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For more than 150 years, the huge building towered over the East River and the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Inside it, the walls were damp and sticky and workers spent long days working on machines refining raw sugar. Everything changed radically in 2004. The machines stopped and the workers...

New York is implementing the largest waste recycling program in the United States. SMR serves the city of New York through its operations in Queens, the Bronx and Jersey City, as well as its most recent venture in Brooklyn, Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility, which opened in 2013. The...

Charles Pratt was one of the 19th-century Brooklyn entrepreneurs who were called “wizards” for their incredible success. He was born in Massachusetts in 1830. He had ten siblings, and his father was a carpenter. The family lived in poverty, so Charles started working at a very young age, having...

The Bedford Stuyvesant and Stuyvesant Heights neighborhoods in Brooklyn were built primarily as residential areas. While there were a few outlying pieces of land and streets like Fulton that housed manufacturing, there were mostly residential buildings here. Therefore, the presence of the Rand Rubber Company building, which at the...

When it comes to Brooklyn's agricultural communities, there is one area that particularly stands out, Flatbush. For nearly 250 years after the first Dutch settlers arrived, Flatbush became a city of farms and farmers. With a few exceptions, the head of every household in Flatbush was a farmer. They...

This company’s vivid history is of great importance to Brooklyn. After all, its establishment demonstrates the transformation of the region into an economic power in the US. The city opposed New York across the East River. The history of Pfizer Inc. until the 1950s is also a history of...

Electric cars significantly help the environment as they pollute the air and affect the climate much less than gasoline-powered cars. This is true, despite the fact that much of New York's electricity network is still powered by fossil fuels. Read about this environmentally friendly transport and its utilization in...

After serving as a doctor at the medical station of the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard, Edward Robinson Squibb founded the pharmaceutical company E. R. Squibb and Sons in 1858. In the 1920s, he hired architects Russell G. Cory and Walter M. Cory of Turner Construction Company to design and build...

The Hecla Iron Works was named after an active volcano in Iceland, Mount Hekla. That’s a proper name for a design studio and foundry. This was also the aim of the company's founders, Scandinavians, born in Denmark, Niels Poulson and his Norwegian partner, Charles Eger. Read more about the...

A closer look at the history of the city of Brooklyn reveals that there were many willing to create, develop and support the American industrial sector in the 19th century Kings County. Entrepreneurs took up everything that could be produced and that was somehow needed by the residents of...