This afternoon I will be attending the 2026 Preservation Conference of the Historic Districts Council, on the topic of “Making It In New York: The Preservation Of Manufacturing.” I’m expecting an interesting afternoon. As a bonus, one of the speakers, Cassandra Smith, works at a long-time client, the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center. GMDC is a non-profit that provides rental industrial space for small manufacturing businesses, and we’ve had the pleasure of helping Cassandra and her co-workers fix some of their buildings, including one project we’ve been bragging about for a while.
People generally don’t think of New York as having any industry, but as recently as World War II there were about a million industrial jobs in the city, mostly light factories and port-related businesses. Even after more than half a century of deindustrialization – and we can debate whether that was a good idea or bad, but it is a fact – there are still something like half a million industrial jobs here. So the conference is based on reality: there is industry here that is part of the city and like any other part, it’s worth saving.
One last note: historic preservation in the US began mostly with houses – the “George Washington slept here” phenomenon – and to a lesser degree with small churches. Over the last 60 years since the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 was passed, other building types have been added to preservation. Some of them, like high-rises, aren’t always seen as worthy subjects for saving; factories are probably the most extreme example of that.
If you have a factory that makes Chiclets chewing gum, what’s your business called? The American Chicle Company, of course.
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