Some time ago, I had the opportunity to scout the defunct Grumman airplane factory in Bethpage, Long Island. Once the leading manufacturer of everything from F-14’s to the Apollo Lunar Module, Grumman was bought by a larger company in the 1990’s and moved out of Bethpage. The enormous complex is now being converted into residential and commercial space, with many of the remaining warehouses having been converted into studio space like the one pictured below:
While scouting there recently, I got to see a few of the remaining aircraft factory warehouses. Though they’re completely empty, it was still pretty amazing. Each warehouse is enormous, stretching on for room after room after room.
The below picture gives you a sense of how much space was used for airplane assembly:
(courtesy Fleet Air Archive)
Also, when I took my tour, a few of the buildings didn’t have power…
…which was creepy, especially when you realized that some of the floors have sudden significant drops, and a wrong step could send you plummeting:
I can’t remember exactly what this was designed for – I want to say it was for working on the underside of planes, but I feel like the explanation was more clever than that. Anyone know? I seem to recall that these were capable of filling with water.
But what really interested me were the floors, which looked like brick, but were actually made of wooden blocks. Why wood? Because when you drop a 5 ton engine on wooden blocks, they don’t smash into a million pieces.
But here’s the neat thing: As I was taking pictures, I began to notice long lines of uprooted wooden blocks, zigzagging across the floor as if an earthquake had struck:
Turns out, this is a result of the wood expanding due to temperature:
It was pretty amazing how it erupted in linear patterns, stretching on for hundreds of feet across the warehouse floor. I’m curious if it was a gradual uprooting, or a sudden event:
More upturned blocks:
One last tidbit: Grumman was also responsible for designing and building the LLV, or Long Life Vehicle, which you might recognize below:
-SCOUT
Wow…that’s where they built the LEM that saved the Apollo 13 crew. I’m a bit of a nut for early space flight stuff, as much as I am for Coney Island and for cool old buildings.
I once had the occasion to ride around NYC for a couple of days with David Lynch — I was helping to publicize his book on meditation, and was escorting him to interviews, readings, etc. Early on, I started to point out beautiful old buildings and he loved them all too — it was kind of a bonding point for us (and since I’m not in the film industry, it was a rare occasion to spend a teeny bit of quality time with the greatest living American avant-garde movie director).
I love your blog.
There’s a pretty cool air and space museum out there, too.
Wood block flooring is still in use a lot today. It’s good for absorbing spilled industrial lubricants, it has a certain amount of give as you pointed out, and it’s cheap and replenishable, sort of a “green” material. Lots of car factories still use it. I’ve never seen a crack quite like that, but I would guess it might be related to the condition of the subfloor – maybe a seam in the concrete or an expansion joint or something, or just the settling of the building’s foundation.
Grumman used structural steel from demolished NYC elevated subway lines to build their factories and airplanes during World War II.
they also built a lot of the UPS trucks you see around town
I will bet you that those blocks heaved because they got wet. Wood floors hate to get wet, and when they do, they expand, and jump up just like in your picture. Happened in my kitchen once.
I was in the Electro Motive locomotive factory in McCook Ill & it also has a similar wood block floor made up of thousands & thousands of 4×4s on their ends.
All his life, my father was a machinist. Wooden block floors were and probably still are common in machine shops.
[...] couldn’t understand why there was so much fuss over the new Miley Cyrus video. We visited an abandoned airplane factory in Bethpage, Long Island. And finally, we wondered if moonshine will become the new PBR. That would [...]
[...] couldn’t understand why there was so much fuss over the new Miley Cyrus video. We visited an abandoned airplane factory in Bethpage, Long Island. And finally, we wondered if moonshine will become the new PBR. That would [...]