Ever wonder how the pasta gets made? This photograph from circa 1932 shows an "Automatic Short Paste Drying Unit," which promised pasta-making "From Press to Package without Handling." The machine itself was manufactured by the Consolidated Macaroni Machine Corporation at 156-166 Sixth Street in Gowanus. Ignazio De Francisci, an engineer from Sicily, founded Consolidated Macaroni Machine Corporation in 1914 to provide pasta-making machinery for the growing pasta-producing industry in the United States.
In 1952, Consolidated Macaroni Machine Corporation changed its name to DEMACO (De Francisci Machine Corporation) and was headquartered at 46-45 Metropolitan Avenue. Luckily for us, DEMACO posted a video of this machine in action in 2015. While DEMACO is now based in Florida, this photo and the company's history show us an example of one of the many industries of the borough of Brooklyn.
This photo was donated by Leonard De Francisci and digitized as a part of Our Streets, Our Stories (OSOS), a community heritage project part of the Culture in Transit grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge. To see more images, ephemera and objects from this project, visit the Our Streets, Our Stories collection on our digital collections portal. To listen to oral histories and view transcripts, visit OSOS's oral history hub.
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 to search our collections. Questions? Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.
This blog post reflects the opinions of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of Brooklyn Public Library.
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