The Gems of DUMBO

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The New York Sun

As the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission considers historic-district status for DUMBO, it’s a good time to tour the Brooklyn neighborhood, whose name stands for “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.”

The area around Old Fulton Street, which terminates in a splendid pier, is not technically DUMBO — it’s Fulton Ferry — though the neighborhoods shade imperceptibly into each other. But the pier, occupying the site of the Fulton Ferry Landing, is a good place to begin a DUMBO walking tour. Steam ferries operated from here to Manhattan between 1814 and 1924. Before the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883, this was Brooklyn’s central business district. Look up and see how the bridge flies right over this area, touching down far from the water. That pushed the downtown district inland, and by 1939 the “New York City Guide” of the Federal Writers’ Project said, “Fulton Street, in this section, is now a sort of Brooklyn Bowery, with flophouses, small shops, rancid restaurants, haunted by vagabonds and derelicts.”

Today the area buzzes. People stand in line at Grimaldi’s Pizzeria (19 Old Fulton St. at Front Street, 718-858-4300) and at the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory (2 Old Fulton St. at Furman Street, 718-246-3963), in the former Marine Fire Boat Station built in 1926. The River Café (1 Water St., between Furman Street and Columbia Heights, 718-522-5200) and the renowned chamber-music venue, Bargemusic (at Fulton Ferry Landing, 718-624-2083), both opened in 1977, are on either side of the pier. Also in that year, the city designated the small Fulton Ferry Historic District, marking the neighborhood’s rise from the depths portrayed by the Federal Writers’ Project.

DUMBO, steps north of Fulton Ferry, began as one of the earliest residential areas of Brooklyn. By the mid-19th century, it had become industrial. The Empire Stores, on Water Street between Dock and Main streets, rose in two stages: the four-story section in 1870, and the five-story section in 1884–85. Famously photographed by Berenice Abbott, the Empire Stores once served the Arbuckle brothers who perfected the vacuum-packing of coffee beans and supplied the frontier in America’s era of westward expansion. Whenever you watch a Western and see cowboys sitting around the fire drinking coffee from tin cups, remember that it’s Arbuckle coffee from Brooklyn.

Take a left on Main Street. The former Gair Building no. 7 stands at 1 Main St. In the early 20th century the Scotsman Robert Gair built his cardboard-box empire on the DUMBO waterfront. It seems that no sooner had Gair completed his campus of factories (10 or so) in DUMBO than the company decamped for upstate New York. New industrial tenants moved in, but in recent years many of DUMBO’s factories have been converted to chic, expensive residences, including 1 Main St.

Gair hired the London-born architect William Higginson to design several pioneering reinforced concrete factory buildings. Built in 1914, 1 Main St. possesses the stern yet airy beauty of its “daylight factory” type. Higginson ranks as, perhaps, the city’s pre-eminent industrial architect, with credits including buildings for the Bush Terminal in Sunset Park, and for the American Manufacturing Company complex, most of which burned down last year, in Greenpoint. The reinforced-concrete buildings succeeded the timber-framed, brickfaced structures such as the Empire Stores. New materials and structural methods made possible vastly greater floor loads and allowed for many more windows to flood factory floors with daylight.

Across Plymouth Street we find a whimsical playground, designed in nautical motifs, built a few years ago. Nothing would have been more out of place here in the days when Brooklyn residents called the neighborhood Gairville. But young families live in the lofts now, and enjoy the playground and its adjoining parks. As you face the water, on your left is Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park, so designated in the 1970s. On the right is a new park in the currently popular cascading-boulders style of waterfront park design, allowing the park user to sit on a rock in the water and dip his toes. These parks form the beginnings of Brooklyn Bridge Park, eventually to stretch along the waterfront between the Manhattan Bridge and Atlantic Avenue.

fmorrone@nysun.com


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