Category: NYC ruins

This three floor abandoned factory building dated back to the 1950s. It’s typical modernist styled exterior made it a rather plain looking addition to a neighborhood full of similar abandoned factory buildings. Over the years it served many companies, before being bought in 2011 for 5 million dollars. That’s a lot of cash for stout factory with no expansion possibilities, so demolition to make way for yet another condo building was definitely coming next.
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The Stella D’oro cookie factory was a longstanding source of good paying jobs in The Bronx – that is, until a private equity company got involved.
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Huge warehouses, conspicuous amounts of non-activity, and that intrigue strikes once again. What the hell is inside these abandoned warehouses? Let’s find out.

Find Out Here

History:

Sheba Exports was the final resident of this now completely dilapidated building. Very early in its history, this warehouse was part of a marine terminal. Today, you’d never be able to tell from what’s left of the place. The exterior is shrouded on scaffolding, and the majority of the property is tucked behind a fence.

Sheba Exports was in the clothing business, in a very odd way. They exported used clothing to other countries (primarily Pakistan according to the records we found). Second hand clothing isn’t just something the cool kids get at their local thrift store. In some parts of the world, it’s the only way many people can afford clothing at all. At some point Sheba’s went out of business though, and they left behind a warehouse still filled with secondhand clothing that was baled into huge 6×6 foot cubes. Taking a guess from the records we found and the clothing in these bundles, it appears this operation ended sometime in the late 1980s. Leftover inventory was abandoned in place – much like the massive clothing piles once found at Greenpoint Terminal Market. Perhaps the market for secondhand clothing collapsed around the same time?

Today, the remaining set of buildings sit condemned and decaying.

Adventure:

Snip, Snip, Snip. Bold are those who love to cut holes in fences, and bolder still are those who cut chains off doors in broad daylight. This is what real exploring is all about.

The plywood door creaked open with a throaty rumble, the froggy auditory excitement soon replaced by the overpowering, punch-you-in-the-face stench of old, wet fabric. Let me tell you, wet fabric might look hot on a woman but holy shit when you bundle up pallets full of the stuff and leave it sitting for a decade or two, wow. There’s no words for a smell like that.

The absolute darkness of the first floor is impressive. There are no windows, and what lays in front of you is a maze of tall, fairly neatly stacked clothing bundles. Think of a corn maze, only one with a distinct smell. Eventually, after what seemed like forever, we found stairs leading up.

Here the floors are bad. You can see the floorboards rotting through in some sections – small holes appear. The walls of the stairs are tin – one of those architectural elements you just don’t see anymore.

Second floor, Ladies Lingerie.

Actually, no. The second floor is disgusting. The drop ceiling has collapsed, leaving a slushy stick tacky coating on the floor and anything left above it.

The third floor ironically is much more interesting and significantly less disgusting. It’s up here that we found some interesting old files, rare graffiti, and piles – not so much of clothing as what seemed like homeless person bits. Useless crap. Chairs, bow ties, toys, and yes, the occasional hole in the floor.

Content that we’ve seen what we need to see, read the files we wanted to read, and had sex with your sister in the back room, we’re off. Back down the stairs and out into the daylight. By now it seems our bold and brazen entry tactics have not gone unnoticed. We make our way off the scaffold, onto the street, and back to the car. We drive a few blocks and loop back around – at which point we see the police have rolled up and are looking around. We were probably inside for at least a half hour, so either the response time was very slow (if we were seen going in), or incredibly fast (if seen coming out).

And so it goes. Another adventure, another escape. This is the nature of exploring. It’s not for everyone, but for us… it’s routine…

For the better part of a decade, at the east end of Hope street, lay an impressively large industrial building that seemed utterly hopeless.

History:
The exact industrial history of this warehouse is, sadly, a bit of a mystery to me at the moment. What we do know is that in the 1980s it was mostly in use as artists lofts and small businesses.

The lofts were, at the time, on the very fringe. A comment via Brownstoner tells the story well:

I am one of the original tenants who moved into Hope Street in 1993 – after the last real estate crash. Kalamon Dolgin, specifically Neil Dolgin couldn’t give it away fast enough. He even put in gas jet heaters so I could live there. No one wanted to live there, and I had been living in Williamsburg since 1988, so this was a step up. I had crack addicted prostitutes passed out on my door, There was incredible drug dealing, murders outside my window and where the gallery is on the corner of Hope and Marcy was a luncheonette where the retired guys would gather, there were scads of feral cats, the first pigeons with West Nile started dying on the roof, and also I watched 9/11 and the Twin Towers go down from that roof. A former porn actress who wound up doing business deals with Dolgin (one slut to another I liked to think) lived there with her homicidal boyfriend. We were terrorized by the super, the former gang leader of the neighborhood who stole our packages, forged our checks and occasionally attacked tenants who did not know-tow to him, My floor was 6000 square feet and over the years we had a gallery, sculptors, artists, actors, writers, notable people. We really, really used the space. The temperature in the winter in the uninsulated building would go down to the 40’s. We bundled up in sweaters and dealt with it.

Also, this was one of the staging grounds to rewrite the NY City amended loft law, which almost, but did not quite pass though the bill was written and it went all the way up to what was then was Governor Pataki, Joe Bruno and Sheldon Silver, but in the way of horsetrading, our bill was traded away at the last moment. It was a good fight, we lost but had a number of planning meetings there with the bill’s lawyers, and rezoning happened and we all got evicted. The water got turned off, electric, you name it. A huge number of the people in that building left NY, not all, but a lot of them. We did not receive a buy out. We did go on rent strike and that helped pay the legal fees.

The guy who bought it for 26 million for Dolgin (it had been the first building in their empire, as Old Man Dolgin let everyone know he had shoveled coal) was a decent sort who lost his shirt. He was a small time developer who got in over his head. I often wonder how it went for him, because obviously he got bankrupted.

The last line of the comment refers to how often the property changed hands in the last 5 years. With so much money vested, won and lost via these various ‘developers’, it was a given that sooner or later some kind of residential conversion would happen with this property. We’ll get to that in a moment.

Aside from being one of Williamburg’s early artist loft spaces, this building also made the news when it was repeated tagged up by then-infamous street artist Neckface.For further reading on that fiasco, and how the gangsta building super wanted to kill him for it, check out this CityNoise post – which saved a copy of the NY Daily News article

The hope street warehouse was also home to the “65 hope st. gallery” – which, if you google, returns loads of results for artists who exhibited their work in this space.

On the business side, I was only able to track down one company that resided in this location: Z & L Trading Corp – which apparently was a tannery (!). As one customer commented: “I have used Z & L Trad Corp. 65 Hope street Brooklyn NY 11211 for tanning bears for rugs. I have had good luck with them as long as the bear is well taken care of in the first place.”

As a personal footnote, I have vague memories of attending some party in this building while it was still lofts. The fact that I don’t quite recall the details probably tells of what a good time this place must have been during the newly gentrified years, before the evictions.

Adventure:
Located on a previously deserted street, this building was always easy to get into. Completely emptied of everything, this building presented itself as one of the few rare utterly boring locations in NYC. Nothing really interesting to photograph, a decent if not predictable view from the rooftop, and little by way of interesting graffiti (outside of some stuff in the basement). The fact that I came and went from this place numerous times over several years without bothering to post about it show how uninspired this place was from a illegal partying/exploring perspective.

Present:
As of my time in writing this, work has finally begun on the residential conversion. The good news is that this majestic old industrial building will not be torn down. The bad news is that it will soon house 117 one bedroom and studio “apartments”. It will also only have 11 parking spaces. I guess they are aiming to rent it onto to unshowered, bicycling riding hipsters. The fact that the community board rubber stamped such a short amount of parking for a building that will probably contain at least 200 residents is a little ridiculous. Basically they’re converting it into a dorm. Surely they will need to pack in as many residents as they can to make some money off this building. A few owners and many millions lost in speculation, this building is a sad tribute to the real estate industry in NYC, though with it’s exterior still intact, it will also serve as a reminder towards the industrial days of NYC, and the bad old days of the neighborhood – when crack and gangs were king and the white people were either bold or stupid.

It’s not every day you come across a building filled with abandoned cement trucks. When you do, you keep your mouth shut on where it’s located.

Adventure
One of our minions down at the research department was surfing satellite images and raised questions as to what the hell this place was. It seemed abandoned enough, so it made it onto the to-do list and was picked up along with a few others in the immediate area.

Upon arrival, there’s zero people around, and that’s not surprising – because there’s really nothing else around here. Making our way over concrete blocks and aggregate mountains, eventually we slide down into a lot full of rusting old machines. This stuff hasn’t seen any action in decades.

Making out way forward we go towards the real target – a huge abandoned warehouse style building. Having read the report on this dump, My personal assumption would be that it would be empty and boring. Boy was I happily wrong.

Instead we found a large supply of old cement mixers and related parts – and a clue to this buildings deeper history. The windows – the ones still in place that is – are painted in a crazy mix of colors. High on one wall is a painting of kids playing basketball. At the far end of the building, a basketball hoop hangs high. Clearly, this place was once a gym. But for who? and when? There’s no schools over here, or churches, or anything else, for that matter.

Upstairs we find a row of battered ancient filing cabinets. All are empty. There’s a touch of graffiti, dating back to the 1980s – a very rare archaeological find considering how little original graffiti exists today.

On a desk in the corner is an address book – all hand written. In it there’s not just names of business contacts, but where the owner of this book met said people. It seems to be the address book of the owner of the cement company. Curiously I thumb through it looking for older relatives of people I that might have ended up in a book like this – though sadly it seems they never crossed paths. (Would have been a pretty amazing find on a personal level if there was a connection).

Satisfied we had seen it all and shot everything worth shooting, it was off to the next location. Someday we’ll get around to getting the exact history of this place – but definitely not today. It’s bright and warm out, and there’s the ever present to-do list, with 4 more spots to hit before day’s end. Such is the weekend grind around here – and so it goes.