Why Industry City matters.
Industry City is an expansive industrial campus where Sunset Park's working-waterfront character meets century-old factory architecture, landscaped courtyards and contemporary production across a six-million-square-foot complex.
Set along 2nd Avenue between 32nd and 37th Streets near Upper New York Bay and just north of Bush Terminal Piers Park, the campus occupies 35 acres within the industrial corridor that shaped western Sunset Park. Sixteen buildings create long masonry and reinforced-concrete blocks, with broad factory windows, loading infrastructure and closely spaced structures preserving the immense scale required by earlier manufacturing operations. Five acres of outdoor public areas now cut through that industrial fabric, including planted courtyards and pedestrian passages that carry movement between former factory buildings. Interior corridors extend the same spatial sequence through food halls, workshops, studios, retail spaces and active production floors, placing contemporary businesses inside architecture built for an earlier industrial economy. The result is a vast waterfront campus whose factory blocks, internal passages, planted courtyards and active workspaces preserve the physical scale of Brooklyn manufacturing within a radically changed pattern of use.
What defines Industry City.
Industry City is best known for occupying the surviving factory core of Bush Terminal, the industrial undertaking Irving T. Bush developed during the early twentieth century to unite shipping, rail freight, warehousing and manufacturing within a single Brooklyn waterfront complex. Bush began the terminal in 1902, pursuing an integrated system in which goods arriving by ship moved through adjacent storage, rail and factory facilities with fewer transfers between separate operators. Architect William Higginson designed the imposing factory buildings erected across the following decades, helping give the complex the reinforced-concrete construction and repetitive industrial elevations that still define much of the site. Bush Terminal eventually combined piers, warehouses, factories and its own rail infrastructure at a scale unprecedented along Brooklyn's waterfront. The terminal became the first multi-tenant industrial complex of its kind in New York and grew into the largest in the United States, concentrating scores of manufacturers within a coordinated industrial property. Reinforced concrete was central to the development, and Bush Terminal joined contemporary industrial projects in demonstrating the building system's suitability for large factories carrying substantial loads. The complex became one of Brooklyn's major employment centers as the borough's waterfront economy expanded through the first half of the twentieth century. Manufacturing decline during the postwar decades weakened that industrial model, and activity contracted sharply during the 1960s as shipping practices, freight movement and metropolitan manufacturing changed. The surviving factory complex eventually acquired the Industry City name, preserving a major portion of Bush's industrial undertaking after the waterfront economy that created it had receded.
A new ownership group led by Belvedere Capital, Jamestown and Angelo Gordon & Co. began a $450 million redevelopment in 2013, shifting the dormant property toward a broad concentration of design, media, technology, manufacturing and creative businesses. Investment upgraded power and high-speed internet infrastructure across the century-old buildings, addressing technical requirements far beyond those of the factories for which the structures were built. A pedestrian pathway and retail corridor was cut through the center of the campus, creating a continuous internal route across a property previously organized primarily for industrial operations. Five acres of open-air public space followed, extending activity into courtyards between the massive building blocks. The tenant population quadrupled after the redevelopment began, and Industry City credited the program with creating more than 8,000 jobs during its earlier phases. Fashion became a substantial component of the new economy, with more than 60 companies occupying over half a million square feet by 2022, including Peter Do, Tailored Industry, Stoney Clover Lane, Ashya, Loeffler Randall and other businesses spanning design, production, warehousing and content creation. Technology subsequently expanded alongside those creative industries, with AI, robotics, biotech and clean-energy firms joining long-established manufacturing businesses across the campus. Industry City now reports more than 700 companies and 3.3 million annual visits, giving the former factory complex a commercial scale approaching its earlier importance within Brooklyn industry.
How Industry City fits.
Industry City works as the anchor for a Sunset Park outing connecting Revolutionary terrain, immigrant religious life and the immense military-industrial infrastructure of Brooklyn's working waterfront.
Begin at Green-Wood Cemetery, founded in 1838 after Henry Evelyn Pierrepont advanced the idea of a rural burial ground among Brooklyn's glacial hills and Major David Bates Douglass helped direct its early planning. The property grew from its initial tract into 478 acres of hills, valleys, ponds and winding roads, becoming one of the earliest major rural cemeteries in the United States and attracting 500,000 annual visitors by the early 1860s. Battle Hill adds an earlier historical layer: fighting crossed the present grounds during the Battle of Brooklyn on August 27, 1776, the largest engagement of the American Revolution. Frederick Wellington Ruckstull's bronze Minerva has stood at the Altar to Liberty since 1920, commemorating that battle from a hilltop position facing the Statue of Liberty across the harbor. Continue to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, where Redemptorists purchased an entire block between Fifth and Sixth avenues in 1892 for $40,000 as Brooklyn expanded into what remained a largely rural southern edge of the city. The parish celebrated its first Mass in the Morse family house on Easter Sunday 1893 with 40 people, then dedicated a 500-seat wooden church in January 1894. Rapid neighborhood growth soon overwhelmed that building: construction of a far larger church began in 1907, its lower church opened on Easter Sunday 1909, and the upper church followed in 1928. The granite complex stretches 240 feet from its 5th Avenue entrance, and its development traces the arrival of dense immigrant settlement alongside Sunset Park's industrial expansion. Conclude at Brooklyn Army Terminal, designed by Cass Gilbert and built in 1918 as an immense military supply installation beside New York Harbor. Reinforced poured-in-place concrete produced what was then the world's largest concrete building complex, with Building B organized around an immense atrium whose staggered balconies allowed cargo to move efficiently between rail cars and storage floors. More than 25,000 military and civilian personnel worked there during World War II, and Elvis Presley departed through the terminal for military service in Germany in 1958. Military operations ended in 1966, New York City purchased the property in 1981 and NYCEDC assumed management in 1986, beginning its conversion into a modern industrial center now supporting more than 100 businesses. The progression moves from Green-Wood's Revolutionary ground and nineteenth-century rural-cemetery movement through a Redemptorist parish built alongside Sunset Park's population growth and culminates in Gilbert's immense military terminal, tying landscape, immigration and industrial infrastructure to the forces that shaped this section of Brooklyn.
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