The photo shows the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The archival photograph is dated 1952.
The factory closed in 2004. Its iconic brick refinery building was preserved, and a modern glass office building was inserted inside the historic shell. Next to it, the spectacular Domino Park was created along the waterfront.
Founded by the Havemeyer family in the 1850s, the refinery was considered the largest sugar refinery in the world. Ships brought raw cane sugar here from the Caribbean, Louisiana, and other regions, where it was refined, decolorized, crystallized, and turned into white sugar, powdered sugar, and sugar cubes for the entire United States.
The factory’s greatest significance was that it became the foundation of the American sugar monopoly. In 1887, the Havemeyers created the Sugar Trust: companies they owned controlled about 55% of all sugar refining capacity in the United States. After reorganizing as the American Sugar Refining Company, the corporation absorbed or pushed out competitors, and by 1907 it controlled approximately 98% of the American refined sugar market.
One important clarification: that 98% referred to the corporation as a whole, not to the single building in Williamsburg. However, the Brooklyn refinery was its primary production center — the “crown jewel” of the sugar empire. The company’s scale was so enormous that American Sugar became one of the original 12 companies included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average when the index was created in 1896, alongside the largest heavy industrial companies in the United States.
The Domino name was introduced as a trademark in 1901.
— Library of Congress, on the original Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Photograph by Ernst Haas.
And this is what the Domino Sugar Factory looks like in 2026:
