert the massive structure while preservationists worked to devise a plan to save the building and commemorate the North Brooklyn waterfront's industrial legacy. But in 2006, a ten-alarm fire, at the time the fourth largest in New York City history, razed most of the complex. The buildings' owner quickly came under suspicion of having set the blaze himself as the Brooklyn Market Terminal, what it was called at the time, wasn't his first property to burn. Others thought the cause of the incident was a homeless man melting down wiring scrap. However, neither theory was proven and the cause remains a mystery to this day. Of the remains of the American Manufacturing Company, the most visible i...

Pottery Beach, located where West Street met the East River, was named for a pottery factory that once stood on its site. A reporter from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle set out to meet the man who gave the beach its name on Christmas Eve of 1883. The account reads more like a fable than an actual news report, though it provides an account of life in Greenpoint before the waterfront was lined with heavy industry. Of the name "Pottery Beach," the man claimed: "there used to be an old pottery here, but it went to ruin after the owners had died and gone, and year after year...there was nothing left but a few old sticks and bricks which told the tale. Well, when I found out that the beach used to be used as a pottery, I concluded at once to call it pottery beach, an' by that name it has gone ever since." The so-called "owner" of the beach, as the newspaper christened him, decided to live on the beach after finding himself homeless. The man, who referred to himself in the third person only as "Jack," was in his past life a captain "of as pretty a ship as did ever sail the ocean," so it was fitting that the residence he built was a haphazardly fashioned cabin on top of a boat. In fact, the journalist for the Eagle was forced to take a row-boat out for an interview because the evening tides were high enough to partially submerge the sunken ship. Jack claimed that Greenpoint's sandy shore was a popular fishing spot, swimming hole, and place to watch yacht races. The former captain had lived on the beach for fifteen years, making a living selling provisions like ginger-snaps, lemonade, soda water, ginger beer, and cigarettes to young beach-goes "their mothers don't know it...they will not git a licking because Jack will not say anything about it." After bidding the man farewell, the reporter reflected on the fate of the area. He wrote: "\[it] will in a very short time be a thing of the past. Large manufactories are constantly springing up in Greenpoint, and all available waterfront will be needed...The property is convenient to all Greenpoint ferries and is within a few minutes of New York, and will doubtless in a short time be built upon by one of the large oil companies now located in Hunter's Point and Greenpoint."

This 1895 Neo-Classical building was the headquarters of the Mechanics and Traders Bank, founded in 1867 by Archibald Meserole, of the prominent Greenpoint family. Architect Alonzo B. Jones incorporated a variety of building materials and architectural styles: a rusticated brownstone base; arched, palladian, and oval windows with terra cotta detail; full-height (second and third stories) red brick pilasters with Corinthian capitals; and a wavy stemlike motif frieze beneath the cornice.

What happens when two Urban Archive staff members are practically neighbors? They go on a walk capturing as many then-and-now pictures as they can! If you’re in North Brooklyn sometime soon, see if you can take some of your own!

St. Elias Catholic Church 149 Kent Street Church: William B. Ditmars, 1869–70 School: W. Wheeler Smith, 1879 St. Elias Greek Rite Catholic Church, formerly the Reformed Dutch Church of Greenpoint (bottom), combines elements of the Romanesque Revival and Victorian Gothic styles, both popular in the post-Civil War period. Its brick and stone façades have round-arch openings, polychromatic ornament and a columned portico entrance. Its polygonal Sunday school building mimics a medieval Italian baptistery, but another Victorian touch can be found in the handsome wooden porch on its east end.

North side of Milton Street, Greenpoint, October 19, 1958. At right Nos. 131 and 133 form a pair of Second Empire townhouses, each with floor length parlor windows, and mansard roofs with round “bullseye” windows. By 1982, when Milton Street was included in the Greenpoint Historic District, the 1870s houses had been modified, with No. 131 losing its bullseye.

“Blue House,” 1958. 119 Milton Street is one half of a pair of Neo-Grec rowhouses designed by Thomas C. Smith and completed in 1876. Curiously, the 1982 Historic District Designation Report makes no mention of no. 119’s bold color scheme.

These tugboats belong to the Reichert Towing Line, which was founded by Jacob Charles Reichert in 1906. Reichert, having worked on tugboats since the age of 16, was promoted to Captain by the time he was 21. He went on to assemble his own fleet of ten ships which formed the Reichert Towing Company. The tugs in Reichert's Line are docked at Dupont Street and participating in the Tugboat Strike of 1946, a two-week strike beginning on February 1st which aimed to bring all activity of the bustling harbor to a standstill. Strikers demanded higher wages, a reduction of working hours, and two weeks of vacation. Wages, kept at a standstill even after World War II, ranged from 67 cents an hour for deckhands and cooks to just over one-dollar an hour for captains and engineers. The strike affected every corner of the city. Mayor William O'Dwyer warned of brown-outs because tuggers wouldn't be bringing in coal. The subway system had to be kept unheated, and public schools were closed and converted to either hospitals or housing for those without fuel for heating. Lights for streetlamps were dimmed or shut off. The strike ended on February 14th, and thus the Mayor's forecast of mass chaos never came into fruition. Both members of the International Longshoremen's Association, the labor union group, and the Employers Wage Adjustment Committee, representing owners and operators of the tug companies, agreed to assemble a three-person panel to negotiate the union's demands and found a compromise.

106-112 Noble Street, September 1, 1936. This photo shows two synagogues: Beth El (at left) and Ahawath Israel, now known as Greenpoint Shul (at right). The Greenpoint Shul is the only remaining synagogue in the neighborhood. According to public records, the building was originally a Congregationalist Church that dates back to 1871. In the late 1880s, it became a German-Jewish Reform synagogue, Temple Beth El. The congregation that worships at Greenpoint Shul today (2018) is the result of a merger of three of five synagogues that have served Greenpoint since the late 19th century.

St. Elias Catholic Church, October 29, 1958. Built in “Ruskinian Gothic” style with alternating white and brownstone arches, the Reformed Dutch Church of Greenpoint was completed in 1870. A Sunday School building was added in 1879. The church was sold St. Elias, a Greek Catholic congregation, in 1943, when the Reformed Dutch Church moved to a smaller building on nearby Milton Street. The Kent Street church has been abandoned since 2007.

“Greenpoint Avenue, west from West Street. In the foreground, is the City of New York Municipal Ferry to 23rd Street, Manhattan. March 1929.” In 1852, Neziah Bliss established a ferry between Manhattan’s 10th and 23rd Streets and the East River terminus of Greenpoint Avenue. Bliss, a prominent landowner, was responsible for pushing Greenpoint’s 19th century commercial development with infrastructure projects including the East River ferry and the Ravenswood turnpike (today’s Franklin Street). Public radio station WNYC purchased the former ferry terminal site in 1935, and built two AM broadcast antennae. In 1990, WNYC moved their transmitters to New Jersey, leaving the waterfront site vacant until 2012, when it was redeveloped as a public park.