One Bedford-Stuyvesant Block's Industrial Past

This week’s Photo of the Week takes us to Kosciusko Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, on the block that forms the northern boundary of Herbert Von King Park (known in the 19th century as Tompkins Park).

Joseph Wild was an English-born Brooklynite who made his business importing Persian, Turkish, and Indian carpets and selling them in his Manhattan showrooms. In the 1870s, he expanded into manufacturing floor coverings, founding the American Cocoa Matting Company with several local partners. They purchased the property pictured above in 1876 to manufacture cocoa mats (think those traditional brown door mats) and jute rugs. 

Over the next decades they expanded along the block and began manufacturing felt, possibly for rug pads, moving the cocoa mat and jute rug manufacturing slightly northwest to the block between Willoughby and Myrtle avenues and Spencer and Walworth Streets. When that factory’s combustible contents caught fire in 1890, burning nearly the whole block to the ground in a blaze that could be seen from Manhattan, the owners were likely moved to replace much of the wood frame factory on Kosciusko Street with more fire-resistant brick buildings. The original wood frame factory above, however, along with the administrative building pictured to the right, remained standing into the mid-twentieth century, flanking the larger brick factory building in the center.  

Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We look forward to inviting you to CBH in the future to research in our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. In the meantime, please visit our resources page, available here or access the resources of the former Brooklyn Collection here. Our reference staff are still available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.