Sugar, Beer and the Waterfront

You're standing in Domino Park, on the Williamsburg waterfront, with the East River in front of you and Manhattan rising across the water. From here, the walk runs north for about 3.8 kilometers into Greenpoint, roughly two hours at an easy pace. Look around first, though. The benches, the dog run, the volleyball courts, the apartment towers behind you, the bars a few blocks inland — none of that explains what you're actually looking at. Rising over the park is a structure on a scale nothing else along this shoreline comes close to matching: steel, brick, ductwork, tanks, catwalks, built for a purpose that had nothing to do with leisure. Whatever happened here happened at industrial scale, with industrial machinery, and employed people by the thousand, for generations. That's the question worth carrying north with you today. This waterfront now reads as parks, apartments and bars, easy and pleasant, largely built for free time. But something enormous once ran here, day and night, for the better part of a century. Walking from Williamsburg into Greenpoint over the next two hours, you'll start to see what that was, and why so little of it is still standing, let alone still working. Start with the hardware, because it is the most literal thing here. The steel gantries along the water lifted raw cane sugar out of ships' holds, and the elevated walkway you can climb is built on their original runway, about thirty feet up. The syrup tanks near the north end held liquid sugar. None of it was trucked in as decoration. It was all already standing on this site, taken apart, stripped of decades of hardened syrup, treated for corrosion and set back down within a few metres of where it worked. The park opened in 2018 and runs about a quarter of a mile along the East River. Almost everything in it that looks industrial is industrial. Now the scale, because the scale is the point. This was the Havemeyer refinery, rebuilt here in the 1880s after a fire, and at its peak it processed more than half of all the sugar consumed in the United States. Not half of Brooklyn's sugar. Half of the country's. Ships came up the East River and tied up at this pier, and raw brown cane sugar came out of them by the ton, went into the buildings behind you as a coarse, damp, molasses-smelling material, and came out the other end white, dry and boxed. For roughly a century, if you ate sugar anywhere in America, there was a good chance it passed through this block. Which means the other end of that supply chain has to be said plainly. Raw cane arriving at this pier in the nineteenth century came from plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil worked by enslaved people. After abolition, it came from indentured workers and from cane cutters paid wages that were brutal by any standard of the time. This refinery was the last step in that chain, the finishing end, and its enormous American market is what made the rest of the chain worth running. Here is the detail almost nobody knows about this site. In the summer of 2014, after the plant had closed but before the raw sugar warehouse was demolished, the artist Kara Walker filled it with a sphinx about thirty-five feet tall, coated in some forty tons of bleached white sugar. The warehouse had no climate control and the walls were still saturated with a century of molasses, so in the heat the building itself sweated and dripped. More than a hundred and thirty thousand people queued to see it over two months. Then the warehouse came down. If you want to know what stood where the newest towers are, that was it. The workforce is the part that gets skipped. Refining sugar was hot, loud, year-round union work, and the plant supported hundreds of families in these blocks and across the bridge. In June 1999, the plant's unionised workforce walked out. The strike ran for roughly twenty months, into February 2001, which makes it one of the longest in modern New York history. Twenty months is not a labour dispute. It is a mortgage, a school year, and then another one. Workers crossed, workers left the trade, replacements came in, and by the time it ended the workforce that had run this plant no longer existed in the form it had before. The refinery kept operating after the strike, at reduced capacity, and closed for good in 2004. It is tempting to draw a straight line from the picket line to the luxury towers, and the line is not that straight. The strike ended the industrial era on this pier; it did not by itself produce what replaced it. Refining had been consolidating into bigger, cheaper plants elsewhere for years, and waterfront land in Brooklyn was becoming worth far more empty than working. The closure and the redevelopment are two separate decisions that happened to land in the same decade. So look at what got built. Domino Park is free, it is open to anyone on standard park hours, and it is genuinely good — designed by James Corner Field Operations, the firm behind the High Line, with a dog run, a bocce court, a taco stand and one of the better skyline views in the city. It is also entirely paid for and maintained by the developer of the residential towers surrounding it. That is not a scandal and it is not charity. It is a private amenity, built to a public standard, that reads to a visitor as a public park. Both of those things are true at once, and you can stand in the middle of it and feel both. One accuracy note, because people get this wrong. The big landmarked brick Refinery building on the inland side, the one with the arched windows and the Domino sign, is not part of the park and you cannot go in. It was gutted and rebuilt behind its preserved façade as offices, which opened in 2023, and it is private. Exterior only. What you can enter is out here: the park, the walkway on the crane track, and the salvaged equipment scattered through it. Before we leave the water, notice how much was kept. Not a plaque, not a scale model — the actual cranes, the actual tanks, the actual runway, cleaned up and left where they stood. Very few industrial sites in New York got that treatment. The other industry that built this shoreline was beer, and we will come to it a few stops from now in the blocks behind us; at the far end of the walk we finish on Manhattan Avenue, which never had to be preserved because it never stopped working. From here we head inland to Bedford Avenue, where the second life of this neighbourhood is happening at street level rather than on a pier.