Iron Works

Keep looking down, that’s where I’m at. How else will you find references to foundries that closed decades ago. In November 2025 I was slouching north on Elizabeth Street in Little Italy, having heard the Elizabeth Street Garden, a repository of not only green plants but also eclectic sculpture. might be shut down and paved over in the name of high rise building, as the current People in Charge are on a housing kick and don’t mind sacrificng green space. The threat, though, was stymied, for now.

At #236 Elizabeth I found this embossed serifed lettering for Boyce & McIntire, owners of the Atlantic Iron Works that had created the cast iron front of the brick building in the mid-1800s.

“Boyce & McIntire was the 19th-century partnership of Daniel D. Boyce and John Rogers McIntire, who owned and operated the Atlantic Iron Works foundry in Lower Manhattan. Active from approximately 1862 to 1877, the foundry was located at 706 East 12th Street. Their cast iron work is sometimes identified in architectural remnants from that era.” [Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation]

Nothing, of course, remains of the old factory building at #706 East 12th, as a high rise apartment house went up there decades ago. East of Avenue C, the East Village was once home to industry like iron and gas works, and by the waterside, dry docks.

Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)