![]() The processes ceased long ago but they scarred the building walls are stained by rust and oxidized sugar, and the bottoms of massive bone char filters are streaked where the sugary syrup had dripped. The thousands of employees, who made their living at the factory and lived in the areas surrounding it, cultivated the neighborhood’s early development and became an integral part of Williamsburg’s history.ĭevoid of human figures, many of Raphaelson’s photos examine the once powerful, now dormant, machines used to refine the sugar. In 1900, the refinery changed its name to highlight its Domino brand, whose iconic illuminated sign would later light up the Brooklyn skyline with a star dotting its “i.” The complex grew to occupy more than a quarter mile of Williamsburg’s waterfront and at its peak in the 1920s, the factory had the capacity to refine 4 million pounds of sugar daily and employed 4,500 workers. Only 25 years after it opened, the factory refined more than half of the nation’s sugar. Buyįirst built in 1855 by the Havemeyers, a wealthy, industrialist family, the refinery survived a fire in 1882, endured a couple changes in ownership, and underwent a rapid expansion, becoming the largest such complex in the world. Paul Raphaelson, known internationally for his formally intricate urban landscape photographs, was given access to photograph every square foot of the refinery weeks before its demolition. Photographs from the book are also on display at New York’s Front Room Gallery until January 14.īrooklyn's Sweet Ruin: Relics and Stories of the Domino Sugar Refineryīrooklyn's Domino Sugar Refinery, once the largest in the world, shut down in 2004 after a long struggle. ![]() Long fascinated by old factories and urban landscapes, he found in the buildings an intriguing subject: a type of Rorschach test because, he said in an interview, the factory “represents different things to so many different groups of people.” Raphaelson’s desire to explore how cities and societies relate to their symbols of modernity and progress-and what happens when they are outgrown and abandoned-drives his new photo book, Brooklyn’s Sweet Ruin: Relics and Stories of the Domino Sugary Refinery. For the next decade, the buildings sat still, quiet and empty-falling into disrepair, awaiting destruction.Ī year before demolition began clearing the way for new developments along the waterfront, photographer Paul Raphaelson documented the refinery’s remnants. But in 2004, the machines stopped and workers laid off. Inside its humid and sticky walls, workers spent long days laboring over machines refining raw sugar from Caribbean plantations. Table sugar is sometimes an ingredient in homemade firecrackers, and amateur rocket builders like to use a mix of sugar and potassium nitrate * as fuel.For 150 years, a massive building and its annexes loomed over the East River and Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. Extreme heat forces sucrose to decompose and form a volatile chemical called hydroxymethylfurfural, which easily ignites and sets the rest of the sugar on fire. At high temperatures, however, the sugar itself can be set ablaze. ![]() If you keep your stove on a low setting, the sugar will eventually become charcoal, in the same way that logs can smolder without actually catching on fire. The resulting sticky material takes on a brown color because the sugar is partially burned in the process. (Powdered sugar is marginally more dangerous.) If you heat up sugar on the stovetop or in an oven, it will caramelize before it catches fire this happens as heat drives out water molecules and the sugar molecules link together in long chains. Granulated table sugar won’t explode by itself, but it can ignite at high temperatures, depending on the humidity and how quickly it’s heated up. No need to fret about your bag of Domino, though. According to the National Fire Protection Association, a room with at least 5 percent of its surface area covered with anything more than 1/32 nd of an inch of organic dust presents an explosion hazard. In that case, a spark could supply enough energy to set off a small explosion, and any place containing sugar dust and lots of oxygen-like a sugar silo-could quickly become a dangerous environment. Neither a sugar cube nor a wooden log is likely to be ignited by a small spark, but a nano- or micron-sized bit of sugar would be much more susceptible. Table sugar, or sucrose, is flammable under the right conditions, just like wood (which is made of cellulose, or lots of sugar molecules linked together). Tiny sugar particles burn up almost instantly because of their high ratio of surface area to volume. Sugar dust is thought to have ignited the blast, which claimed at least eight lives. Firefighters finally put out the blaze at a Georgia sugar refinery Thursday, a week after an explosion set a silo on fire.
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