C. E. Lipe Machine Shop
| Machine shop | |
| Industry | Machinery, experimental |
| Founded | 1880 |
| Headquarters | Syracuse, New York |
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Key people
|
Charles E. Lipe (1850-1895), Alexander T. Brown |
| Products | Machinery, experimental |
The C. E. Lipe Machine Shop was established in Syracuse, New York in 1880 in the Lynch Building by Charles E. Lipe (1850–1895), a mechanical engineer. The building became an early industrial incubator and was commonly known as the Lipe Shop. While Lipe worked on his own ideas, he rented out facilities to others. Some of the leaders in industry worked both independently and side by side in this building to solve the industrial problems of their era. "These men sowed the germs that sprouted into major business enterprises in Syracuse and elsewhere" and for many years the machine shop was known as the "cradle of Syracuse industries."
The modest two-storied brick building, known as the Lynch Building, with 20,000 square feet (1,900 m2) of floor space at 208-214 South Geddes Street in Syracuse is known as the "cradle of Syracuse industries," a phrase coined by Samuel Cook, an executive at the Brown-Lipe-Chapin Company in 1916.
By August 1998, the machine shop had reverted to the home of a nondescript hardware store near the intersection of Geddes and Fayette streets.
Syracuse manufacturing concerns, which by 1921 represented "millions of invested capital" and employed thousands of individuals, had their inception in the building. For many years, the shop's office had been a "veritable museum" of designs, models, parts and pictures of various kinds of machinery developed there, or by the inventors and their associates.
Patrick Lynch, a salt manufacturer, built the structure first known as the Lynch Building in South Geddes Street between Fayette and Marcellus streets in 1861 as a machine shop to serve the salt industry, which relied on pumps, engines and other mechanical devices made in the Syracuse area. Except for the addition of wings, the building remained unchanged for several decades.
After the salt industry began to wane, the building was used for the manufacture of farm implements for a few years. In 1875, the Robinson Plow Company occupied the plant, succeeding an earlier manufacturer of lawn mowers there. In 1876, the company went on to become the Syracuse Chilled Plow Company. By 1879, the Lynch Building was put up for sale.
The building became an industrial incubator after Charles E. Lipe, 29, a young Cornell University engineering graduate of the Sibley College of Mechanics in 1873 and son of a German-born farmer from Fort Plain, Montgomery County, New York, moved into the building in 1880 and set up the C. E. Lipe Machine Shop. The building was commonly known as the Lipe Shop.
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