![]() ![]() One of the workers who was struggling to re-enter the workforce told The New York Times, “'I learned this past week that I'm a dinosaur… Having a job for a long time in one place is not necessarily a good thing. They had, over the course of the 20th century, negotiated better and better worker contracts in terms of conditions and compensation.” But when the closure came, the workers, with so much specialized knowledge and no plans in place to be retrained, were abandoned like the factory itself. “The workers were in a place that was, for someone who had an industrial job, a utopian situation. Despite the labor unrest, Domino had “became a kind of time capsule,” says Raphaelson. Only a few years prior, refinery workers had staged the longest strike in New York City’s history: for more than 600 days, from 1999 to 2001, they protested treatment by Domino’s new parent company, Tate & Lyle. Even though the factory is abandoned and those “someones” are long gone, details of former workers remain throughout: lockers plastered with 9/11 commemorative and American flag stickers and the occasional pin-up poster, a supervisor’s abandoned office strewn with paperwork and files, a machine with writing etched into its metal exterior.īy the time the factory shuttered in 2004, production and employee rolls had been falling for decades, as the company traded hands between various conglomerates and food producers increasingly relied on cheaper corn sweeteners. “A thought lingered in the shadows between the machines: someone, not long ago, knew how to work these things,” he writes. Escher-esque fashion.īut up close, Raphaelson reminds us that these objects once required knowledge-once specialized and useful-now irrelevant. From afar, some of the images become almost abstract and geometric: a bin distributor is reminiscent of a pipe organ a view of staircases and railings blend together in an M.C. The processes ceased long ago but they scarred the building walls are stained by rust and oxidized sugar, and the bottoms of massive bone char filters are streaked where the sugary syrup had dripped. The thousands of employees, who made their living at the factory and lived in the areas surrounding it, cultivated the neighborhood’s early development and became an integral part of Williamsburg’s history.ĭevoid of human figures, many of Raphaelson’s photos examine the once powerful, now dormant, machines used to refine the sugar. In 1900, the refinery changed its name to highlight its Domino brand, whose iconic illuminated sign would later light up the Brooklyn skyline with a star dotting its “i.” The complex grew to occupy more than a quarter mile of Williamsburg’s waterfront and at its peak in the 1920s, the factory had the capacity to refine 4 million pounds of sugar daily and employed 4,500 workers. Only 25 years after it opened, the factory refined more than half of the nation’s sugar. Buyįirst built in 1855 by the Havemeyers, a wealthy, industrialist family, the refinery survived a fire in 1882, endured a couple changes in ownership, and underwent a rapid expansion, becoming the largest such complex in the world. Paul Raphaelson, known internationally for his formally intricate urban landscape photographs, was given access to photograph every square foot of the refinery weeks before its demolition. Photographs from the book are also on display at New York’s Front Room Gallery until January 14.īrooklyn's Sweet Ruin: Relics and Stories of the Domino Sugar Refineryīrooklyn's Domino Sugar Refinery, once the largest in the world, shut down in 2004 after a long struggle. ![]() Long fascinated by old factories and urban landscapes, he found in the buildings an intriguing subject: a type of Rorschach test because, he said in an interview, the factory “represents different things to so many different groups of people.” Raphaelson’s desire to explore how cities and societies relate to their symbols of modernity and progress-and what happens when they are outgrown and abandoned-drives his new photo book, Brooklyn’s Sweet Ruin: Relics and Stories of the Domino Sugary Refinery. For the next decade, the buildings sat still, quiet and empty-falling into disrepair, awaiting destruction.Ī year before demolition began clearing the way for new developments along the waterfront, photographer Paul Raphaelson documented the refinery’s remnants. But in 2004, the machines stopped and workers laid off. Inside its humid and sticky walls, workers spent long days laboring over machines refining raw sugar from Caribbean plantations. ![]() For 150 years, a massive building and its annexes loomed over the East River and Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. ![]()
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