A huge factory that formerly turned out threads for the Howard Clothes Company (a men’s haberdasher), and before that, gyroscopes, stands on the west side of the pedal to the metal Flatbush Avenue Extension between Concord and Chapel Streets is now a residential tower called The Howard. The superstructure for a huge neon sign that displayed the Howard Clothes name for Manhattan-bound traffic is still there; I remember riding in a car up the FAE and seeing only the H and W remaining. The company was founded in 1924 by founded by Samuel Kappel, Joseph Langerman, and Henry Marks and named after Langerman’s son Howard. Info on Howard Clothes has been somewhat sketchy (not even a wikipedia listing) but luckily, Consumer Grouch has a great page complete with newspaper ads. Howard Clothes remained in business until 1970; it competed with Bond and Eagle Clothes much of its existence and all three has massive neon billboards somewhere in NYC that are now all gone.
Interestingly, Howard Clothes founder Samuel Kappel had acromegaly, a disease of the pituitary gland that causes distorted facial features like those of 1930s-40s actor Rondo Hatton. The disease is treatable in the modern era.
The building was constructed between 1915 and 1916, architect Frank J. Helmle, and was originally a gyroscope factory built by inventor, engineer and industrialist Elmer Ambrose Sperry. With World War I on the horizon, America’s involvement seemed inevitable, and the gyroscope was a key air and sea navigation instrument. The company later developed the UNIVAC computer before being broken up with some divisions joining Honeywell and others Lockheed Martin.
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10/8/24
5 comments
I wonder why the window at the top right sticks out
Looking up some older businesses in my Connecticut hometown I soon found that little or no information is the usual situation for businesses that had closed down in the pre-Internet era. Even rather large businesses have disappeared with almost no trace. So, the lack of information on Howard is not at all surprising.
I believe that in the late 1970’s the Howard building was a training center for the subways.
I worked at Bond’s Clothing store on Fulton St in Brooklyn in the mid-60’s. I passed a Howards Clothing store on the way to the subway. My father worked at Sperry’s factory in Bush Terminal during WW2, where they manufactured the Sperry Bombsight. While not as famous as the Norden Bombsight, it was found to have superior accuracy. He often said as we drove along the Gowanus Expressway – “That’s where we helped win the war”.
In 1944, Sperry sold the Brooklyn factory at 40 Flatbush Avenue Extension to the Howard clothing manufacturing company, which already had a smaller nearby factory.[9]
Postwar, Sperry expanded its interests in electronics and computing, producing the company’s first digital computer, SPEEDAC, in 1953.
During the 1950s, a large part of Sperry Gyroscope moved to Phoenix, Arizona and soon became the Sperry Flight Systems Company. This was to preserve parts of this defense company in the event of a nuclear war. The Gyroscope division remained headquartered in New York—in its massive Lake Success, Long Island, plant (which also served as the temporary United Nations headquarters from 1946 to 1952)—into the 1980s.