Eat the City(49)
Sugar production on the island peaked in 1952 and then slowly dwindled. As the harvest became more mechanized, the sugar industry laid off 42,000 Puerto Rican workers during the 1950s. Another surge of Puerto Ricans flooded New York, and the city’s mayor, Robert Wagner, visited San Juan to discuss migration. Labor costs had increased, the mills had been poorly managed, and a new program sought to industrialize the island rather than promote agriculture. The local mill where Jorge Torres’s sugar had been processed closed in 1967, and other big centrales followed.
BY the time Jorge Torres came to New York in the late sixties, the old Havemeyer sugar plant, now known by the brand name Domino Sugar, was still chugging away on the Williamsburg waterfront. The Havemeyer family no longer had any connection to the refinery. Sugar had become ubiquitous, not only sweetening soda and ice cream, candy and cake, but also enhancing flavor in processed and fast foods like TV dinners and McDonald’s burgers and buns. As a new sweetener, high-fructose corn syrup, gained market shares, Domino’s parent company changed its name from the American Sugar Corporation to Amstar Corporation so as not to be limited, specifically, to sugar.
Joe Crimi worked for twenty-five years in the Domino plant, starting in 1976, when he was twenty-two. He was a machine operator and a forklift driver; he worked the packet line, where he loaded paper packets into a spinning machine that filled them with sugar, and the five-pound line, where sacks of this size were filled and sealed. For a while, he hung powder, as they called it, pressing a button so hot confectioner’s sugar flowed in waves into hundred-pound bags. Sugar for him, too, was a family business. His mother-in-law worked as a telephone operator at Domino for three decades, and his father-in-law was a blacksmith in the Domino repair shop. Four of Joe’s wife’s cousins were truck drivers who delivered sugar. Union members all, they enjoyed working conditions that had improved far beyond anything Henry O. Havemeyer would have allowed. “I loved the place. It was phenomenal,” says Joe, who recalls good vacations and other benefits and fair treatment from the owners. The company hired college kids to work summers when employees went on vacation—and some stayed. People kept right on working into their eighties. “It was like you don’t want to go,” says Joe.
The factory’s doors were open to the East River, where ships packed full of raw sugar came in from all over the world. Most of the factory workers didn’t talk much about the sugar’s origins—they just knew it kept coming. Scrolls, or pipes with spiral stainless-steel turning blades, circulated the product through the buildings. The heart of the beast pumped sugar through steel and brass arteries to every limb of the eleven-acre plant.
Workers in the factory used to eat the raw sugar by the handful. “There’s everything in it,” says Joe. “It tastes earthier.” They used refining techniques the Havemeyers would have recognized, pouring brownish sugar syrup into bone black filters two stories high and watching it come out clear. Aged machines had been refitted with stainless-steel parts and painted hospital green. Many of the machines, imported long ago from France, Germany, and Switzerland, were so outdated that there were no spare parts, and workers in the maintenance shop had to build them. “They may not have had the high school, they may not have had the college, but they can work with their hands,” says Dennis Richards, another Domino employee. Every night, they would shoot hot water through every machine to leave them clean.
The warehouses could hold millions of pounds of raw sugar—plant managers were careful never to halt production by allowing supply to run out. Containers moving sugar from one place to another closed like jaws, with a clank, and made a psssss sound when they opened, and workers could tell by the rhythm if something malfunctioned. Sugar slammed down from a height into the bin below with a hollow bang, like a drum. Powder mills hammering away to make a fine dust of confectioner’s sugar produced a jet engine roar. So much sugar dissolved in the air like a candy fog that a special circulation system was designed to suck it out. A film of sugar settled on the workers’ skin, so that the sweat dripping down their faces in the heat tasted sweet on their tongues.
Much of the labor was still manual, but the machines continued to advance, and every decade or two, the number of workers seemed to halve.
Sugar waned as sweeteners such as high-fructose corn syrup, saccharin, and aspartame waxed. The British company Tate & Lyle bought Amstar in 1988. The company, whose founders had contributed to London’s Tate Gallery, had become the largest sugar and sweetener company in the world. In the 1980s, Joe, a union leader, watched as new managers slashed benefits, fired employees, and expanded workloads of the holdouts.
After more strikes and layoffs at Domino, the plant was operating at only a fraction of its capacity, with whole rooms shut down. During the last twenty-month strike, what the guys called “rigor mortis” set in on the old machines—with no one to grease and wash them, they cracked and refused to move at all. No more workers were left in the maintenance shop to make repairs. “It was just a matter of timing,” said Joe. “We knew it was going to close.”
In 2001, Tate & Lyle sold Domino to the Fanjul brothers, exiled Cuban sugar planters managing their own sugarcane kingdom out of Florida. When the Fanjuls announced three years later that they would shutter the plant in Williamsburg, some neighbors thought—despite the smoke whirling from the chimneys—the plant was already closed. Much of Brooklyn’s industry had long since left. Still the largest manufacturer in Williamsburg, Domino had gone from 4,500 to 300 workers, whom a newspaper called “relics from a bygone era.” The last age of sugar in New York, that of good union jobs for Joe Crimi and his friends, had passed.