photo: www.scoutingny.com
Last evening as I was eating my dinner of Spaghetti-O’s and watching the PBS News Hour (sometimes a way to lose an appetite if topic is scary) I caught a segment which totally captured my attention. A vacant factory building in Brooklyn, once the home of Pfizer, had been vacant and abandoned for years. Recently an entrepreneur bought the building and has now created a small business incubator. Not only are the tenants hip and cool so are the products they are manufacturing! I particularly like the company producing animal collars and leashes which state that the animal is a rescue. Way cool. But further the angle of the piece was a discussion of how the Pfizer building once offered 2,500 jobs, good jobs. With the incubator at roughly 40 percent occupancy 1,000 have been created by these entrepreneurs. Hopes and plans by the owner/developer are that a similar number of jobs will once again thrive at this site.
Photo: Nathan Kensinger for ny. curbed.com
Tell me where we might do this in Hartford. Use the comment section below or comment on our Facebook page to send us your suggestions for buildings which offer a similar potential for revitalization of historic buildings and employment. Let’s do this together, yes?