Industry · 1872 – 1873
The Coignet Stone Building
New York City's oldest concrete building — a showroom whose patented French concrete built St. Patrick's arches, now stranded beside a Whole Foods.
The concrete that built a city
Between 1872 and 1873, the New York and Long Island Coignet Stone Company built a showroom and office on the Gowanus, on a five-acre factory site that manufactured béton Coignet — a concrete patented in the 1850s by the Frenchman François Coignet. It was the first American firm to make Coignet stone, and the material went into landmark works: the arches of St. Patrick's Cathedral, floor slabs for the Western Union building, and supply for the Met and the American Museum of Natural History.
Boom and bust
Despite the early prestige, the Coignet Agglomerate Company shuttered completely in 1882. The five-acre complex vanished over the following century — except for the little office, which somehow survived as the lone reminder of what had stood there.
A landmark beside the supermarket
The building was designated a New York City landmark in 2006. When Whole Foods bought the surrounding land it agreed to restore the facade, and the structure underwent a roughly $1.3 million restoration. Today NYC's oldest concrete building stands, improbably intact and freshly painted, beside a Whole Foods parking lot in Gowanus — the last brick of a building boom it helped invent.
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