Evocative Words from Inside Red Hook's Revere Plant

[Photo courtesy of Soupflowers from her superb Revere Sugar Refinery flickr photoset]

Brooklyn Paper reporter Ariella Cohen writers a beautiful piece this week as the result of a visit inside the Revere Sugar factory, which is slowly being demolished by developer Joe Sitt. The column notes that Mr. Sitt still isn't saying whether any buildings on the site will be saved--and there are structures of historical signficance on the site other than the iconic dome, which he is having demolished.

Ms. Cohen files an evocative report, which does with words what a handful of other people that have made their way onto the site have done with pictures. It's a wonderful read in its entirety, but we reproduce a small sample here:

To be inside a factory on the verge of demolition is like visiting a place of worship emptied by earthquake. The ceilings are high. Unfiltered sunlight washes over everything: chairs that once held people, stray leather shoes, a suit jacket, ink-stained ledgers, bashed-up books. A sapling grows in the arch of a broken, scroll-shaped window.

At the Revere Sugar refinery on the new gold coast of Red Hook, the high ceiling is a silver dome over the South Brooklyn waterfront. Look past the tree growing in that window and see how the Statue of Liberty shines on the water, see the skylines of Manhattan to the north and Sunset Park to the south.

Revere went bankrupt in 1985 and the plant was wrecked by fire some years later. Clearly, no one has come back for cleanup duty in the cathedral built by a sugar king from the Philippines. Now, a real-estate developer from Brooklyn, Joe Sitt, has begun tearing it down.

So soon enough, the ledger books scribbled with notes about fusty boilers and sugar orders that were late in 1982 will be gone. In due time, the signs will all be removed (one, near the exit, warned workers to be careful because “a fire could put us all out of work”).

Beautiful words paying homage to an oddly stunning place.

(For two other amazing visual looks inside slowly falling Revere dome, check out the flickr photosets posted by Gowanus and Mercurialn.)