The Domino Sugar Refinery might be Brooklyn's signature building representing the borough's industrial history. Looking across the East River from Manhattan while below the Williamsburg Bridge, its presence on the Brooklyn waterfront is dominating. That Manhattan vantage point surrendered its industrial heritage of gasworks and docks more than a century ago, to tenements followed by high-rise apartment housing complexes. Now the factory is an icon of the battle to convert Brooklyn's waterfront from an industrial setting to a residential one.
Bluejake has a photo essay of shots inside and outside the factory:
The Domino Sugar Refinery has been an iconic presence on the Brooklyn waterfront since the 1880s and is now a flashpoint of the evolution of Brooklyn's former industrial waterfront. Occupying an 11 acre plot north of the Williamsburg Bridge, the factory has been shuttered since 2004. Recently, a fierce debate has started about the future of the factory buildings-- developers would like to knock them down and replace them with high-rise luxury towers similar to the ones going in the plots north of the site, while neighborhood activists would like to see them preserved and redeveloped as affordable housing.
This is a rarely seen look inside the factory. More photographs at Bluejake and Nathan Kensinger. The Food of the Future's Domino Pictures; Panorama from the Roof, Facing South, on Flickr; MercurialN's Domino Pictures.
Photographs by Bluejake
