The GMDC: One of 40 Historic Sites That Need Your Vote!

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The Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center (GMDC)—a huge, brick industrial warehouse at the end of Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint—is one of the 40 historic New York City sites currently vying for $3 million in grants through Partners in Preservation, a collaboration between American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

It’s also the future home of the Greenpoint Boathouse and Environmental Education Center and the North Brooklyn Boat Club—a place that, once open, will provide opportunities for environmental education, kayaking, canoeing, and access to a much-maligned waterway that has historically been off limits.

GMDC needs the grant money to bring this boathouse into being and improve its waterfront on Newtown Creek for public use.

This is where you come in. To help divvy up the grant money, Partners in Preservation is asking New Yorkers to vote on the sites they love—up to one time per day. Which takes all of 10 seconds, tops, through Facebook.

GMDC is just one of the sites we’ll be blogging about till the voting period ends May 21. In addition to helping revitalize the North Brooklyn waterfront,  participating in the voting process will help you learn more about its importance to local businesses and its storied past.

The eight original buildings of GMDC–erected between 1887-1903–were combined to form an industrial complex that once produced rope out of materials from all over the world. Now there are over 30 small businesses in the complex, ranging from metal and woodworkers to custom printers, artists, even a designer/engineer of solar energy systems.

This weekend you can check out all the artisans, engineers and artists working in the GMDC. Like many of the 40 sites picked by Partners in Preservation for this preservation campaign, GMDC is hosting an open house both Saturday, May 5 and Sunday, May 6 so the public can tour the building and visit the open studios of its manufacturing and artisan tenants.

Learn more about the Partners in Preservation Open House here.

Vote for GMDC here. (It takes 10 seconds through Facebook!)

And check out more historic sites to vote for at http://www.partnersinpreservation.org/

Then tweet about it! #PreserveNYC is the hashtag.

FULL Disclosure: BB partnered up with Partners in Preservation to spread the word about its preservation campaign for 40 landmarks around NYC, and in particular the sites in Brooklyn. We are getting paid to blog about the campaign (which is sweet for us since we like to write about historic Brooklyn anyway) but we haven’t been told to express a particular point of view. The opinions expressed here are strictly our own.

 

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