The
Red Hook StarªRevue SOUTH BROOKLYN’S COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER
2ND JULY ISSUE, 2014
A Red Hook monument goes silent forever photos and text by Micah B. Rubin
F
or 60 years, the ruckus of machines and tools rang though Golten Marine’s machine shop at 160 Van Brunt.
A hive of mechanics and workers toiled for long hours as they rebuilt engines and drive systems of ships and tankers stranded throughout the world. Even when it was quiet, an air compressor’s hiss rang through the workshop. On July 3, Goltens went silent, the building sold to LIVWRK, a developer with plans to convert the industrial space into office and creative spaces.
second home.
the guys would stay together at the shop.
Edik Fishman, a jack-of-all trade with 17 years of Goltens experience was decommissioning the machine shop’s electrical system. While he slowly climbed the studded, grease-caked stairs to the light-soaked second floor, the 70year old with a grey stubbly beard and smears of grease on his cheeks paused to impart words of advice.
“Friday nights was poker night,” said Sandro Morelli, 66, who originally worked on the night shift. “We would wash up, have sandwiches and play poker until the morning. Just a friendly game to stay together with the people you were working with. Those [nights] I miss,” he said.
For the employees of Goltens - many of whom spent their careers covered in the building’s grease and grime – the closing hurts. Not because on April 4th, they lost their jobs. Not because they lost their income. Because they lost their family.
“Have more than one child. Who does my son have after I am gone?” he lamented. “He is alone.”
Since then, the same guys who spent years mending and repairing damaged ship parts have been dismantling their
On some nights, when 2nd shift would finish, rather than head home to their families or to the neighborhood bars,
Like losing a family member For the employees of Goltens, shuttering the facility is like losing a family member.
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
For 48 years, Sandro worked for Goltens, He started in 1966 at Noro Incorporated, a non union shop in New Jersey. His job moved to the company’s unionized Red Hook facility on Van Brunt in 1968, where he worked until retiring in as the Machine Shop Supervisor in January 2014 but temporarily brought out of retirement to help close down the shop. Sandro remembers his first day on the
job like it was yesterday. “When I first came here and walked through that door at 9:30 in the morning, everybody in the place spoke a foreign language. We thought Brooklyn was part of America, but we came over here and we couldn’t understand a damn thing. That’s how it started,” he joked. Even today the few remaining workers cleaning up the space maintain that internationality. The General Manager’s originally Croatian, the Service Engineer from Spain, Business Development Manager from India, other workers are from Ukraine and South America. “Most of our work force was from other countries,” said Shari Umland, the Human Resource manager who worked for Goltens for 25 years and from time to time brought her son to work with her. (please turn to page 3)