Industry · 1879 – 1929
The Ansonia Clock Company
The clock empire that built a factory one block away, survived a catastrophic fire, ran for fifty years, and shipped its machinery to the Soviet Union.
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A clock company comes to Brooklyn
The Ansonia Clock Company was already a giant of American timekeeping — founded in 1851 in Ansonia, Connecticut, by the brass magnate Anson Phelps — when it expanded to Brooklyn in 1879, building a large factory in the South Slope just a block from Windsor Place. At its height the company turned out millions of clocks: parlor clocks, school clocks, the big public clocks that hung in railroad stations across the country.
The fire of 1880
In October 1880, barely a year after it opened, a major fire tore through the Brooklyn factory — destroying buildings, machinery, and inventory, with losses estimated at roughly $750,000 in period dollars. (The neighborhood legend that it “burned down the day it opened” compresses the story; the fire came the following year.) True to the industrial nerve of the era, Ansonia rebuilt on the same site within a year and resumed production.
Fifty years, then a Soviet ending
Ansonia ran in Brooklyn for roughly half a century. Then, in 1929, the company sold the bulk of its timekeeping machinery and tooling to Amtorg, the Soviet government's American trading company. The equipment — and some of the skilled workers — were shipped to Moscow, where they helped seed the Soviet clock-and-watch industry that produced brands like Poljot and Sekonda. An American clock factory one block from Windsor Place became, in part, the machinery of Russian timekeeping.
Who — and what — was Amtorg?
Amtorg Trading Corporation is the strange part of the story. Incorporated in New York in May 1924 — by merging Armand Hammer's Allied American Corporation with two other firms — it was the Soviet Union's first trade representation in the United States. The two countries had no diplomatic relations until 1933, so until then Amtorg, controlled from Moscow by the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade, functioned as a de facto Soviet trade delegation and quasi-embassy operating out of Manhattan. It was also widely understood to double as a base for Soviet intelligence-gathering on American industry.
Buying America's machinery, one factory at a time
During the first Five-Year Plan, Amtorg went on a buying spree — negotiating contracts with Ford, General Electric, International Harvester, the architect Albert Kahn, the dam-builder Hugh L. Cooper, and more than a hundred other American firms, taking advantage of how desperate the Depression-era economy was for orders. By 1927 its purchases for shipment to the USSR had jumped to $31 million in a single year. Whole factories' worth of American tooling — Ansonia's clock works among them — were crated up in New York and reassembled in the Soviet Union. The brick beside Windsor Place was one small node in an industrial transfer that helped build the early Soviet economy.
What's there now
The factory didn't disappear. It was converted to housing and renamed Ansonia Court — today a 70-unit co-op complex spanning 7th to 8th Avenues between 12th and 13th Streets. The brick that once made clocks now makes apartments, and the name still hangs over the door.
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