Brooklyn Graffiti Skull Mural

No pirate treasure here but I did find some rope to hang myself.

This remnant of a much larger complex that burned in 2006 was once home to American Manufacturing Company. It was built in 1890 and manufactured 10 million pounds of oakum used in caulking wooden ship seams. Employing over 2,000 workers who lived nearby in Greenpoint Brooklyn. Mainly female Polish and Lithuanian immigrant workers. American Manufacturing Company started off as a two-story jute mill quickly expanding from one block to six. In 1920, it became the largest hemp and jute factory in the manufacture of 400,000 pounds of cotton bagging and ties daily.

Later known as the forgotten Greenpoint Terminal Market. The historic warehouses burned in 2006 as it was revealed they were being referred to by The Municipal Art Society as historical landmarks to the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The Greenpoint fire was responded to by a large force of 350 firefighters on the day it burned. Now, a few remaining buildings that survived and were part of the complex have turned into residential buildings, and one outlier building is situated on the river. That building was all that remains until graffiti artist Greg Suits (Suitswon) placed that building on the map. Intrepid photographer Raphael Gonzalez saw it and his pictures went viral across news sites. After researching more about the building, the location was used in Netflix's original Marvel series The Punisher.

To learn more about the storied history of Greenpoint Terminal Market, you can read a well-written and in-depth piece by Bedford and Bowery, here.

To see the last vestiges of the market check out Nathan Kensinger's Flickr set.

📋 Reader Records

💀 Did you work the Greenpoint waterfront?

Did you or a family member work at American Manufacturing Company, or at the Greenpoint Terminal Market before the 2006 fire? Payroll records, union cards, photographs of the jute and oakum floors, and anything that names the Polish and Lithuanian women who worked there would all help. So would shots of the skull building before and after Greg Suits painted it, or stills from the days The Punisher filmed on the site. Full credit given to all contributors.

⬇️ Keep Reading

🏚️ More of the Brooklyn waterfront, painted and torn down

What became of the skull building, and other warehouses and walls along the water.

💀 The Last Stand of the Greenpoint Skull What happened to this building after the skull made it famous. Greenpoint could not keep it. › 🌾 Historic S.W. Bowne Grain Storehouse An 1886 Red Hook storehouse came down over a Labor Day weekend, with no permit and no demolition order. › 📦 Williamsburg’s CitiStorage Warehouse Demolished A fire scattered 243,000 boxes of records along the waterfront. The city paid $160 million for the site. › 🛏️ Greenpoint Nurses' Residence: Inside Brooklyn's Abandoned Quarters A few blocks inland: where the nurses slept at 300 Skillman Ave is becoming a 200-bed shelter. › 🐙 The Artistic Tide: Vewer's Octopus Graffiti Masterpiece A purple tentacle reaches out of the letter E on another stretch of Brooklyn shoreline. › 🚇 The Vewer Avenue Tunnel A $24 million rehab started in February 2017. The tunnel did not open until November 2023. ›

📍 American Manufacturing Company built this Greenpoint complex from 1890 and grew it from one block to six. Most of it burned in the May 2006 Greenpoint Terminal Market fire, leaving this single building on the river.