The Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center (GMDC), the largest non-profit industrial developer in New York City, is used to working under the radar. A recent award from the Municipal Art Society and City Lore recognizes GMDC’s Manhattan Avenue facility as an influential cultural location.
“We’re honored to receive this award,” said Brian Coleman, CEO of GMDC (located at 1155 Manhattan Avenue). “I think our facility is a really special place. Even today it is significant because of what has happened to industry citywide.”
The Municipal Art Society and City Lore honored GMDC with an award in honor of the tenth anniversary of the Place Matters Project. Place Matters is a collaborative advocacy project that identifies and protects cultural institutions throughout the five boroughs.
The GMDC joined nine other institutions, including the Weeksville Heritage Center in Crown Heights, at an awards ceremony at the Municipal Art Society in Manhattan this past Wednesday.
“Each of these great places has had a positive impact on the lives of thousands of New Yorkers and they deserve to be honored for their priceless roles in community life,” said Kent Barwick, Municipal Art Society president. “MAS is proud to join with City Lore to help protect these places that promote the well being of New York’s communities in ways that too often go unrecognized.”
Home to over one hundred tenants, occupying more than 700,000 square feet of industrial space, GMDC has helped create and retain hundreds of jobs in the manufacturing and industrial sectors in North Brooklyn over the past 15 years. There are eighty unique businesses at its flagship site on Manhattan Avenue, ranging from woodworking, to luxury jewelry making to custom foam mattresses. CEO Brian Coleman believes that his building represents the past and future of manufacturing in New York City.
“The jobs that small manufacturers create are better than service level jobs,” Coleman said. “Manufacturing jobs are the entrée to the middle class for many immigrant residents in the city.”
Real estate professionals from other parts of the country and all over the world frequently visit the GMDC site. Last week, a group of Dutch architects stopped by for a tour and several businessmen from Japan came through the neighborhood this year as well.
“The Japanese were the most interesting” Coleman said. “They have a lot of old manufacturing facilities outdated by today’s standards and they are looking to reuse them.”
Representatives from Place Matters and the Municipal Arts Society visited the facility recently, interviewing tenants and the GMDC organization for their Jane Jacobs exhibition held last year. GMDC staff members believe that those interviews and the nature of their Design Center piqued the Municipal Arts Society’s interest.
“We’re concerned with people who make things with their hands and preserving blue collar jobs,” said Paul Parkhill, director of planning and development at GMDC. “[Manufacturing tenants] don’t have to have a lot of English language skills to do this work.”
One tenant, Bruno Holst, has been running his woodworking shop, Bear Woodworking, out of GMDC for the past six years. A Park Slope resident, Holst had previously made cabinets and living room fixtures out of studios in Williamsburg and the Gowanus area before being displaced by residential encroachment. Now he has a long-term lease in Greenpoint with no plan of moving in the near future.
“You live in Brooklyn, you should work in Brooklyn,” Holst said.
