Warehousing coffee beans. That was the original purpose of this very spot. Welcome to Empire Stores.
Constructed between 1868 and 1885 these seven warehouses are located in DUMBO. DUMBO is in the northern section of Brooklyn Bridge Park. Thick exterior walls of red brick kept the inside dark and cool. Schist interior walls added to this effect. This was a perfect environment for storing perishables.
Empire Stores held goods like sugar and molasses. Wool and rubber also found a home here. Most notably it housed coffee. Brooklyn was America’s coffee capital at the time the stores were built. The vast majority of the country’s coffee supply arrived through New York Harbor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Arbuckle Brothers were early pioneers of the coffee industry. They operated a sprawling complex of coffee production facilities next to Empire Stores. When they added the Stores to their campus it joined their other warehouses. It stored their best-selling Ariosa and Yuban coffee brands.
Empire Stores continued in this role as shipping slowed. Other warehouses began to empty. Many warehouses were torn down to make way for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Brooklyn Heights Promenade in the 1940s and 50s. Empire Stores was abandoned in the 1960s.
The area became an historic district in the late 70s. Empire Stores was one of the last remnants of the waterfront’s rich shipping period. The following decades saw deterioration and failed development attempts.
In 2012, Brooklyn Bridge Park released an RFP for the development of the historic site. Realizing DUMBO’s rebirth as a tech hub and center of economic activity they proposed to fill Empire Stores with office and retail space. They also planned public amenities.
Midtown Equities joined forces with HK to bid for the right to redevelop Empire Stores in 2013. The site’s location 20 feet from the East River made it a jewel. The memory of Superstorm Sandy put the need to protect this jewel at the top of the developer’s list of challenges. Engineers calculated how to turn the 400000 square foot raw space into a destination. The team reckoned with ways to separate the historic arched brick buildings from the waterline.
Today we can enjoy Empire Stores’ public roof. We can explore its shops and restaurants. Eat at Cecconis. Try FEED. Taste something at Time Out Market. Public restrooms are on the first floor. Empire Stores enjoys its return to its former status. It is once again a centerpiece of Brooklyn’s shoreline. It used to exemplify the borough’s shipping and industrial strength. Now it stands for Brooklyn’s resurgence as a world-renowned destination.
The team developed a program that would merge the whole ground floor with the park. The ground floor features a mix of chain stores and restaurants. It includes a food hall whose vendors are approved by Time Out magazine. National clothes retailer J. Crew also has a presence here.
There is generous public space. The team cut an open courtyard. They opened shutters onto the park. This creates a path into a central stairway. That stairway focuses on a public roof deck.
Midtown Equities chief Jack Cayre says the waterfront made the site unique and hard to resist. The public experience of the building would encourage people to cherish it.
Empire Stores original architects never intended for people to live or work there. Architects and engineers preserved and reinforced the stone walls and floors. These had kept coffee beans ready for sale for decades. These features also add a muted natural patina.
The site had comprised seven buildings separated by massive stone walls. Valgora found a 19th Century painting in his research that heralded the stone-wall strategy as Fortress Brooklyn. In those days the barricade kept the rowdy longshoremen away. To keep seven-foot waves from again knocking out the columns at grade the team decided to find a way to protect the building from a distance.
The design and development team procured an AquaFence. It is a retractable flood wall that staff can store when the building doesn’t need it. The redesign also calls for placing on-site energy generation on the roof behind an existing architectural feature.
Empire Stores is thriving again. It is an integral part of New York’s Dumbo neighborhood and the waterfront development in Brooklyn Bridge Park. A thoughtful intervention maintains the integrity of the existing structures. It knits them into a single entity. The timber and masonry facility is a blend of commercial and public spaces. There is a 100000-square-foot roof addition 50000 square feet of green roofs and a 7000-square-foot extension of the park that climbs to the roof.