Construction has just been completed on a $150 million project that transforms the167-year-old Domino Sugar Refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront into what has to be the city’s — if not the world’s — most unlikely, strangely enchanting venue from to which to earn a living or make a fortune.
“Office building” is too prosaic a description for the Refinery at Domino, a 15-story, 460,000-square foot masterpiece of what’s called “adaptive reuse.”
Developer Two Trees and architect Vishaan Chakrabarti of his firm Practice for Architecture and Urbanism have imagined the venue as a glass box inside the old structure. The glass is set back fifteen feet from the outer walls, with a jungle of trees and plants created by design firm Field Operations softening the void.
Beyond the glass, 548 church-like, uncovered arched windows in the original façade offer views of the Manhattan and Brooklyn skylines, the East River and trains snaking over the Williamsburg Bridge. The empty outer windows don’t consistently line up with the floor plates, a quirky touch that gives each floor its own special character.
A glass-dome penthouse called “Skylight” sits at the top of the revamped structure and provides gathering space for future tenants. A lovingly-crafted replica of the original Domino Sugar sign attached to the outer wall powerfully evokes the past.
Two Trees did little to “clean up” the façade, which still bears the imperfections and discolorations of a century-and-a-half’s exposure to the elements.
It’s the city’s most audacious architectural transformation since the High Line Park, which Field Operations also designed.
Opened in 1884, the original Domino Sugar plant was built by the family of three-term mayor Henry Havemeyer. It was a beacon of the city’s industrial age, an eye-catching icon representing a trade that employed tens of thousands and helped make Wall Street fortunes. It produced as much as 1 million pounds of sugar per day, every day.
Over time, the brick-and-masonry exterior of the landmark building, which boasts a 214-foot-tall chimney, became weather-beaten but it was nevertheless an arresting site on the East River waterfront.
The plant closed in 2004 when Domino moved operations to Yonkers. In 2015, Two Trees, known for creating DUMBO, broke ground with plans to turn the industrial relic into the heart of a fun-filled residential and commercial complex.
It was no easy task. Over one hundred, 30-foot-high vats used to process sugar had to be removed from inside the space.
“Your feet stuck to the floor from the sugar residue. It was black, icky and rancid,” Mary Ann Tighe, the head of the project’s leasing team at CBRE tristate, told The Post.
Two Trees head Jed Walentas recalled that,”You could see remnants of urban explorers before us. Footprints in the sticky molasses. The sugar plant was so hot, they had to keep kegs of beer to cool off.”
The Refinery is the centerpiece of Two Trees’ eleven-acre, $3-billion Domino complex on the Williamsburg waterfront. The development also includes an all-new office building; three apartment towers; 60,000 square-feet of stores; a river esplanade and a five-acre park. The whole place has an optimistic, party-time feel with its pretty landscaping, Danny Meyer taco stand and steel drums and other salvaged artifacts.
The Refinery officially opened with a media event last week and it doesn’t yet have any tenants signed on. Two Trees is asking for $60-per-square-foot for rent, but many tenants will pay much less thanks to the city’s Relocation and Employment Assistance Program (REAP), which provides a per-employee benefit for companies that move from Manhattan.
Still, signing on forward-thinking companies will be a challenge when high interest rates are slowing growth and some employees are still working from home.
Walentas said tenants won’t likely be from the financial sector — “I don’t think Goldman Sachs is coming,” he joked — but rather tech, media and other creative industries. The L train Bedford Avenue stop and the J line’s Lorimer Street station are within easy walking distant from the development, as is “the great density of human capital and talent massed in North Brooklyn,” according to Walentas.
The emotional pull that anachronistic properties have on cutting-edge industries is exemplified by Apple’s recent move of its European headquarters to London’s Battersea Power Station, a four-smokestack leviathan every bit as antiquated-looking as the Refinery. Meanwhile, Facebook parent-company Meta has moved much of its New York operation into the 1912 Farley Building across from Penn Station.
The Refinery belongs to an epochal revitalization of Brooklyn’s long-neglected waterfront. The renaissance also includes Industry City in Sunset Park, the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s rebirth, and the riverfront greenway anchored by Brooklyn Bridge Park.
But the sugar plant’s reclamation for 21st Century enterprise is surely the sweetest new addition.
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