Walkabout: Troy’s Fortress of Shoddy, Part 1

Read Part 2 of this story.

The architecture and history of Brooklyn will continue to be the focus of my Walkabouts, but every once in a while, it’s nice to get out of town, and head north for a summer excursion. As I assume most people know, I’ve moved a bit north of Brooklyn Heights, all the way to Troy, N.Y., the home of Uncle Sam. Really, Uncle Sam Wilson was from here, is buried here, and this city loves him. By the end of the 19th century, Troy was one of the most prosperous cities in the country, with a burgeoning textile industry, iron and steel works, and a world famous bell foundry. It was the home of one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious engineering and technology centers: Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, and two of this country’s oldest and best women’s schools: the Emma Willard School and Russell Sage College.

Troy was also at the crossroad where the Mohawk River meets the Hudson River on the Erie Canal, and was therefore an industrial and manufacturing city where fortunes were made, and thousands of factory workers were hard at work. Those fortunes show up in the fine architecture here, in an historic downtown that sits on the Hudson River, with factories and warehouses along the river and well inland as well. The industry here is also represented by blocks and blocks of charming housing stock, in many different styles and sizes. It’s a great place for an architectural geek like me. By New York standards, Troy is small, but like Brooklyn, there are architectural goodies here, some of which rival Brooklyn’s best, and, in fact, a few of them were designed by Brooklyn’s best.

Troy lies about seven miles north of Albany, and the easiest way to get there when coming up the New York State Thruway is to get on I-787 north. The highway runs along the west side of the Hudson, and as you approach the exit for South Troy, one can look across the river to where much of Troy’s heavy industry once was, and see…a big castle. It looms large, sitting firmly on the river’s edge like a medieval keep, a fortress against invaders long gone, an anachronism, and one of South Troy’s most visible and well-known landmarks. The address is 1 Jackson Street. Locals have long called it, appropriately, “The Fortress.” This fascinating building has a New York City connection — several, in fact, so sit back and join me here in Troy for the story of the Fortress of Shoddy.

Although it looks much older, the Fortress was actually only completed in 1902. A lot of research has been done on this building, but Troy must have had the same people in their Department of Buildings that Brooklyn had, because there is nothing in the records as to the names of the architect or builders; it’s lost, or was never recorded. The original name of the building is the United Waste Manufacturing Company Building, and it was built as a storage facility for wool and cotton shoddy. Interestingly enough, the main factory and headquarters of United Waste was in Cohoes, another mill town that lies a couple of miles north of this warehouse, and on the other side of the river. Cohoes is called the “Spindle City,” there were so many mills there. It’s interesting that they put the two buildings so far from each other, but there was method in their madness. You can see this building for miles around. It’s great advertising.

Shoddy is a cloth made from reconstituted wool and cotton rags. Long before recycling and reconstituting materials became popular in the late 20th century, mid- 19th century manufacturers had figured out how to turn old clothes, rags, scraps and leftover manufacturing remnants into new fabric. Shoddy was used to make blankets, workmen’s clothing, and more often, soldier’s uniforms. Many of the uniforms of the Union Army during the Civil War were made of shoddy, a practice that continued up until World War I. Shoddy was not a superior material, it did not have the strength of either good wool or cotton, and not surprisingly, there was a great deal of complaining, especially during the Civil War, about the quality of the uniforms. The adjective “shoddy,” meaning inferior and badly made, as you can guess, comes from this fabric.

Troy became famous for its shirt factories, and then its detachable collar and cuff factories, all derived from a Troy woman who cut off her husband’s starched shirt collars and cuffs so that they could be washed more often and separately from his shirts. This grew into a huge industry, as detachable collars, sold in multiple packages, became de rigueur for the 19th century Victorian man. The collar factories, an offshoot of the Arrow Shirt and other garment factories here, gave Troy the nickname, “The Collar City.” There was a lot of raw material in Troy, ready to be reconstituted.

So this was a garment center town, and the manufacture of shoddy was a small, but lucrative industry. Troy actually had two shoddy mills, the building for the other, the Troy Waste Manufacturing Company, still stands on River Street. The United Waste Manufacturing Company, founded in 1899, was one of 88 shoddy mills across the country by 1909; an industry that employed over 2,000 people. By 1906, the factory in Cohoes employed over 130 workers. In addition to the factory headquarters, they had an office in this warehouse, an office in Boston, and one on Leonard Street in lower Manhattan.

Producing shoddy was hard and hazardous work for the factory workers. The rags were soaked in muriatic acid, a process called “carbonizing, “and then dried at temperatures above 100 degrees, which reduced the cotton fibers to carbon. The whole mass was then mixed and oiled, and then ground into a fibrous mass. From this soup, threads were twisted out, and woven into fabric that looked like dyed wool. As can be imagined, this was toxic to workers, especially those working with the hot and dry “carbonized” rags, and respiratory conditions similar to white lung were common.

Fire was a danger as well. This warehouse had a horrific fire in 1908, when a worker named Ann Rumnick had her dress catch fire from machinery sparks, in a baling room where the rags were bundled. The fire spread quickly in the hot dusty room filled with flammable rags. Women were jumping out of the second story windows, and fortunately, the sprinkler system and the fire department were able to put the blaze out. Poor Ann Rumnick died, burned beyond recognition, but the only fatality. The fire caused over $50K in damages, and probably hastened the company’s demise.

United Waste was owned by a group of local prominent investors, including Troy’s former state senator and mayor, Edward J. Murphy, who was the general manager. His son Joseph was the treasurer. The vice president was Colonel William H. Rowe, Jr, who was an office holder in a number of local knitting mills, and was a bank director and trustee of Syracuse University. By 1906, the president of the company was J.J. Ryan. He and Murphy had been responsible for the construction of this warehouse, and for the opening of the Waste and Shoddy Exchange, where materials were bought and traded. They made headlines when they bought 3,000 bales of raw cotton scorched in a Staten Island warehouse fire.

They had the cotton shipped up the Hudson to Troy, and then spread out in a five acre field just to the west of the Fortress. There, about 160 men, women and children sorted, graded, dried and re-baled the cotton for re-sale. The children were organized in gangs, and it was their job to dry the raw cotton by shaking it until it was dry. A trade paper called America’s Textile Reporter announced that “the sight resembles a typical Southern cotton plantation scene at ginning and baling time, and is a most unusual spectacle, so far from the home of King Cotton.” I bet.

Shoddy’s days as a lucrative material were coming to an end by the beginning of the ‘teens. Although the idea of recycling fabric and scrap was a good one, the resulting material was just, well….shoddy. The name itself and its reputation prevented its use for anything other than very limited market. Attempts to use it for soldier’s uniforms during World War I were met with fierce opposition by the armed forces and the soldiers themselves. Uniform suppliers would testify before Congress that our soldiers were being asked to fight a war in Europe’s winters. The least the country could do is supply them with real quality woolen clothing, not shoddy. They were not going to use it. And the industry would virtually disappear, at least in that form.

By that time, the United Waste Management Company had let go of this warehouse. It was now the Hudson River Warehouse Company, owned amazingly enough, by Joseph J. Murphy, who was treasurer of both United Waste and Hudson River Terminal. They were using it as a warehouse, and painted the company name prominently on the building. By 1955, this massive warehouse belonged to the Goldberg Building Material Corporation, part of a larger compound of surrounding buildings. This warehouse was used to store goods and materials.

As one of Troy’s most prominent buildings, the Fortress has long caught the attention of Trojans, but it also grabbed the attention and the wallet of a New Yorker. He bought it. This man’s plans for the massive empty building, an architectural description of the building, and its importance in Troy’s architectural pantheon, will conclude our story, next time. In the meantime, look at the magnificence that is Troy’s Fortress.

(Above photo:bilfazjr on Flickr. The rest of the photos are mine.)