This is a coffee table book – almost two and a half pounds – full of beautiful photographs. And it came out today. We are proud to be included with other remarkable spaces around the country through almost a dozen photos and a page of text about the history of seltzer, of the Brooklyn Seltzer Boys, and of the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum.
American culture and politics are shot through with nostalgia for the country’s industrial past, a time when we actually made things―physical things, not patterns of bits and bytes. But what did this past actually look like? Photographer Michael L. Horowitz has traveled throughout the Northeast in search of its remnants, both heritage businesses that have survived to the present and the ruins of decommissioned factories and infrastructure. The spaces he takes us inside range from the intimate to the vast―from the last silk flower workshop in New York’s Garment District to Buffalo’s looming grain elevators and the Paterson Great Falls Hydroelectric Plant, in operation since 1914. Horowitz photographs these places with the eye not only of a photographer but of someone who has taken the time to understand their workings in detail―an understanding that is extended to the reader through Jim Holtje’s lively and carefully researched text.
