Loose-Wiles Company Building, ca. 1912. Once the largest factory building under one roof, the building constructed c. 1912 was called the "Thousand Windows Bakery." It housed the Loose Wiles or Sunshine Biscuit factory. They manufactured their "trademark" Sunshine biscuits as well as Saltines, Hydrox Cookies, and Animal Crackers. The factory closed in the 1980s and the iconic electric sign, which had not even been installed when this photograph was taken, was removed (though later occupants of the building have added their own signage to the still-standing metal framework).

In the late 1860s, Brooklynite Thomas Adams carried out a series of experiments with chicle, which is extracted from Mexican Sapota trees, hoping he could make the rubber-like substance into toys, boots, or bicycle tires. The trials were a failure. He was just about to throw the chicle into the East River when he remembered that his boss, who was the ex-dictator of Mexico, regularly chewed it. Experimenting by adding sugar, he created a better-tasting gum than any other available at that time. This post can be viewed in its original format at: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/blog/2011/09/07/chewing-gum-king.

Ludwig Baumann and Co. warehouse, 1948. Ludwig Baumann was a Bohemian immigrant who arrived in New York in the mid 19th century and became a clerk in a grocery store. During the Civil War, he and his brother opened a popular furniture store. Ludwig himself died in 1904 but the company maintained under the helm of his sons and partners. This building was built in 1924 as a furniture warehouse and would remain in that function until the late 1950s when the company offered it for sale as part of a major liquidation sell off.

(Morrell Smith, 1925-27) Colloquially known as the “Long Island City Clock Tower,” this neo-Gothic style building was designated as a New York City Individual Landmark in 2015, but it is a landmark in every sense of the word. Standing at 14 stories tall, the structure was Queens’ tallest until the construction of the Citigroup Building at One Court Square in 1990. Its location in one of the borough’s busiest transportation hubs has made the building a prominent fixture. Queensboro Bridge Plaza (now Queens Plaza) became an important commercial center after the 1909 completion of the Queensboro Bridge and the construction of numerous elevated transit lines that converged here. The Manhattan Company, founded by Aaron Burr in 1799 and a precursor to J. P. Morgan Chase & Co., merged with the Bank of Long Island in 1920 and established 40 branches in Queens over the next decade. This building, located in the heart of the borough, would be a showpiece for the company. Its grand, 14-foot diameter, the four-faced clock has provided subway riders with a time check on their commute to work for roughly 90 years. The clock tower itself occupies the top three stories of the building. When it opened in 1927, the Bank of the Manhattan Company occupied the basement, ground floor, and mezzanine, and the rest of the building was rented as office space. The banking hall’s interior, finished in marble with brass hardware throughout, remains largely intact, though covered in gypsum wallboard. The exterior is clad in buff brick with limestone trim, and its verticality is emphasized by bands of contrasting brick that draw the eye to the highly ornate clock tower. In addition to the clock faces, this section features reliefs of the god Oceanus, a symbol of the bank, and monograms of the bank’s initials, as well as a crenelated roofline.

The Metropolitan Building, located at 27-42 Thomson Avenue, was home to the Zeese Wilkinson Company from 1921 until 1950. The company was listed in an advertisement in the "American Printer" on June 20th, 1922, stating that the company occupied "115,000 square feet of floor space...in the 5th and 6th floors of the new Metropolitan Building." The company closed in 1950. The Metropolitan Building, now called the "Arris Lofts" is presently a luxury residential building.

Masonic Temple of Long Island City. The cornerstone of this building was laid in 1906 to much pomp and circumstance and with many high ranking Freemasons from around New York State in attendance.

Though most of the historic details of this large residential building have been stripped (except for the iron fencing on the roof), the wood frame building seen in this photograph still stands hidden under the vinyl siding of its current facade.

Now the headquarters of the New York City School Construction Authority, this six-story flat-slab concrete factory building was built by the American Chicle Company in 1919 as part of the Degnon Terminal industrial park. Raw chicle was unloaded onsite via a direct railway connection, brought to the top floor for spraying to keep moist, then moved by gravity conveyors to each floor for chewing gum production. The building’s façade is dominated by a two-story central tower, but was famous for its three large rooftop signs that once advertised “Dentyne,” “Adams Black Jack,” and “Chiclets” to passing commuters on the Long Island Rail Road. At the pedestrian level, the façade is enlivened at the second story of each pier by colorful tile work with designs featuring a raised floral motif surrounding a geometric diamond pattern. In 1976, an explosion that killed one worker marked the start of a decline that ultimately led the factory to close its doors and lay off 1,600 employees in 1981.

American Chicle Company ca. 1921 The American Chicle Company was the fifth major industry to move into the Degnon Terminal. A six-story flat-slab concrete factory housing 13 acres of floor area, the building occupied a 200-by-600-foot site that comprised about sixty city lots. Through an opening on the rear end of the building at the first story, two train tracks entered a central courtyard for freight loading and unloading of raw chicle, which was brought to the top floor via elevators and automatic conveyors, sprayed to stay moist, then moved by gravity conveyors down to each level for chewing gum production. In a paternalistic gesture to the workers, the owner, Thomas Adams (whose name still identifies the building's watertower), provided worker amenities such as dining rooms, a kitchen, and a rooftop recreation space.

Standing at 27-28 Thomson Avenue, the triangular Arris Lofts was originally constructed as an industrial building. Typical for a factory building, the façade is unadorned but dominated by large windows that provided plenty of natural light for the interior workspace. This eight-story, poured concrete structure was one of six Eagle Electric warehouses in Long Island City, producing electrical switches and other equipment and gaining notoriety for its billboards proclaiming that “Perfection Is Not An Accident.” Later, the building served as the MetLife printing plant before its conversion to luxury apartments in 2008. Architect Costas Kondylis was hired to transform this loft space into 237 luxury apartments while retaining the building’s original industrial feel.

Pan American Airways Building,1946. The large Jet Blue rooftop sign that currently graces a nearby building was not the first airline logo to top a Long Island City building. During the middle part of the 20th century Pan-Am, whose logo more memorably topped the building just north of Grand Central Terminal, also occupied a building on Queens Plaza. The building seen here in 1946 does not include the rooftop sign which was installed c.1960.

The Long Island City Courthouse was constructed between 1872 and 1876, more than two decades before Queens became a part of the Greater New York City. The French Second Empire style building was designed by a Massachusetts architect named George Hathorne. Suffering the fate of many 19th century buildings, the structure was ravaged by fire in 1904. Between 1904 and 1908 it was completely redesigned by local Queens architect Peter M. Coco who stripped the exterior of much of its ornamentation and added two stories and two entranceway columns to create a neo-Classical courthouse. (The resulting building is seen here in 1932 and remains the same today.)

The westernmost portion of Queens remained predominantly rural and undeveloped until around 1870, when Long Island City was incorporated from the nascent industrial communities of Astoria, Blissville, Hunters Point and Ravenswood. The start of this area’s growth began when the Long Island Rail Road moved its main terminus from Downtown Brooklyn to the East River waterfront in Hunters Point in 1861. A decade later, the Steinway piano factory opened a new industrial complex and worker settlement in nearby Astoria, stimulating growth and establishment of infrastructure in the area. As Long Island City grew to become a regional transportation and population center, the Queens County seat was moved from Clowesville (in present-day Nassau County) west to Long Island City around 1874. In the last quarter of the 19th century, its waterfront became home to oil refineries, lumber yards, factories and chemical plants, while the city’s population tripled from 15,609 in 1875 to 48,272 in 1900. After Queens was consolidated into Greater New York City in 1898, Long Island City’s connections to Manhattan were strengthened with the completion of the Queensboro Bridge in 1909. The elevated railway trains, trolleys, automobiles and pedestrians travelling across the bridge all converged at the new “Queensboro Bridge Plaza,” now known as Queens Plaza, which soon supplanted the rail yards of Hunters Point as the gateway to Queens. Transportation was further improved with the construction of the East River Tunnels and Sunnyside Yards in 1910, which provided Long Island Rail Road trains with a direct connection to Manhattan, as well as with the completion of new subway lines to Astoria and Corona by 1917. Banks and manufacturing firms soon gravitated towards this new central plaza, which became famous for the large electric signs that dotted the rooftops of its buildings, advertising products like Swingline Staplers, Chiclets and Pepsi Cola to travelers passing through. Hunters Point, on the other hand, saw its population peak in 1905 before starting a slow decline, becoming a primarily industrial area with the old brownstones and institutional buildings sitting in the shadow of the elevated trains rumbling past. By the post-World War II era, shifts in transportation, industry and demographics spelled the end of Long Island City’s role as the center of Queens. Deindustrialization left many factories shuttered and the waterfront underutilized, while Queens’ population growth and commercial activity was primarily concentrated farther east in the borough’s more suburban neighborhoods. However, the empty warehouses, with open floor plans and ample lighting, prompted artists to move across the river as early as the 1960s, which led to the founding of institutions like the Noguchi Museum and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Centre to secure their legacy. By the 1990s, corporations, including Citibank and MetLife, were moving to Long Island City in search of affordable office space and good transit connections, converting industrial buildings or building new structures like One Court Square, the tallest building in New York outside of Manhattan. Residential development along the waterfront began with the 1997 completion of the 42-story Citylights building, the first of several luxury residential towers along the East River that now vie for the best views of the midtown skyline. Although the neighborhood is in the midst of a large-scale transformation as development spreads outward from the subway stations and the waterfront, remnants of Long Island City’s past anchor this dynamic place to its roots and serve to keep its history alive, making it an appealing place to both live and work.

(Peter M. Coco, 1904-1908) In the late 19th century, the county seat was relocated to Long Island City, which was emblematic of the area’s increasing importance as an independent municipality that boasted its own public school system, regular police force and pure water supply. The new county seat was located in a two-story, French Second Empire building on Court Square, a prominent place in the growing city. Unfortunately, the structure was gutted by a fire in 1904, so a new building was commissioned from architect Peter Coco. A graduate of Cooper Union, Coco designed the building in the neo-English Renaissance style, incorporating many interesting details, such as the pairs of eagles set above cartouches around the third story. When the boroughs were consolidated in 1898, Long Island City lost its status as the county seat to Jamaica, yet the courthouse remained in use as the county courthouse until being taken over for use by the state’s Supreme Court in 1932. This dignified four-story building has remained a focal point for judicial activity in Queens for over a century, serving as the site of many notable trials, including that of Ruth Brown Snyder and Henry Judd Gray, who were famously executed at Sing Sing Prison in 1928 after being convicted in the murder of Snyder’s husband, Albert Snyder. The trial was widely publicized and large crowds gathered outside the courthouse for the verdict on May 9, 1927.