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End of an era... last Tool Dealer to leave Canal St.....

rivett608

Diamond
Joined
Oct 25, 2002
Location
Kansas City, Mo.
This is in today, 2-7-06, New York Times.......

There Goes the Neighborhood, the Machine District
(there was a photo here... check their web site to see it)
Some of Grand Machinery Exchange's remaining goods being loaded on Centre Street before being trucked to a new home on Long Island.


By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: February 7, 2006
Later this week, a group of men with callused hands and a set of 19th-century tools will drag a 2,600-pound grinder across Larry Goodman's grease-soaked floor, haul it onto the back of a flatbed truck and then sweep out an empty storefront that has dealt in industrial workhorses for 80 years.

The End of an Industrial Era
It is safe to say that there will be few tears shed when his company, Grand Machinery Exchange, leaves Lower Manhattan for Long Island, but its departure will mark the demise of New York's once robust machinery district and an end to one of the more tangible links to New York's industrial past.

Mr. Goodman, whose grandfather started selling second-hand metalworking machines on Centre Street in 1927, recalls a gritty world that buzzed with riggers, repairmen and buyers haggling over Volkswagen-size contraptions. "It was a riot down here," he said, watching one of his machines being trundled away. "All these guys, all these places, they're gone now."

Long before luxury lofts, the Apple store and the swarms of European tourists — decades before the words SoHo and TriBeCa were even a glimmer in the eyes of real estate opportunists — there were the bronze forgers, the book printers, the food canners and the garment makers. Until the 1950's, when the industrial lifeblood began to ebb away, vast stretches of Lower and Midtown Manhattan were given over to a vertical city of foundries and factories that employed hundreds of thousands.

And it was here, along the island's lower spine, that a tribe of used-machine dealers gathered, most of them former junk peddlers, and their refurbished presses, shapers and grinders kept the factories humming.

There were once 40 such dealers in the machinery district in the Canal Street area, and Henry Zeisel is grudgingly nostalgic for the rough and tumble pageant of gruff men, many of them East European Jews, who knew how to turn discarded band saws and crankshafts into saleable merchandise.

"They used to call us the 40 thieves," said Mr. Zeisel, 86, whose father opened Zeisel Machinery in 1925, which long ago moved to New Jersey. "There was a great deal of competition, but despite the reputation, most of us were honest businessmen who worked way too hard."

The end of the machinery district follows the evaporation of so many other mercantile zones that have given New York rich concentrations of, say, used books and restaurant supplies. Radio Row, the collection of electronic gadget dealers, was obliterated by the construction of the World Trade Center, and there are few New Yorkers old enough to recall the knot of church-goods dealers around Murray Street or the butter-and-egg district at Duane and Greenwich Streets. A few months ago the city's wholesale fishmongers moved en masse to Hunts Point, Queens, from their ancestral home at the Fulton Fish Market beside the East River, and the viability of other districts that specialize in textiles, flowers and meat packing looks increasingly grim.

The machinery district's death cannot be pinned solely on rising real estate values, the culprit for so much displacement in up-and-coming neighborhoods. The exodus of light manufacturing, which had filled all those lofts in SoHo, drained away some of the best customers, and as the machines grew bulkier and heavier, the dealers simply needed more showroom space. The final blows include the advent of cheap airfare, the fax machine and finally the Internet, which diminished the need for a centralized market.

"The buyers used to take the train in from New England or the South and go from one showroom to the next," said Murray Zeisel, 77, Henry Zeisel's younger brother. "When the dealers started to leave, so did the out-of-town walk-ins."

As the showrooms left, so too did the army of freelance riggers, the thick-necked deliverymen who could carry a massive lathe across town or country. Because many smaller loft buildings lacked freight elevators, new purchases would have to be lifted up the outside of the building and passed through a window. Larger machines might be disassembled and then reassembled after their move.

"In the early days, you'd even see men carrying machines up the stairs on their back," said Harry Mison, 70, a former president of the Machine Dealers National Association whose family dealership, Noble Machinery, closed four years ago after moving to Long Island. "There were plenty of characters."

By the mid-80's, there were just a half-dozen showrooms left, and without the riggers, the salesmen and their customers, it was only a matter of time before lunchtime haunts like Harry's delicatessen, Flanagan's steakhouse and Moran's luncheonette went out of business.

Grand Machinery Exchange, the district's sole survivor, would have pulled out sooner had Mr. Goodman's family not owned the Centre Street building and an even larger warehouse nearby on Baxter Street. (The final years of delay were prompted by the federal tax code, which would have made the sale of the properties financially imprudent.) Mr. Goodman, 44, who started working for his father a day after graduating from college, is eager to move to the company's new airplane hangar of a building on Long Island, which at 50,000 square feet will double the amount of space.

"We're ready to enter the 21st century," he said, sitting at his desk below the portrait of his grandmother, Bertha Goodman, who demanded that her image be affixed to the wall upon her death. "This is not a funeral but a very necessary change."

Even with most of its merchandise gone, the Centre Street showroom felt like a time capsule of Manhattan's industrial past, filled with ancient hardware that once powered factories and piles of yellowed manuals that explain the inner workings of machinery long turned to scrap.

Puttering around the basement, Mr. Goodman noted the thick steel girders that his grandfather, Jacob, an immigrant from Poland who never learned to read or write, installed in 1947 at a cost of $64,000. "Without these, the floors would have collapsed," he said. Scattered about were wooden carts and hand trucks that would look at home in a museum of the Industrial Revolution. Mr. Goodman said everything would probably end up in a Dumpster.

And the portrait of his grandmother? "I think she's had a long enough run," he said with a shrug.

As he packed up his files, a longtime customer, Hale Gurland, stopped by to say goodbye and reminisce about the old days, when the sidewalks were often made impassable by machinery. Mr. Gurland, 53, a metal sculptor who grew up around the corner, used to earn pocket money as a teenager by helping to move equipment. As an adult, he often bought cutting and grinding devices that helped produce his art.

"Nothing I ever bought from your father worked," Mr. Gurland said half in jest. "The guys down here had a saying: 'If it doesn't work, just bring it back.' "

Still, unlike Mr. Goodman, Mr. Gurland was deeply wistful about the end of the machinery district and slightly resentful about its replacement by the chic and the overpriced.

"You used to be able to buy anything down here, even rocket engines," he said. "Now it's all yuppies and boutiques. You can't even find a screwdriver in this neighborhood."
 

Dave A

Titanium
Joined
Jan 4, 2005
Location
Roseville, CA
Thats a really nice article - It's progress and it's inevitable. The sad thing is, the people that will occupy those buildings and lofts will have no idea of the history of the area and most wouldn't care if they did.
 

sandiapaul

Titanium
Joined
Mar 19, 2004
Location
Princeton, NJ USA
My brother used to live a few blocks away and I visited the area many times when I was growing up. I used to think it was normal to walk down the street and see lathes and mills in storefront windows. Can you imagine such now? How the mighty have fallen...
 

L Webb

Titanium
Joined
Jul 28, 2001
Location
Fullerton, CA USA
Here in Los Angeles we still have our Santa Fe St. machinery district. Although there is a fraction of the dealers there once was, you can still go there and find what you need.

Many buildings that housed machinery dealers are now filled with garment sewing shops or importers of crap merchandise.
Time marches on.....

Les
 

Ries

Diamond
Joined
Mar 15, 2004
Location
Edison Washington USA
So has Don called them yet and asked to buy the old brochures? :D

I like the quote- "nothing I ever bought here worked".

That is about the only good thing about the nationwide culling of used machinery dealers- the ones who just sat on huge warehouses full of , pardon my french "junk" are going away. The few that remain in business will have to actually sell working tools, with value, at a reasonable price, to stay in business. At least, I hope so.
 
Great epitaph. thanks for posting it. I worked on the upper east side for a number of years in the mid-late 80's, and used to look for an excuse to go down to canal street on the way to to other places for construction supplies. It was of course, mostly all gone even by then, but still nice to walk down a street ans see machine tools in the windows. The guys in Grand Machinery knew i wasn't likely to buy anything, but they were friendly and often informative about tools and machines in the showroom. Probably helped pass the boredom of awfully slow looking days for them, at the time.

smt
 

John in MA

Titanium
Joined
Apr 14, 2005
Location
MA, USA
It's always sad to read these things. Used to be that way around here, although before my time (I'm just a young'n.) I frequently run across old machine catalogs and tags with addresses from the next town and into Boston. All gone.
 

Joe Michaels

Diamond
Joined
Apr 3, 2004
Location
Shandaken, NY, USA
I had posted a few pieces about going to the "Machine Tool District" in New York City when I was a kid and more recently. Reading of the relocation of Grand Machinery, I was saddened. I knew it was inevitable. They are the end of the era. How they hung on as long as they did is remarkable, given that there was no more real demand for the machine tools in NYC.

As I wrot ein my earlier postings, I recall that Grand Machinery had this neat little model machine shop in their window. It was there over 40 years ago when I first saw it as a boy. It was there a few years back when I walked my family thru the area on a little tour. It was a model machine shop, complete with line shafting and a small steam engine to drive it. It gathered dust, untouche din the window of Grand Machinery for as long as I remember. Similarly, there was this mounted Marlin (or similar trophy fish) on the wall of Grand Machinery. probably a remembrance of a winter trip to Florida over 50 years ago, for that is almost how long ago I first saw it. I wonder whether the trophy fish and the little machine shop model are being relocated to Long Island or whether the new "corporate image" of things has no place for it.

As was noted, there was acertin bree dof characters who inhabited the New York Machine Tool District. There were the dealers. These guys bought the machine tools at auctions, and dragged them into their stores. The dealers employed gangs of half-assed mechanics to "pretty up" the machine tools. These guys were often Eastern European immigrants. They washed the machine tools with buckets of raw gasoline, steel wooled and polished with emery cloth and then hit anything that was unmachined or unpolished with gloss enamel. Some of the dealers went so far as to have the ways, tables, and similar surfaces "rescraped". Rescraping was a highly debatable issue. I think the prevailing practice was to clean up an worn and ridged lathe bed or beat up mill's table and then just have it "flecked" or "fish scaled" with a hand scraper. To a young kid, the machinery sure looked attractive. I remember the smells in those places: a mixture of machine oil, fresh paint, kerosene, and cigar smoke.

As a young kid going to Brooklyn tech HS, I would take the subway over to "Center Street" after school on Fridays sometimes. I would walk in and out of the dealers' stores, looking at the machine tools. The dealers were usually quite friendly. They would see us walking along and say: "Come on in, boychik (Yiddish slang for a youngster)... It don;t cost nothing to look." Often the dealers would ask us about Brooklyn Tech, tel us it was a great high school or ask us our plans for the future. I remember one dealer of new machinery showing me my first look at a CNC machine (paper tape in those days). In tyhose days, I was not up for buying any machine tools. What I did buy was odds and ends of tooling and measuring instruments. The delaers must've cleaned out the tool rooms at the auctions, probably paying a few bucks for bushel baskets (remember them) of tooling. For 50cents or a buck or two, they could sell a kid like me machinist tools or odd cutters. I bought toolholders for my first lathe (a Seneca Falls rescued from a junker) on Center Street. Used Armstrong or Williams toolholders for a buck apiece, 3 bucks gfor a multi-head knurling tool.

As I got older and dealt with the dealers, I bought a few odd machine tools, including a Powermatic drill used from Grand Machinery. I "hondeled" on every deal I ever did on Center Street. Hondeling meant bargaining (from the Yiddish or German word "Handel" meaning business or commerce). If you DIDN'T hondel, there had to be something wrong with you. It was part of the experience. I remember at age 16, buying a used milling vise for a Burke Mill we had in my dad's basement. I hondeled like crazy, and got the vise for something like 15 bucks. The dealer and I shook hands. I said "Gesheft ist gesheft" (Yiddish or German for Business is business). The dealer took out a bottle, poured two shots of Canadian Club, and we each had a shot of whisky. I took the vise home on the NYC subways out to Brooklyn and walked a half mile with it.

Hondeling, making a deal, sealing it with a handshake and a drink were all part of the way it was done. There was some yelling int he streets, some cursing and carryings on, but it all evene dout in the end. The riggers were out in the street. They were older men even then. They had single axle straight trucks with names like "Mike Krasilovsky" or "Leo Gutenberg" and "NYC Licensed Master Rigger" on the doors. They were old trucks- old gassers like baby B model Macks or Brockways with flatbed with a "kickdown" or "beavertail" at the back. Behind the cab was a "capstan" type of winch to snub a rope around, driven by the truck engine's PTO. These guys had heavy hardwood rollers, planks, wooden horses, blocking, track jacks, pinch bars, Johnson bars, and plenty of snatch blocks and rope blocks on the trucks. The riggers stood around Center Street looking for a job, able to home in on a potential machine tool sale and a possible moving job. They could and did waltz machine tools in and out of impossible places with very simple equipment. No forklifts, no Hillmans, no skid-steers or mini-cranes. You'd walk down Center Street and there would always be a rigger or machinery mover sitting there with his truck, maybe drinking coffee, maybe smoking or at least chewing a cigar. If you went to a machine shop auction, you ran into the same cast of characters- dealers from Center Street and the machinery movers.

They were older men in the 1960's when I was a teenager. I guess they are all gone now. Goodman was the holdout. Now, no one will know what once was in that district. It will be Chinese import merchandise businesses on the ground floors and Yuppie Loft Housing on the floors above. No one knows what a machine shop or a machinist is in that area, so with the passing of Grand Machinery from the neighborhood, the breed and their way of life will be as extinct as any dinosaur. As it is, I refer to myself as "an old time engineer and stubborn dinosaur".

There is still stuff in my shop including that Powermatic drill press that came off Center Street. I suppose I will get my son and go down to my shop with a bottle of whisky and we'll knock one back to the memory of the old machine tool district.
 

Billy Boy

Hot Rolled
Joined
Jan 30, 2005
Location
San Francisco, CA
I used to work around the courner from those guys. As I have built up my metal working equipment, I have often browsed the selection over at the Grand Machenery Exchange... they were on my way to Victor machinery which was the other old hanger-on down the block. Victor sold low quality cutters, drill bits etc. The only reason I would ever go there was because I needed something *now*. Never a good deal, and never a quality piece.

In all my days passing through Grand Machinery I never once saw a machine that was priced to move. It seemed to me that he wasn't there to sell machines as much as display them... and I never much liked the way that I was spoke to in there. Never helpful or informiative. Generally just old new york style belittling and rashing.

I'm glad to hear that they are still alive and moving out to LI. But while even I have nostalga for a time when Canal Street was a thriving industrial market place... the stores that have gone out of business there have done so for a reason. Poor service, poor prices, poor selection... and really, what else is there?

Sorry to be a sour note, but I won't miss those guys a bit. Bring in the boutiques... at least they *might* have something worth buying that doesn't come with a smack on the back of the head and a dressing down.

B
 

JST

Diamond
Joined
Jun 16, 2001
Location
St Louis
Victor moved out a couple months ago.

But they must have come up in the world... they sell decent stuff now.

I've had less trouble with them than with J&L ..... I got some trash from J &L that shoulda never passed initial inspection.... let alone got shipped.
 

moldcore

Hot Rolled
Joined
Dec 15, 2005
Location
UTAH
To Joe Michaels,

Thank you for sharing with us your experiences, beautifully written and priceless. We must be about the same age but I had the great opportunity of growing up in Los Angeles. With your description of the “Machine Tool District”, I felt I was there with you even though I’ve never been to New York City. You should have written the original article.

As a shop owner I hate to see any business in this industry struggle. But like all “things”, time takes its toll in the name of progress.

Wayne
 

J. Elliott

Hot Rolled
Joined
May 18, 2002
Location
Boonville, NC 27011
rivet608,

So pleased to see someone post the link back to that older post. That is exactly the one I had in mind while reading this story over lunch, with the actual paper paper in hand. (How much longer this'll last, who's to say?)

The closing line had me laughing out loud with the guys at the next table lookin' at me funny. "Now you can't even find a screwdriver in this neighborhood." Classic!

I'd like to see what Dave Ficken has to say about all of it, as a guy who tried to sell good machines up in that region. I couldn't quite get a grip on anything other than the passing of an era. Seems that several folks saw these places as a good way to buy worn out junk. They'll miss 'em - kinda, sort of, maybe...
 

X-Y-Z

Aluminum
Joined
Sep 21, 2005
Location
NEW HAMPSHIRE
Another sad story.
Well, sad at first, then the more I think about things like this, it really makes me mad. I know the Industrial age is well over for the US, but can someone more educated than me tell me where we are heading?
I mean, I am only 35, but I was born 100yrs to late for my time I guess....seems like everything thats changing in the past few years is all backwards.
Pretty soon EVERY corner will be the same:
Home Depot
Lowes
Staples
Wal Mart
Applebees
DunkinDonuts
Starbucks
Its all the same no matter where you go, what state, what town....if not yet its coming, and they keep getting bigger. Its now hard to find a diner or small lumber yard/hardware store, where you get good service, and find what you are looking for without a 10 mile walk around the mega store.
Is this all progress? Not to me.
So my question....(really)....
DO YOU EVER THINK THE US WILL RISE AGAIN AS AN INDUSTRIAL/MANUFACTURING LEADER?
Obviously not for many years at least...but 20, 30 years...never?
Next question:
WILL THERE EVER BE A DECREASE IN MEGA BOX STORE CONSTRUCTION?
I have traveled a good part of this country, and sometimes I think I might as well take a street corner picture and put the name of any city on the bottom, no one would ever know...they all resemble the next.
Anyone with me, or did I loose you all here?
 

olddude

Stainless
Joined
May 27, 2005
Location
JAPAN
Why are you all sad, we don't need nasty environmentally harmful machines and the low class uneducated people who run them.
We are a service economy built on equality, environmetal friendlness, globalism and the UN.
It's time to silence the American industrial exploiters.
This is good,Kofi Annan told me so.
 

dennh

Stainless
Joined
Sep 8, 2002
Location
northeast
OAKNH: "Pretty soon EVERY corner will be the same:
Home Depot
Lowes
Staples
Wal Mart
Applebees
DunkinDonuts
Starbucks"

Pretty darn sad. It's at a point where if you need home repair parts, you have 57 ways of buying the same cheap imported crap.

30 miles south of you. Den(nh)
 

wilbilt

Hot Rolled
Joined
Feb 20, 2005
Location
Honcut, Ca. USA
Industrial age is well over for the US, but can someone more educated than me tell me where we are heading?
I mean, I am only 35, but I was born 100yrs to late for my time I guess....seems like everything thats changing in the past few years is all backwards.
That's a very good question. I have often felt that I was born too late.

I think the real issue is that we are all realizing too late that it is all gone. The ambition, the desire to be the best, and the motivational common sense that built our industry is conspicuously lacking from today's youth.

It's all about eating at Mickey D's and playing video games. Forget about once-common things like knowing how to read a micrometer...these kids can't even handle a basic task like cooking a meal for themselves. Even worse than that is they have no concept of why they might need to.

I think it's all downhill from here... :(
 

Bob-O

Hot Rolled
Joined
May 27, 2004
Location
Long Island, NY
OAKNH: "Pretty soon EVERY corner will be the same:
Home Depot
Lowes
Staples
Wal Mart
Applebees
DunkinDonuts
Starbucks

Absolutely right! 2 of this bunch, Home Depot & Staples, now anchor a strip mall where once Fairchild Republic Aircraft stood. I was told when I worked there in the late 70's that they employed as many as 20,000 during their heyday. The between Grumman, Fairchild, and the smaller job shops, the local aerospace industry moved a lot of machinery thru the decades. I'm sure some of it passed thru Canal Street.

I'm still using tools and accessories my Dad bought down there from the 1940's thru the late 60's.
Bob
 








 
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