Cathedrals of Industry

(photographs by Michael L. Horowitz, text by James P. Holtje)

Last month my husband and I went to an event at the 92nd Street Y where Michael Horowitz and Jim Holtje talked about this book (and about the larger subject of America’s “industrial past, present, and future”) with Paul Krugman and Esther Fuchs. I should have just bought a copy of the book that night, but I didn’t feel like waiting on line, and I also thought I didn’t really need another coffee table book. But I wanted to read the book and look at all the pictures (some of which were projected onto a screen during the event), so I got it from the library. I then proceeded to read it delightedly over the course of a few days, with many pauses to show various pictures to my husband, who at some point said “you want a copy of this, don’t you?” So I decided to get a copy of this book after all. It’s gorgeous—the paper stock and printing are very good—and has so much interesting stuff in it. The book is divided into three sections (Raw Materials, Workshops and Factories, and Infrastructure) and within each section there are photos (mostly color, some black and white) of various relevant sites, with some text explaining the story of each particular factory/train station/water treatment plant or whatever. There are photos of the Hoboken train station and the now-gone piers in lower Manhattan from the 1970s; there are photos of Manhattan’s last remaining silk flower manufacturer from 2023. There are photos of grain elevators in Buffalo and giant blast furnaces at Bethlehem Steel. There’s a photo from a silk thread factory that shut down when workers tried to organize, with a workbench above which hangs an insurance company calendar still open to August 1957, the month that the place closed. Horowitz does a great job of capturing both the vastness of these industrial spaces and the details of architecture, machines, and workspaces, and Holtje’s text accompanies the photos well. If you’re at all interested in industrial/post-industrial landscapes, I highly recommend this book.