The Brick Water Tower: Monument to Immigrant Labor

This brick water tower, built around eighteen seventy-five, once served the brick manufacturing works that operated on this site. When the Coastal Group developed the adjoining property in more recent decades, they chose to restore the old tower rather than demolish it, dedicating it to the Borough in honor of the immigrant workers who labored at the brickworks. The Raritan Bay region of New Jersey was once one of the most productive brick-manufacturing zones on the East Coast, and the immigrant men and women who fired and hauled those bricks helped build the rowhouses and brownstones of New York City. This tower now stands as a local monument to that largely uncelebrated industrial workforce.