{"id":670907,"date":"2022-05-25T10:45:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-25T10:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grist.org\/?p=571119"},"modified":"2022-05-25T10:45:00","modified_gmt":"2022-05-25T10:45:00","slug":"a-warehouse-by-any-other-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/05\/25\/a-warehouse-by-any-other-name\/","title":{"rendered":"A \u2018Warehouse\u2019 By Any Other Name"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
On May 24, 2019, Anastasia Kidd picked her 1-year-old up from the floor of her apartment in Red Hook, a waterfront neighborhood in Brooklyn. A thin layer of dust coated his skin, his hair, his clothes. \u201cHe had dirt all over him,\u201d Kidd recalled a few months later during a community meeting<\/a>. \u201cI had to close the windows.\u201d Half a block away, several bulldozers scraped the ground, digging up layers of wood, metal, and red bricks that for over a century had comprised the Lidgerwood complex. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Built in 1882, the two-story metalworking factory was the birthplace of boilers that heated the booming city, coffee hulling machines shipped to plantations in Brazil, and engines that propelled the drilling of the Panama Canal. When the foundry left Brooklyn\u2019s waterfront in 1927, the building passed from owner to owner until 2018, when the United Parcel Service, or UPS, bought it and several surrounding properties as part of a plan to erect a 1.2-million-square-foot warehouse in its place. As bulldozers rammed down the Lidgerwood\u2019s centuries-old walls and scraped the site clean of its history, a layer of dust blanketed the neighborhood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Back then, Red Hook\u2019s residents \u2014 a mix of Black and Latino families that had lived there for generations and wealthier newcomers \u2014 had no way of knowing that the UPS warehouse was the first in an onslaught of e-commerce shipping facilities that would spread unimpeded through the neighborhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDuring the dark of night of the COVID lockdown, last-mile facilities<\/a> arrived,\u201d said Andrea, a Red Hook resident who moved to the neighborhood in 2007. (She preferred to omit her last name to avoid confrontation with some of her neighbors.) \u201cThat\u2019s when everybody went, \u2018What is happening?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n