Bush Terminal Yard

Industry City (formerly Bush Terminal) is a historic intermodal shipping, warehousing, and manufacturing complex on the waterfront in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City. Bush Terminal was the first facility of its kind in New York City and the largest multi-tenant industrial property in the United States.

The Bush Terminal Company managed shipping for all the Bush Terminal tenants, making it the first American example of completely integrated manufacturing and warehousing, served by both rail and water transportation, under a unified management system. At its peak, Bush Terminal covered 200 acres (about 81 hectares), bounded by Upper New York Bay's Gowanus Bay to the west and north, by 3rd Avenue to the east, and—at its peak—between 27th Street to the north and 50th Street to the south.

Today, Industry City comprises roughly 40 acres (16 ha) of the former Bush Terminal, including 16 original buildings. The 6.5 million square foot complex is currently undergoing renovations to modernize the historic infrastructure in an effort to preserve the industrial heritage of the project for future generations of artisans, craftsmen, and small businesses. Work on the project began in 2012, but as of Spring 2017 a completion date has not been announced.

Bush Terminal is named after its founder Irving T. Bush. His family name came from Jan Bosch, who was born in the Netherlands and immigrated to New Amsterdam (now New York) in 1662. Bush Terminal is in no way related to the Bush political family. Bush Terminal was unique from other rail-marine terminals in New York due to its distance from Manhattan, the magnitude of its warehousing and manufacturing operations, and its fully integrated nature.

Wholesalers in Manhattan faced expensive time, transportation, and labor costs when importing and then re-sending goods. So in 1895, Irving T. Bush, working under the name of his family's company, The Bush Co., organized six warehouses and one pier on the waterfront of South Brooklyn as a freight handling terminal. There had only been one warehouse on the site in 1890, and before that, the land contained an oil refinery belonging to the Bush & Denslow company of Rufus T. Bush, Irving T. Bush's father. Standard Oil bought this refinery in the 1880s and dismantled it, but after Rufus T. Bush's death in 1890, Irving T. Bush later bought the land back using his father's inheritance.

...
Wikipedia