No part of the city cries more loudly for reorganization than the Erie Basin and Gowanus Canal district of Brooklyn. It is a region of grimy factories and warehouses and gas tanks, of badly paved, narrow, abortive streets, of empty lots and industrial rubble among which gnarled trees and abandoned privet hedges manage to survive. It looks like a segment of a bombed city. Remarkably, the description is still apt fiftyseven years later. He goes on: “In the midst of this emptiness, the Brooklyn Improvement Company, whatever that may be, occupies a classic stucco mansion, standing at the corner of 3rd Street and Third Avenue in ironic solitude—or should one say hopeful anticipation?” And, fifty-seven years later, we still don’t know whether that “classic stucco mansion” stands in “ironic solitude” or “hopeful anticipation.”
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n 1952, Lewis Mumford, who at the time was architecture critic for The New Yorker, journeyed to Gowanus to look at the new factory of Eagle Clothes, on Third Avenue at 6th Street. It’s a measure of Mumford’s greatness as an architecture critic that while he wrote (brilliantly) about the United Nations and Lever House, he also considered it his duty to write about factories and about such parts of the city as the “benighted district” where “the Erie Basin, leaping across the Gowanus Canal, begins to give way to the modest residential streets of South Brooklyn.” Mumford had long campaigned for the removal of garment factories from Midtown Manhattan to the outer boroughs—not so the Garment Center could be made over into fancy offices or apartments, but so the city’s manufacturing operations would be more efficient and workers’ lives would be happier. He believed in the inherent dignity of factory work and that manufacturing plants should be clean, well-lighted places. This the Eagle factory was, a place where wide aisles and strip windows gave the plant “an air of clean, uncluttered serenity.” The basement cafeteria, Mumford marveled, served both breakfast and lunch. The only thing really wrong with the factory was the “tall, raucous sign” that detracted from the pervasive sense of calm. And Eagle Clothes was for Mumford a model of the kind of building that Gowanus desperately needed:
Technically, the walls of the “mansion” were not stucco but a patented concrete known as Béton Coignet. An engineer named François Coignet invented this type of concrete in France in the 1850s. In the late 1860s, the New York and Long Island Coignet Stone Company was formed to manufacture Coignet’s concrete for the American market. The plant was originally at Smith and Hamilton streets. As the company grew, it established a larger plant along Third Avenue between 3rd and 6th streets, with direct access to the 4th Street Basin, one of the four basins built in 1869 by Edwin Litchfield’s Brooklyn Improvement Company. These basins, together with other improvements, created the modern Gowanus Canal that would serve Brooklyn industry for many years. The 4th Street Basin juts perpendicularly from the canal eastward from Second to Third avenues, bisecting the concrete company’s property. In 1872–73, the company erected its office building on the southwest corner of Third Avenue and 3rd Street. This is the “mansion.” Mumford can be forgiven for thinking it had once been a private house, for it certainly looks like one. But it wasn’t. It was the company’s headquarters. (In 1898, India ink baron Charles Higgins purchased a private house, still standing on 9th Street between Fourth and Fifth avenues, to use as the headquarters of his company, the factory of which stood right behind the house.) The building was also intended to showcase the possibilities of the company’s products. The rusticated façades and ornamental detail were made of a
cast concrete used, like stucco, in imitation of cut stone. The building’s foundation was of the company’s own poured-in-place concrete. The floors may be of reinforced concrete. Altogether, the building is one of the city’s pioneer examples of concrete construction, as we learned from architectural historian Matthew Postal’s amazing report for the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, which designated the building as a landmark in 2006. Concrete manufactured at the Brooklyn plant was used in several notable buildings in New York, from the soaring vaults of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to the floors of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank on Broadway at Driggs Avenue. Nonetheless, Coignet’s company was shortlived, closing in 1882. The building’s architects, William Field & Son, were based in Manhattan but left a major mark on Brooklyn. In addition to this building, they worked for the great philanthropist Alfred Tredway White, designing his legendary model housing developments: the Tower and Home Buildings and Workingmen’s Cottages in Cobble Hill and the Riverside Buildings in Brooklyn Heights. (For more on this firm, the reader may wish to consult my essay “Alfred White’s Architects,” in the newly published book The Social Vision of Alfred T. White, published by Proteotypes and the Brooklyn Historical Society and available at the Proteus Gowanus Gallery on Nevins and Union streets.) In 1882, the building became the headquarters of the Brooklyn Improvement Company— “whatever that may be,” in the words of Lewis Mumford. Well, I’ll tell you what it was. Edwin Litchfield founded the Brooklyn Improvement Company in 1866 to develop land that he owned. Litchfield was at one time the largest landowner in Brooklyn. His holdings included a substantial portion of present-day Park Slope and Gowanus. In 1852 he purchased the 150-acre Cortelyou farm, for which the “Old Stone House,” in what is now J.J. Byrne Park, was the farmhouse. The farm extended from Second to Tenth avenues and 1st to 10th streets. In 1854–57 Litchfield built his beautiful country house high up on the terminal moraine that bisects Brooklyn, just east of Ninth Avenue (Prospect Park West). Designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, one of America’s most important antebellum architects, “Litchfield Castle,” as the Brooklyn