This story begins simply enough. This clipping from the New York Public Library scrapbooks is titled “West Street Foundry, corner Beach and West St. N. York”:
I intended to discuss the various cast-iron foundries that were in Manhattan – and I still will get to that topic, sooner or later – but I hadn’t heard of the West Street Foundry. It turns out the reason I didn’t know the company was that it did not produce structural cast-iron elements. Rather it produced cast-iron parts for steam engines and specifically for the marine engines used in steamships. That’s still an interesting topic, but a bit outside my focus. (If I had infinite time…) The Wikipedia entry on the company has a nice list of ships that contained their engines, but had what struck me as an odd note: it says that the company was located at West and Beach Streets in Brooklyn. Brooklyn has a West Street (sort of has two…wait for it) running parallel to the East River in Greenpoint, but there’s no intersecting Beach Street there now, or in the mid-1800s. There’s a short semi-private street in the Brooklyn Navy Yard called West Street, but it’s literally in the Navy Yard and thus was not someplace a private company would be located when the yard was active. Also, there’s no intersecting Beach Street there.
It’s quite easy to find the corner of Beach and West if you look in Manhattan in the nineteenth century. It was in the neighborhood now known as Tribeca, on the Hudson River waterfront. That intersection no longer exists because the two blocks of Beach between West and Greenwich Streets were demapped to create a large lot for a new building. There was a large foundry complex at that corner in the 1850s:
If you look at the picture up top, the river is on the left, so the West Street Foundry is shown as being on the northeast corner of the intersection, which matches the map.
Some inconclusive but possibly meaningful evidence: First, the various New York newspapers linked to in the Wikipedia article (specifically footnotes 7, 8, 9, and 13) refer to the company as being in New York. Brooklyn and New York were not only two separate cities at that time, they were economic and political rivals, and I doubt a New York newspaper would refer to a Brooklyn company in that way.
The article gives the location as “the northwest corner of West and Beach Streets” which is physically impossible on Manhattan’s West Street (that location is in the river) and unlocatable in Brooklyn. West Street in Brooklyn is nearly a block from the river, not immediately facing the docks, as shown here.
Most likely, someone made a mistake in editing the Wikipedia piece and the building at West and Beach in Manhattan was it. But there’s always that nagging feeling that maybe I missed something in finding the address.
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