April 29, 2008

Over the last several weeks, the ILA building at the corner of Union and Court streets has been torn apart piece by piece. Built over 30 years ago, it is a remnant of '70s commercial architecture--as generic as a Midwestern bank or insurance office. But its sizable courtyard and stepped back facade was a rare sight in crowded Carroll Gardens. It may not have been beautiful, but it didn't exactly offend either. The plans to maximize the space for upscale housing however have offended, spilling into outright anger at a recent community meeting. According to Brownstoner, the development:

will involve 14 townhouses on Sackett and Union streets, and a large multi-unit building fronting Court Street. Several blogs covered the meeting, and by all accounts the community members gathered last night seemed quite wary of Clarett's plans. The audience booed the rendering of the Court Street building (above), according to Gowanus Lounge, and many vocally objected to its dark color and height. Counting mechanical equipment on the roof, the building could be around 85 feet tall.

Since I walk by the corner every morning I have been snapping pictures of the demolition. Curious to know more, I asked Nathan Ward, local writer and author of the forthcoming book, The War for the Waterfront: Mike Johnson & the Mob, for background on the building, the ILA, and what the demolition says about the passing of a way of life in this neighborhood.

What is the ILA?

The ILA is the International Longshoremen's Association, a union originally founded on the Great Lakes in the 1890s, and which later moved its headquarters East to New York, where it has presided since the time of the First World War.


What was the function of the building? Why was it built here?

In New York, which became the world's largest port, the ILA had two power bases: The main headquarters in Manhattan, where the Irish had control of the lucrative West Side docks and ran the International Union, and Brooklyn, particularly the large longshoring area then called Red Hook, which had the various locals staffed by more newly arrived Italians willing to do less desirable dock work. Anthony ("Tough Tony") Anastasio rose from longshoreman to stevedore and Brooklyn union leader and made the Brooklyn side as powerful as he could. He did this both through consolidating various locals into one big modern local (number 1814) and by virtue of being related to his widely feared Mobster brother, Albert Anastasia (who spelled it differently, he claimed, to avoid tainting his family, which included another brother who was a priest). Neither a saint nor a murderer, Tough Tony sought finally to be remembered for giving his men their own Clinic, as it came to be called. According to the ILA’s semi-official history from 1966, Men Along the Shore, Tony “gave the docks of Brooklyn an organized identity they had never had before” but the “most apparent and tangible achievement of [his] colorful career is, of course, the magnificent Brooklyn Longshoremen’s Medical Center.” If in later years the union welfare fund was cynically raided or the clinic’s blood supplies hawked by Mafia associates, that was off Tough Tony’s watch. He died in 1963, the year his building was praised by Kennedy’s assistant secretary of labor as an example of “the enlightened fruits of good industrial relations.”

Did the local economy revolve solely around the docks?

In Brooklyn there certainly was a network of waterfront businesses, especially along the five mile stretch of shore running south from Brooklyn Bridge to Twentieth Street. But not everyone was a longie, certainly. Even in the late 1940s, when there were some 46,000 dockers (full and part-time) in New York, before the replacement of the odious shape-up system of hiring, day to day employment was not guaranteed and so there were large numbers of “weekend” longshoremen who otherwise worked as cabbies, doormen, bartenders, motormen.

What effect did containerization have on the neighborhood?

The classic picture people have of dock work comes from old movies –guys with hooks moving sacks of flour or stowing crates in the ship’s hold, what’s called the “break-bulk” method of handling cargo. The containers—sealed metal boxes of freight that could be moved from container ships onto trucks or planes or railroad cars--made the job far less back-breaking, since freight was now moved by cranes. After the invention of container shipping in 1956, successful ports eventually needed a lot more room for trucks and for the containers themselves. The lament that you often hear from some old-time Brooklyn guys, that in the sixties ‘New Jersey got shipping and New York got the World Trade Center’ doesn’t explain how Brooklyn could have kept all its shipping without a lot more highway and parking space for the containers. Brooklyn—at least Red Hook--would look more like Port Newark, which was proposed in the sixties but thankfully not implemented.

A crime commission clip from On the Waterfront

Was the union as corrupted as films like On the Waterfront made it out to be? Did the exposes about that corruption lead to a crackdown?

You bet. The thing about On the Waterfront is that its audience in 1954 was very educated on the subject of waterfront gangsterism –the way people knew all the Watergate background when ‘All the President’s Men’ came out. Audiences in 1954 had followed the Kefauver hearings (then the most-watched show ever on Television) and the New York Crime Commission Hearings, whose gritty testimonies provided grist for dozens of lesser crime dramas. It’s only in recent years that critics have viewed the criminal background of On the Waterfront as typical Hollywood melodrama meant to serve the REAL story of the lovers, or worse, have assumed the whole film is just an apologia for Kazan’s and Schulberg’s testifying about communists in the film industry. Kazan’s experience no doubt drove him to change the movie’s ending to something more heroic and hopeful (Terry lives, instead of dying at the bottom of harbor, as most certainly would have been the fate of someone flouting the waterfront code and informing against the racketeers. In Schulberg’s novel, Waterfront, Terry doesn’t get away in one piece.)

As for exposes leading to a crackdown on waterfront crime, since the fifties there have been multiple crackdowns by the feds and your Columbia Street neighbors, the Waterfront Commission, and despite the diminished shipping compared to the old days, the rackets hold on –Peter Gotti was recently put away for extortion on the Brooklyn waterfront, and in 2005 members of the ILA Executive Council were the subject of a RICO lawsuit.

What became of the longshoremen who lost their jobs?

Many moved into other industries; lucky ones, like my old longshoreman-landlord on President Street, bought their buildings in the dog-days of the seventies, sold in the nineties, and moved to Florida.

Are you sad to see this way of life passing?

I love this neighborhood and would give a lot to have seen Red Hook in its longshoring prime.

The proposed project for 340 Court Street

Any opinions on the ILA building as a work of architecture?

Not to speak ill of the recently departed, but to me the Clinic building was symbolically and historically important, but certainly no beauty. It had far more personality, however, than the gutless grayish housing blob that’s going in there soon. Architecturally, the ILA Clinic was on a par with its nearby institutional nemesis, the Waterfront Commission building.