Coffee, Cardboard, and an Ugly Name on Purpose: DUMBO's Empire Stores

The row of brick warehouses on your right, built starting in eighteen sixty nine with additions added in eighteen eighty five, once held sacks of coffee beans, sugar, and molasses hauled off ships from the Brooklyn waterfront. Known as Empire Stores, the seven building complex worked as a cargo warehouse for nearly a century before it was finally abandoned in the nineteen sixties, its iron hoisting wheels and coffee chutes left to rust until a renovation decades later turned it into shops, offices, and a food hall, while keeping the original stone walls visible inside.

Around the same era those warehouses were doing their last real work, a few blocks away, a Scottish immigrant named Robert Gair ran a paper factory on Washington Street. Gair's business accidentally invented something that reshaped how goods like the coffee and sugar stored here got packaged and shipped everywhere else: the pre folded cardboard box, assembled flat and popped open into shape, rather than built board by board. The invention was significant enough that the surrounding blocks were nicknamed Gairsville for years afterward. Today that same Gair factory building houses the offices of the online marketplace Etsy.

The neighborhood itself did not get its current name until nineteen seventy eight, when residents coined the acronym DUMBO, for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, deliberately choosing something unattractive. The thinking at the time was that an ugly, awkward sounding name might discourage developers from noticing the neighborhood. It did not work for long. The warehouses that once stored raw coffee and sugar now sit at the center of one of Brooklyn's most expensive and most photographed waterfront neighborhoods.