58 Kent Street, Former pencil factory in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, United States.
58 Kent Street is a six-story Art Deco building in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. The upper facade is decorated with terra cotta sculptures shaped like pencils, making it immediately recognizable from the street.
The Eberhard Faber company used this building as a factory from the 1920s until 1952, when production moved to Pennsylvania. At that time, Greenpoint was one of the main centers of pencil manufacturing in the United States.
The terra cotta pencils decorating the upper part of the facade are a direct reference to what was once made inside these walls. Today the building is used as office space, but its industrial exterior remains clearly visible from the street.
The building is easy to reach on foot in the Greenpoint neighborhood, not far from the East River waterfront. The terra cotta decorations on the facade are clearly visible from the sidewalk, but the interior is not open to the public.
The Eberhard Faber factory was the first in the United States to produce colored pencils, and it also introduced metal tip covers and rubber erasers to writing instruments. All of this happened a few blocks from the current East River waterfront.
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