Antique Brick Show

Charles Terrace is coming down.

Buildings that structurally could live another 100 years are being scrapped, erased and disassembled.  But there is more than what can be seen that is being destroyed.  What is being carried off in dumpsters, mixed in with the shards of wood and metal, is the stigma of what life used to be at Charles Terrace.  All the negative images that materialize when you say "public housing" are being erased.  And from this clean slate a new housing development called Emerald Springs is being born.

From a clean slate comes a rebirth, returning the site's mission to the time where providing temporary housing for the most needy took first flight.

But before this new beginning, there is still time to remember the past.   Embedded in the salvaged brick are memories of two brick manufacturing companies and their long ago industrial might.

Powell & Minnock Brick

At the turn of the century, along the Hudson River in Albany county New York stood one hundred and thirty brick manufacturers. The ample supply of clay along the Hudson river shore bank made this the largest brick making region in the world, employing seven to eight thousand workers.  These brick manufacturers fed the insatiable appetite of New York City, the fastest growing city in the world.

But by the 1950s, the brick industry was consolidating and moving to new sources of raw material in the southern United States, diminishing the appetite for Hudson River brick.  Only 10 brick plants remained operating.  By the 1970s, this was reduced to 2 plants.  Finally, in 2001, the last plant, Powell & Minnock, ceased operations forever.

But in 1895, the Powell & Minnock brick Company opened its doors in an area just north of Coeymans (pronounced Quee-mans), NY between today's New York Route 144 and the Hudson River.  At its peak it would have an annual output of 50 million brick and ship products as far north as Canada, south to Delaware and west to Ohio.  Among the many projects supplied by P&M include New York City's 320 acre Co-op City and Detroit's own Charles Terrace.

Clippert & Sons

At the turn of the century, Detroit was also reaping rewards from the demand for brick. In the 1890s, there were two dozen brick yards within or near Detroit.  Brick making centered in Springwells Township, in the vicinity of Michigan Avenue and Lonyo, due to the exceptional quality of its "blue clay."  They employed some 750 workers and made nearly 100 million bricks per year.  However, the work was available for only part of the year, from April to mid-October. It's workers, mainly German and Polish immigrants, were force to live in "appalling poverty". The State of Michigan concluded: “The inmates of our houses of correction and our prisons are better fed, more comfortably clad and housed than these people are.” (pg. 3)

Clippert Brick opened its doors in 1880 with George Clippert becoming president of the company in 1899.  Clippert owned three brick yards in southwest Detroit along the Michigan Central Railroad near the current Dearborn and Detroit border at Wyoming and Southern Avenues.  It was one of the oldest brick operators in Detroit when the company dissolved in 1989.




Clippert Brickyard is at #64
#57-#64 are Springwells Township Brickyards 1890-1905
link

Believed to be the original Clippert Brickyard Office
at Southern Avenue and Wyoming Street