Bruno Holst, a woodworker, runs his shop from the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center in Brooklyn.
A certain postindustrial beauty still haunts the blocks along North Brooklyn's waterfront, where a Hopperesque panorama rendered in rust and brick stretches from Williamsburg to Greenpoint. Frozen in time and twisted in shape, some of these streetscapes once abuzz with factories are now better known as generic urban backdrops for cop shows.
The Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center in Brooklyn sits along the Newtown Creek.
A rezoning plan approved last month will allow much of this forlorn stretch to be remade by waterfront high-rises. Provisions were made to include a significant portion of housing affordable to low- and moderate-income residents, which allayed the fears of many opposed to wholesale luxury development.
While few would argue that the largely fallow waterfront was being wisely used before, the adjoining inland blocks are another story. They have long been home to scores of small factories that make everything from cabinets and candles to frames and food. As nondescript as they were affordable, their future is in flux as rezoning could allow landlords to opt for the big bucks by turning factories into loft homes.
The last thing someone living in a luxury loft wants to hear is the high-pitched shriek of buzz saws or rumble of delivery trucks that are part of the daily rhythms for the area's industrial ancestors.
"The city is all going to be service oriented and there will be no manufacturing left," said Bruno Holst, a woodworker whose shop was gentrified out of several Brooklyn neighborhoods until he settled into a Greenpoint factory that is off-limits to developers. "If you're not a doctor or a lawyer, where are you going to work? We all can't be computer experts. Everybody has a car, but nobody's a mechanic."
Mr. Holst is one of nearly 100 tenants inside a former rope factory located in a 19th century brick building at the end of Manhattan Avenue, where the Newtown Creek meets the East River. On the Queens side of the creek, the smokestacks that once marked that part of Long Island City as solidly industrial are being razed to make way for apartments. There is even talk of putting up an Olympic Village on land that was once home to the Fink Bakery and the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant.
On the Brooklyn side, longtime tenants in Greenpoint say they are facing pressure from landlords intent on cashing in on the area's improving fortunes. But local industry advocates insist the area still has many manufacturers who need to be in the city and not in New Jersey or on Long Island.
"The era of New York as a center of commerce with an active port and a lot of waterfront manufacturing, that's gone," said Paul Parkhill, the director of planning and development for the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center, a nonprofit industrial developer that runs the Manhattan Avenue building. "But there are a lot of small manufacturers who cater to a market within New York City. Many of them are creative enterprises who need to be close to their market and employ people who live close by."
Industry, Mr. Parkhill said, helps define the very nature of urban life.
"What makes a city a city?" he asked. "It seems to me a mix of uses is integral to urban life. If people are just living and consuming, is that why people live in a city?"
He estimated that there are more than 250,000 industrial jobs in the city, and they serve as important a role now as they did generations ago when they were the first and only resort for immigrants.
"Historically, those jobs were a way to climb into the middle class," Mr. Parkhill said. "They give jobs to people who cannot adapt easily to the service sector or who do not have the language skills for work even at a big-box store like Wal-Mart."
It was only a decade ago that warehouse-style stores were seen as the successor to industry in some neighborhoods, though in recent years they have been kept at bay by labor and community groups. City officials have begun to enact an industrial policy that they hope will help retain manufacturers.
The proposals, which state legislators passed late last week, would include a tax credit for manufacturers who relocate to specific industrial zones around the city that would then be protected from rezoning.