In the earliest days, much of the sugar arriving at the Havemeyer family’s refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront had been harvested by slaves. It was mixed into a dirty slurry, boiled in enormous vats and filtered through charred animal bones.
Then it was “whipped, beaten, flayed, hurled into ‘grain,’” The Illustrated American magazine reported in 1894. “The process is very wild and terrible, like a caged cyclone.” Life in the refinery was so infernal that The New York Tribune declared in 1894 that a worker had only one hope of escaping “perpetual torture.”
“Not infrequently,” the newspaper said, “death comes quickly to his relief.”
What amazes visitors to the refinery today is how palpable this history remains. It is awakened by the smell of fermentation that still clings to the bricks with sweet and sour notes, as if it were coming from a neighborhood bakery next to a corner saloon.
Sugar is everywhere around the long-shuttered plant — in hardened brown clumps that are perched on the beams and wispy stalactites that drape the machinery, in a shiny film that blackens the walls and a syrupy residue that slickens the floors.
It speaks of a time when “refined” and “sugar” were as inseparable as “homogenized” and “milk,” when the Havemeyers were to sugar what the Rockefellers were to oil.
Shoppers may not have known the Havemeyer name or corporate identity, the American Sugar Refining Company, but they certainly knew its best-selling brand: Domino. At the plant, just north of the Williamsburg Bridge, as many as 1,500 tons of sugar were refined every day under the towering “Domino Sugar” sign.
Now the sign is a relic, an artifact. So is the plant itself, which closed in 2004 after a bitter and protracted coda, including a 20-month strike from 1999 to 2001.
The sign would be given a prominent new location under a redevelopment plan by the Two Trees Management Company, which is to be reviewed in the coming months by the City Planning Commission and the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Two Trees, controlled by the Walentas family, is proposing to build 3.3 million square feet of residential, office, retail and open space on five parcels along Kent Avenue over the next six to eight years.
There has been much debate about the future of the Domino site. Less attention has been paid to the factory itself.
Under its plan, Two Trees would hollow out the fortresslike central refinery to its brick walls and rebuild it as office space, with up to four additional floors. Dating to the 1880s, the refinery, formally the Havemeyers & Elder Filter, Pan and Finishing House, is a landmark — the only building on the site with that status. But the designation covers only the exterior.
Necessarily, the refinery would be emptied of the huge tanks and pipes that make it feel as claustrophobic as a submarine. “It could get to be 140 degrees,” said Jorgen G. Cleemann of Higgins Quasebarth & Partners, historical consultants to Two Trees, referring to when the plant was in operation. “You did what you needed to do and got out.”
The riverfront boiler house, which blocks views of the refinery building from Manhattan (and vice versa), would be razed. The Domino sign would be moved to the central refinery from a tower known as the bin structure, where sugar granules were sorted by size. The tower would be torn down, as would the conveyor bridges linking it to the refinery.
Piles of refined sugar could still be found on the bridges until two months ago, when the exterior cladding was removed and swarms of bees picked them clean, said Al Henriquez, the site supervisor for Two Trees.
Some reminder of the bridges would remain as new window bays projecting from the central refinery, said John H. Beyer, of Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners, which is working on the reconstruction project.
In contrast to the refinery, the raw sugar warehouse is nothing but colossal volumes including a 505-foot-long storeroom and wood-lined bins 35 feet deep. Two Trees has been renting it for large-scale events and would continue doing so for a year after demolishing the rest of the site. Then the warehouse would come down.
Two Trees would preserve the 80-foot-tall gantry cranes that once unloaded sugar and the 425-foot-long rail tracks on which they rolled. It would also salvage 4 of the 16 syrup tanks, as well as conveyors, platforms and a sign that warns, “Syrup Truck Drivers Beware.”
These and other historical objects would be arrayed with explanatory signs on a five-block-long Artifact Walk, bordering a waterfront park. Both have been designed by James Comer Field Operations.
“I don’t think anything approaching this level of interpretation of industrial history has occurred in New York,” Mr. Beyer said.
But it won’t be sticky. And it won’t smell of sugar and sweat.
Yahoo Local News – New York Times
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