Knockdown Center

52-19 Flushing Avenue | also 59-50 54th Street | Maspeth | built 1930

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

1902
The Gleason-Tiebout Glass Factory makes gas-lamp bulbs under three smokestacks
From 1902 this Maspeth building held the Gleason-Tiebout Glass Factory, which made bulbs for indoor gas lamps. Decades later the factory turned to glass marbles, and the building afterward became home to the Manhattan Door Factory, best known for knock-down door frames.
Source: atlasobscura.com
2012
Knockdown Center turns the old factory into a performance space named for its door-frame past
Since 2012 the building has housed the Knockdown Center, a performance space co-founded and directed by Tyler Myers, formerly projects manager for the Frieze Art Fair. While digging into the floor to add bathrooms, workers found tunnels and an octagonal chamber holding the glass factory's iron crucible, once used to melt silica at over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Blocks of orange, navy, black and white glass found there still sit below ground, where the techno club Basement now operates. The center has hosted a floating forest installation and a Carnegie Hall production of West Side Story.
Source: atlasobscura.com

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