H. Kohnstamm & Company of Red Hook

By the time I noticed, it was already too late.

Another loss. Another familiar silhouette scraped from the skyline. Another piece of Brooklyn's industrial memory folded up and tucked away, replaced by something sleeker, faster, and utterly forgettable.

It was sometime around 2018 when I first looked at the former grounds of H. Kohnstamm and Company, a name that once meant something in this part of the borough. The property sat in that peculiar state of half-life so common to old industrial sites in the outer boroughs. One side lay in ruin, a crumbling monument to an era when Brooklyn made things. The other half hummed along just fine, a thriving business still operating in the shadow of the decay, its workers going about their routines as if the ghosts next door didn't exist. I remember thinking I should come back. I should document this. I should put a pin in it.

I never did.

My attention, as it often was in those days, had drifted to Connecticut, New Jersey, and the former Bowne Grain Storehouse at 595-611 Smith Street. That building had its own tragic arc. A fire. Then the relentless math of Brooklyn's hyper-heated real estate market. Then demolition. The canal-side neighborhood was changing so fast you could practically hear the rezoning applications rustling in the wind.

I had first spotted H. Kohnstamm and Company years earlier, of all moments, while taking my road test at the DMV Red Hook location just across the street. A strange detail, maybe, but the memory is vivid. I passed on my second attempt after failing on my first attempt at a different location. My classmate, a quiet guy who sat in the backseat, did not. He told the driving instructor and me, with annoyance and utter defeat, that it was his fifteenth try. Fifteen. The man wanted that license the way some people want salvation. I think about him sometimes, wonder if sixteen was his lucky number.

But I digress.

It wasn't until months later, when I needed a desk for a new apartment and drove down to the Ikea storefront in Red Hook, that I saw what had happened to the Kohnstamm property. I almost drove past it. Where the old buildings had stood, an entirely new building now occupied the lot. White walls. Clean lines. No character whatsoever. And plastered across its facade, that grinning arrow logo you see on a hundred million cardboard boxes a year.

Amazon.

Workers moved in chaotic lines outside, loading familiar brown envelopes into the trunks of waiting cars. It was a last-mile distribution center, one of those facilities designed to shave thirty minutes off your delivery time so that the electric garlic press you ordered at midnight arrives before dinner. While I was busy living my life, forgetting to bring a camera, the old world had been gutted and rebuilt in the image of next-day shipping.

And it wasn't just Amazon. FedEx and UPS had also swept into the area during those same years, acquiring parcels of land, building new facilities, or leasing warehouse space along the neighborhood. Red Hook, once a neighborhood of longshoremen and sugar refineries, was being reimagined as a logistics corridor. The transformation was methodical, almost surgical. You could see it taking shape block by block if you knew where to look.

The most bitter chapter came in 2019, when UPS turned its attention to 202 Coffey Street. The building that stood there was the former Lidgerwood Manufacturing Company, a 19th-century industrial structure with the kind of bones that preservation advocates dream about. Local elected officials had raised concerns early on, and UPS, to its credit or perhaps its cunning, offered reassurances. The company said it would work to preserve the historic building. Officials took them at their word.

Then, on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, UPS demolished it.

The timing was not lost on anyone. A long holiday weekend. City Hall is half-empty. Reporters already checked out. By the time people returned to their desks on Tuesday, the Lidgerwood building was rubble and dust. The outrage, when it came, arrived too late to matter. The bricks were already strewn across the site in heaps in the shape of small mountains.

Red Hook, for all the attention it deserves, is only one theater in a much larger campaign. Amazon's leasing spree stretches across every borough, propping up the city's industrial real estate market at a time when office towers in Midtown sit half-empty and commercial landlords are desperate for stable tenants.

In East New York, a 211,000-square-foot delivery station at 2300 Linden Boulevard is already open and humming. Over in the Bronx, the company has secured large swaths of warehouse space in Hunts Point, the neighborhood best known for its sprawling wholesale food markets. In Queens, Middle Village has seen Amazon move in. And on Staten Island, the company has planted its flag at the Matrix Global Logistics Park, adding yet another node to its ever-expanding web.

Then there is the crown jewel. In 2020, Amazon purchased the Lord and Taylor Building in Midtown Manhattan for approximately $1 billion. The historic department store, which had been a fixture of Fifth Avenue retail since the early 20th century, became the property of a company that has arguably done more to dismantle traditional retail than any other force in modern commerce. The irony was almost too perfect, too neat, the kind of twist a novelist would second-guess for being too on the nose.

Taken together, Amazon's New York City operation represents something unprecedented. The company is building a seamless and efficient delivery network designed to serve over 8 million residents, and it is doing so with the kind of capital and coordination that few public agencies could dream of mustering. Where the city sees zoning maps and community board hearings, Amazon sees logistics puzzles. Where preservationists see history, the company sees square footage.

Before there was an Amazon delivery station at 55 Bay Street, before the white walls and the loading docks and the grinning arrow logo, there was a factory floor that smelled of chemicals and soap and ambition.

H. Kohnstamm and Company began its life in 1851, near the lower tip of Manhattan, in a world that would be almost unrecognizable to us now. The Civil War hadn't started. Brooklyn was still its own city. And a young business set up shop to make a product that sounds almost quaint today: bluing for laundry use. That faint blue tint that housewives added to their wash loads to make white linens appear brighter. It was a small thing, a humble thing, but it was the seed from which an empire of color would grow.

The company's earliest roots, however, reach back even further and deeper into the tangle of 19th-century Manhattan commerce. City directories from 1852 through 1866 list a Joseph Kohnstamm operating on Tryon Row, downtown, near where the massive Municipal Building would later rise in 1914. Old records describe him as a "manufacturer of ultramarine and importer of artists' colors." A faded sign on the Tryon Row building once read "Jos. Kohnstamm, Importer of Paints & Colors," a ghost advertisement for a ghost enterprise on a street that no longer exists.

The business, as it came to be known, was formally shaped by two cousins, Hesslein and Heiman Kohnstamm. Hesslein had been in the coloring trade with his brother, who died in 1868, and continued as a manufacturer and importer of ultramarine blue and other coloring materials. For decades, the Kohnstamm operation focused on pigments and dyes, supplying the raw palette that colored the industrial age.

Then came the Spanish-American War, and with it, a crisis that would redirect the company's future.

The country found itself desperately short of food coloring materials. Manufacturers turned to industrial pigments as substitutes, and the results were catastrophic. People died. The colorings that made candy bright and beverages appealing were, in some cases, literally poisonous. Kohnstamm saw both the danger and the opportunity. The company introduced safe, standardized food colors, and in doing so, helped frame the very federal food and drug regulations we still rely on today. Seven basic food colors are certified as safe: Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3, Red 3, Red 40, Yellow 5, and Yellow 6.  That framework owes a debt to the Kohnstamm family's advocacy and expertise.

Hesslein Kohnstamm entered the food additive business formally in 1907, following the passage of the first comprehensive federal Food and Drug Law. He built a color plant right here in Brooklyn to manufacture food-grade colors. The borough was no longer just producing pigments for artists and laundresses. It was coloring the nation's sodas, its baked goods, its candies.

After World War I, the company expanded further, launching a flavor division under the H. Kohnstamm name. A production facility rose in Kearny, New Jersey, in 1927, with Dr. David Jorysch leading the division. The product line grew to include flavoring extracts, essential oils, and ingredients for the food, beverage, baking, and confectionery industries. If you drank a bottled soda in mid-century America, there was a reasonable chance that Kohnstamm had something to do with the color swirling in the glass. If you unwrapped a piece of penny candy and marveled at its shade of red or yellow, the hue may well have been born in Brooklyn.

But the Kohnstamm story was never just about color. The original line of pigments, chiefly used by commercial laundries, expanded after roughly twenty years into a full range of laundry and cleaning supplies. By the 1870s, the company had developed a white chip soap. From there came cleansing powders and detergents, products that moved Kohnstamm from the artist's studio and the chemist's lab into the basements and laundry rooms of everyday Americans.

Some of these products were ingeniously specific. There was Thermotex, a chemically treated nylon cloth engineered to withstand the searing heat of a pressing iron. And Intersuds, a tallow soap blended with special ingredients to make it a superior whitener for cotton products. These were not glamorous inventions. Nobody wrote songs about pressing cloths or laundry soaps. But they were the kind of practical innovations that made daily life a little easier for millions of people who never knew the name of the company behind them.

The company certified its colors through the Food and Drug Administration, supplying the right pastel hue for a bar of soap, the exact shade wanted for a face powder or a hair rinse. It made the colors in your carbonated drinks safe to swallow. It operated, for well over a century, at the invisible intersection of chemistry and ordinary life.

At its peak, Kohnstamm's reach extended far beyond the Brooklyn waterfront. The company's offices sat at 161 Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, an address it maintained from approximately 1961 to 1976. Corporate headquarters were listed at 161 Avenue of the Americas. Its manufacturing plants dotted the map of the industrial Northeast: Pavonia, Camden, Newark, and Kearny in New Jersey, along with a facility in Clearing, Illinois, a suburb tucked against the southwestern edge of Chicago. The Newark installation had previously served as the General Color Company plant, another layer of industrial history absorbed into the Kohnstamm operation.

The Brooklyn plant at 55 Bay Street had been active as early as 1912. For nearly seventy years, workers walked through its doors, mixing dyes and pouring soaps and packing products that traveled across the country. The factory didn't close until the early 1980s, when the tides of American manufacturing had already begun their long retreat from the urban core.

In 1988, the story of H. Kohnstamm and Company reached its final chapter, though it did not end so much as dissolve into the larger currents of corporate consolidation.

Warner Jenkinson Company, a subsidiary of Universal Foods, purchased H. Kohnstamm's color businesses along with Clark Colors. Separately, Universal Flavors acquired H. Kohnstamm Flavors in the New Jersey market. The name disappeared from building facades and trade publications. The family's century-long enterprise was folded into bigger entities with blander names, absorbed the way a drop of dye is absorbed into a glass of water. There one moment, diffused the next, invisible but still present at the molecular level.

And in a way, that is the most fitting epitaph for a company that spent 137 years perfecting the art of coloring things. Kohnstamm's knowledge did not vanish. Its research lives on under the auspices of the corporations that absorbed it. Its formulas, its expertise, its institutional memory, all of it carried forward by employees who once punched the clock at a plant in Brooklyn or New Jersey or Illinois. The name is gone, but the work endures, embedded in products that still line pharmacy shelves and fill grocery store aisles.

If you have a connection to this vanished workplace—whether you spent time on the floor of H. Kohnstamm & Company, or have preserved a fragment of their history in your family's life, a photo, a video, a product, an employee badge, a catalog, or an old advertisement—I would be honored to share your piece of the story here. These tangible memories and personal accounts are what truly animate the silent shells we see today; they give voice to the past in a way that maps and corporate filings never can. Every image or recollection you share helps to fill the gaps, honoring the skill and community that once filled these now-quiet spaces. Please feel welcome to contribute, and know that you will be fully credited for helping to preserve this important chapter of our local heritage.

Source(s):

1. Richling, B. (2021, February 12). Amazon leases 487K of warehouse space in Red Hook, further expanding Brooklyn footprint. Bklyner. https://bklyner.com/amazon-leases-487k-of-warehouse-space-in-red-hook-further-expanding-brooklyn-footprint/

2. The most consequential projects and deals of Dov Hertz. (n.d.). Apostrophe Atrophy. Retrieved December 30, 2025, from https://www.apostropheatrophy.com/tools/dov-hertz.html

3. Grutchfield, W. (2009). H. Kohnstamm & Co. Walter Grutchfield. https://www.waltergrutchfield.net/kohnstamm.htm

4. Freeman, W. M. (1959, August 22). The helping hand in many products; Kohnstamm company adds color and flavor to a long list of items. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1959/08/22/archives/the-helping-hand-in-many-products-kohnstamm-company-adds-color-and.html

5. Society of Flavor Chemists & Chemical Sources Association. (1995). The flavor industry from 1945-1995: A short history of the flavor industry with emphasis on the USA and the past fifty years. [Unpublished manuscript].