Ward Baking Company Building
| Ward Baking Company Building | |
|---|---|
| General information | |
| Type | Bakery |
| Address | 800 Pacific Street |
| Town or city | Brooklyn, New York |
| Country | United States |
| Opened | 1911 |
The Ward Baking Company building at 800 Pacific Street, Brooklyn, New York, built in 1911, was a historic building and was a significant example of a period industrial facility.
The founder, George S. Ward, a captain of industry and soon-to-be baseball magnate, brought a team of architects to Europe for inspiration and they designed this building on the long boat ride home.
In a 1921 Ward Bakery Publication called The Story of our Research Products, company writers bragged about their founder, who had “the courage and the pioneer spirit to erect the first sanitary and scientific bakery in America.” The same publication describes the New York factory as “the snow-white temple of bread-making cleanliness.”
With 4 acres (16,000 m2) of area divided between its six floors and basement, the factory employed hundreds of New Yorkers. And with its capacity to turn out 250,000 loaves per day, it fed hundreds of thousands.
800 Pacific Street lies in a narrow corridor of Prospect Heights that once housed several major industries interspersed with historic brownstones. Now this area is primarily residential, with a sprinkling of small business utilizing the soaring industrial spaces. The Ward Baking Company Building is now a storage facility.
The former Ward’s Bread Factory stretches from the south side of Pacific Street to the north side of Dean Street, between Carlton and Vanderbilt Avenues, in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. It lies along a former industrial strip comprising three long blocks of Pacific and Dean Streets, characterized by large and architecturally magnificent industrial structures built in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Within two blocks of the Spalding Building lies the Prospect Heights Historic District, a “cohesive district composed of single-family row houses and multiple dwellings almost all of which were built during the final thirty-five years of the nineteenth century” as described on its State and National Registers application.
The Ward’s building was six stories tall, with a façade of glazed white terra cotta tiles. Graceful Grecian-inspired arches ran the length of the building, front and back. Ornamental detailing ran the length of the building. At one end stood a 120-foot (37 m) smoke stack, previously used in the baking process.
It had six floors, a basement, and sub-basement, with a total area is more than 4 acres (16,000 m2).
In 1911, George S. Ward, President of the Ward Baking Company, and a team of architects returned from a European tour with plans for two great baking plants for the New York area. One was built in that year in the Bronx, the other in what is now Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.
We were gone for 30 days and when we returned the plans were completed,” Ward related to a journalist from The Baseball Magazine in 1926. “They were made literally in mid-Atlantic.” As evidenced from the graceful arches, the architects had been inspired by Greco-Roman designs.
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Wikipedia