Spear & Company Factory
94-15 100th Street | also 101-01 95th Avenue | Ozone Park | built 1964
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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.
- 1906
Spear & Company builds one of the city's first poured-concrete factories
Spear & Company had this factory built in 1906, making it one of the earliest buildings in New York City with concrete poured in place. The four-story building, between 94th and 95th Avenues, holds about 85,000 square feet. A later preservation report found it significant for its reinforced-concrete construction and its restrained, eclectic utilitarian design.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1920
Spear merges with Chicago's Regal Hat, then locks out its factory workers
On May 1, 1920, the Spear Company of New York joined the Regal Hat company of Chicago to form Regal-Spear Co., which made cloth hats and children's novelties and was billed as the world's largest cloth headwear house, with 22,000 customers. Later that year, amid labor unrest, the workers were locked out of this factory. The building also housed Columbia Wax Products Co., a maker of novelty candles.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2017
The old hat factory joins the State and National Registers of Historic Places
The building, best known as the Worksman Cycles factory, where pushcarts, tricycles and heavy-duty bicycles were made, was listed in 2017 on both the New York State Register of Historic Places and the National Register, as an intact early-1900s reinforced concrete factory. Governor Andrew Cuomo's office named it one of 21 sites found eligible that year. Listing makes owners eligible for tax credits to rehabilitate the building.
“The building was listed on the New York State Register of Historic Places in 2017.”
Source: Wikipedia
- 2018
Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center guts the building for small makers
In 2016 the city's Economic Development Corp. announced a $10 million grant along with a $3.7 million loan to rehabilitate the factory for 24 businesses and 80 skilled workers. By July 2018 the interior had been gutted and a new roof installed. The Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center raised $40 million for the work, planning 12,000 square feet of solar panels and naming it the GMDC Ozone Park Industrial Center.
Source: Wikipedia
Further reading
- Spear and Company FactoryWikipedia
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