1013 Grand Street’s miserable humidity gave us the first air conditioner. — Photo by Paul Cox

In 1902, the Sackett & Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Company of Grand Street were struggling to align their printing plates on paper warped by another humid Brooklyn summer. Customers were demanding more precise color registration as printing technology bounded forward, but there was no known technology that could keep a building at a consistent relative humidity. Sackett & Wilhelms laid out the challenge to the Buffalo Forge Company, specialists in air pumps and heating. A freshly hired young engineer named Willis Haviland Carrier hit upon the solution, which was to one day be recognized by the National Academy of Engineering as one of the top ten greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century. As Bushwick heats up again this June, odds are you’re using it right now.

	One of the few remaining pieces of Carrier’s original system at 1013 Grand. Click to see more.

The five-story brick factory near Newtown Creek which became the world’s first air-conditioned building still stands at the corner of Grand Street and Morgan Avenue. It’s gone through many changes in use and occupancy, and few signs remain of the printers or of Carrier’s air conditioner, but we had to go hunting. The complex takes up several addresses in the fork of Grand and Metropolitan, including the one now housing the ISCP. 1013 Grand itself is home to a familiar Bushwick mix of art studios and workshops, ostensibly non-residential lofts, and a garment factory. Handmade Frames is a major occupant, as was Matt Gagnon Studio until recently. Ironically and predictably, this birthplace of cool is no longer climate-controlled aside from a few window units attached to individual lofts. 

After some snooping around we propitiously ran into Ben Bajorek, who is both a craftsman of furniture and an armchair historian. He has searched the building more thoroughly and found a few relics of Carrier’s system. Most visible from the street is the boiler with its tall chimney, the steam from which was introduced into the air in winter to keep the relative humidity at the target 55 percent. The same level was maintained in the summer by pumping the air through an ammonia-compression refrigerated chamber in the basement which was also fed with additional water vapor, flushing moisture out of the atmosphere as condensation. The runoff was collected in a cistern beneath the rear yard, rather than being dripped all over people on the sidewalk as is the popular method today.  

The basement machinery has sadly disappeared (this is not the Carrier air conditioner that sits in the Smithsonian, which is the first with a centrifugal compressor, from 1922) but the brick ducts which distributed air up to the factory floors can still be seen. While air conditioning went on to make possible the revolution that was four-color-process printing, Sackett & Wilhelms didn’t survive to see it through. They did however stay in business long enough to score some juicy government contracts during World War I, printing some of the most famous propaganda posters of the war. 

It was only a side benefit of Carrier’s system that the building was kept at 70 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter and 80 degrees in the summer: relative humidity being a dynamic function of temperature, this too had to be controlled. However, before 1902 was over Carrier had already sold the same system to the New York Stock Exchange, which became the first building to be air-conditioned strictly for comfort. The rest is climate-controlled history, and a century later America uses more electricity to power our air conditioners than the entire continent of Africa uses, period. For better or worse, most of us back here in the original home of the air conditioner can’t recall what a Brooklyn summer was like without it.

Additional information from Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air Conditioned World by Stan Cox.