Old Ice Factory in Pittsburgh

Consolidated Ice Company Factory No. 2, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania

Date added: September 13, 2023

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Pennsylvania
Industrial

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At the time of its construction in 1907, Consolidated Ice Company Factory No. 2 was the largest ice manufacturing plant in the city, and contributed to the supplanting of the local natural ice industry. As refrigeration became an individual domestic appliance by the middle of the twentieth century, the importance of the ice manufacturing industry itself declined, and the factory was Closed in 1951. This factory building is one of the last surviving elements of the industry in Pittsburgh.

Prior to the development of mechanical refrigeration in the late nineteenth century, the only practical ways to preserve foods were by drying or salting them. This limitation circumscribed the diets of all the world's peoples, and dictated the manner in which food was bought and sold in the marketplace. Except during harvest times, the diets of most people were limited to those few staple foods that could be stored for long periods of time. Thus, people purchased staple foods in large quantities, and perishable foods such as meats as close to the time of preparation as possible. This led to the custom of shopping for food every day, and established an economy of small grocery stores and meat markets scattered throughout residential neighborhoods in American cities.

The preservative effects of cold temperatures were well known but impractical for most people to use. It was common practice for people in cold climates to harvest "natural" ice from local rivers and lakes by cutting it into blocks and storing it in "ice houses" for use in warmer months, until it melted or was used up. This was a difficult and time-consuming process that was limited by geography and the weather. Only a few wealthy individuals, such as Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, were able to store natural ice for their own use.

It was not until after the Civil War in the United States that the natural ice industry became a big business, when the harvesting and handling of ice was mechanized and ice could be hauled long distances by train. Ice companies formed to organize these activities and to erect warehouses in cities for the storage of large amounts of ice. These companies began to market ice to individuals in the 1870s, promoting the domestic "refrigerator" or "icebox" industry, and developed a system of ice supply stations and local delivery to individual households. By 1880, five million tons of natural ice were harvested annually in the United States, mostly in the Northeast, and between one-third and one-half of it was sold to individuals. The business was so successful that by 1899, twenty-five million tons of natural ice were harvested from lakes and rivers, and large companies had formed, such as the Knickerbocker Ice Companies of New York and Philadelphia and the Consolidated Ice Company of New York. After the turn of the century, the amount of natural ice harvested yearly began to decline, but as late as 1920 fifteen million tons were still being harvested in the winter. In fact, as late as 1914, two-thirds of the ice used in Chicago was natural, as was three-quarters of the ice consumed in Detroit.

Limitations associated with the natural ice industry led to the rapid development of ice manufacturing during the nineteenth century. One problem with natural ice was the cost of harvesting and hauling it, especially over long distances. People in warmer climates, such as the American South, did not have the opportunity to harvest ice locally, and had to purchase and transport it at great cost. Ice harvesting was also subject to the vagaries of the weather, and two successive warm winters in 1888-89 and 1889-90 produced an "ice famine" in 1890 in all but the most northern of states. Meanwhile, the demand for ice grew tremendously, as people became familiar and comfortable with, and then dependent on, the refrigeration of foods. The great growth of the beer brewing industry in the U.S. after 1890 (which utilized cold fermentation and cold storage) added to the demand. Finally, the growth of cities and industries in the United States polluted the water supplies, and thus the ice, near the big cities (a typhoid outbreak in Chicago in 1901 was blamed on contaminated natural ice). All of these factors created a demand for an alternative to natural ice and spurred on the development of the artificial ice industry.

While research into the principles of refrigeration had taken place in the eighteenth century, and the first successful experiments in producing artificial ice occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century, it wasn't until 1856 that the first documented commercial ice manufacturing took place. In the United States, the first efforts took place (not surprisingly) in the South, where all five of the ice factories that existed in 1869 were located. After 1875, the refrigeration industry began to develop, with large numbers of machines built and sold in the 1880s and 1890s. Even so, of the 220 ice factories in the United States in 1889, 170 of them were located in the South. It wasn't until the 1890s and 1900s that mechanical refrigeration became a national industry, spurred on especially by great improvements in refrigerants after 1900, and began to challenge the natural ice industry. There were 790 ice factories in the U.S. in 1899 (none of which were located in the seven coldest states), but 3200 ice factories existed in 1907, only eight years later. There were 3500 ice factories in 1912; 4800 in 1920; and 6000 by the mid-1920s. In 1907, 15 million tons of artificial ice were made, matching the natural ice harvest. A total of 26 million tons of ice were manufactured in 1915, and 56 million tons by the late 1920s.

One of the earliest forms of ice-making was the freezing and scraping of ice from refrigerated metal plates. However, the typical manufacturing process from the beginning involved the immersion of galvanized steel cans filled with water in tanks of super-cooled brine. Water treatments of various kinds were used to clean and clarify the water used to make the ice. Each can of water could produce a 300- to 400-pound block of ice. These blocks were removed from the steel cans, scored by saws (for future division), and stored in refrigerated ice storage rooms until needed. A large ice factory in the first decade of the twentieth century could produce as much as 1000 tons of ice per day. The ice was distributed in the cities by horse-drawn ice wagons; it was estimated that in 1900, an ice factory producing 100 tons of ice per day needed a stable of thirty horses to pull the delivery wagons. It wasn't until after 1910 that motorized trucks became common, and not until the late 1920s that they completely supplanted the wagons.

The immense growth of the ice industry around the turn of the century allowed the development of a number of other industries in the United States. The brewing of lager beer, which takes place at low temperatures, became possible in large quantities. The ability to transport meat on ice or in refrigerated rail cars brought about the tremendous growth of the cattle and meatpacking industries. Similarly, fruits and vegetables from the South and from California could be transported to the population centers of the North and East, spurring those industries and changing the diets of all Americans for the better. The demand for better and more varied diets was great, from the start. For example, as a byproduct of the ice and refrigeration businesses, the average American was already consuming three liters of ice cream every year as early as 1907.

In Pittsburgh, the ice industry began in the 1870s. There was a listing for a single "tice merchant" on Market Street in the 1865 city directory, but his ice business was subsidiary to his meat market. By 1873, the Chautauqua Lake Ice Company, the first ice firm in Pittsburgh, was established along the railroad at 20^th Street in the Strip District. As the name implies, the Chautauqua Lake Ice Company harvested ice from Chautauqua Lake in upstate New York and transported it to Pittsburgh by train for storage and distribution. In 1875, there were three ice dealers in the city; in 1880, there were thirteen; and by 1885 there were fifteen, almost half of which served the meatpacking industry in the city of Allegheny and on Herr's Island. At that time, there were other ice companies in Pittsburgh whose names betrayed the sources of their harvested ice: the Sandy Lake Ice Company, the Ligonier Valley Ice Company, and the Conneaut Ice Company.

By 1890, the first ice factories had been built in Pittsburgh; the Hygeia Ice Company and the Union Ice Manufacturing Company, both located near the Point, and the Arctic Ice Company in the city of Allegheny. However, the Chautauqua Lake Ice Company, which had built its main warehouse for natural ice at 13^th and Pike (now Smallman) Streets before 1890, dominated the ice industry in Pittsburgh. This main warehouse (which burned twice and was rebuilt for good in 1898, and is now the home of the Sen. John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center) was strategically located adjacent to the Pennsylvania Railroad and Allegheny Valley Railroad tracks, in what later became the center of the wholesale produce trade in Pittsburgh. In 1896 the company's letterhead boasted that its main warehouse had a capacity of 200,000 tons of natural ice. It supplied a system of ice depots for distribution throughout the city and its suburbs, to both industries and homes.

The currents of change in the organization of industries that swept through Pittsburgh and the nation, beginning in the late 1880s, affected the ice industry as well. The 1890s saw the consolidation of the steel industry in southwestern Pennsylvania under Carnegie and Frick and the merger of many of the glass factories in Pittsburgh into the United States Glass Company. Similarly, in the 1890s, the largest independent ice companies in Pittsburgh began to consolidate. In 1891 the primary ice manufacturers entered into an agreement to fix the price and supply of ice in the city. The Chautauqua Lake Ice Company (with a daily ice manufacturing capacity of 80 tons), the Hygeia Ice Company (90 tons), the Union Ice Manufacturing Company (80 tons), and the Arctic Ice Company (100 tons) agreed to a system that apportioned orders and returns among the companies in proportion to their ice manufacturing capacities. They also appointed members to a board of review that oversaw the agreement, mediated conflicts, and imposed fines on rule-breakers. This arrangement appears to have collapsed after just a few years.

With the failure of voluntary cooperation, Pittsburgh ice companies turned to formal union. The Chautauqua Lake Ice Company merged with the Eureka Ice Company (which had previously swallowed the Hygeia Ice Company) in 1897 to form the Chautauqua-Eureka Ice Company. In 1899, the new Chautauqua-Eureka Ice Company merged with five more firms; the Arctic Ice Company, the Conneaut Ice Company, the Crystal Ice Company, the Diamond Ice Company, and the P. Hermes Ice Factory, to form the Consolidated Ice Company. Consolidated assumed control of all of the older companies' assets. These included the main Chautauqua warehouse at 13^th and Pike Streets, with its ice factory (150 tons daily capacity) and its distribution system of eight branch offices (supply depots) and seventy ice wagons; the two Hygeia factories (one along the river and a small one in East Liberty) with a daily capacity of 200 tons of ice; and the Eureka Ice Company's twenty-eight ice wagons.

In 1900, the Consolidated Ice Company demolished and rebuilt the former Hygeia Ice Company factory in East Liberty, at the corner of Penn Avenue and Lambert Street, near the East Liberty railroad station. However, concerns remained in Pittsburgh about the cleanliness of the river water that would be used to make ice. It was not until 1907 that the City of Pittsburgh built a sand filtration plant to purify water drawn from the Allegheny River for distribution through the city's water system. That same year saw the construction of a new Consolidated Ice Company factory at 43^rd Street, near a bridge over the Allegheny River. With a capacity of 200 tons of manufactured ice daily, it became the largest factory in the company's portfolio. The appellation "Factory No. 2" comes from an insurance map from the mid-1920s, and confirms the temporal primacy of the factory at the main Consolidated warehouse at 13^th Street.

The property upon which the Consolidated Ice Company constructed its Factory No. 2 was a vacant lot until the beginning of the twentieth century. This vacancy was due in part to financial difficulties suffered by its mid-nineteenth-century owner, for the property was seized by the Allegheny County sheriff and conveyed to the Peoples Saving Bank in 1877. The bank sold the vacant lot in 1891 to the Pittsburgh Malleable Iron Company, which sold it again, still vacant, to the Consolidated Ice Company in October 1906. The Consolidated Ice Company constructed most of the current factory in 1907, specifically, the office/stable building at the south end of the property and the manufacturing plant at the north end. Between the two structures was an open courtyard used for loading ice wagons, with a sheltering roof over the loading docks along the north side of the courtyard. Between 1914 and 1923 the company added the "connector" building at the rear of the courtyard, joining the office and manufacturing buildings, as well as the transfer/storage building alongside the railroad tracks.

The Sanborn Insurance Maps of 1927 described the internal layout of the ice factory. To the south was the office building, with offices at the 43^rd Street end and a garage behind (motor trucks having replaced horse-drawn ice wagons by this time). Two 100-ton refrigeration machines were located in the connector building, with their condensers on its roof, and the refrigerant liquid (ammonia) was carried by pipes to two brine-filled freezing tanks in the southern half of the manufacturing plant. Water-filled galvanized steel cans were immersed, almost to their tops, in the super-cooled brine. As the water in the cans froze, any impurities or discoloration in the water would be concentrated in the still-liquid water in the middle. These "cores" could be removed by hoses and replaced with clean water to ensure the clarity of the block of ice as a whole. Once the water was frozen solid, the cans were lifted out with the aid of a small overhead crane and dunked in a pool of water to detach the ice from the cans. The ice was then stored in the tall spaces in the northern and eastern parts of the plant, referred to as "ice houses" (which were kept cold by refrigerant pipes on the walls) or in the transfer/storage structure along the railroad tracks.

The Consolidated Ice Company continued to dominate the ice industry in Pittsburgh as the industry shifted from natural ice to manufactured ice in the 1910s and 1920s, thanks to its two large factories (on 43^rd Street and on Penn Avenue in East Liberty) and its four smaller ones; in the Strip District, in Wilkinsburg to the east, and two factories on the South Side flats. Its domination of the ice industry was due not only to its capacity to supply both natural and manufactured ice (865 tons per day) and to its distribution network for domestic ice sales, but also to the strategic location of its factories and warehouse. The factory and warehouse at 13^th Street was located on the edge of the burgeoning wholesale produce market of Pittsburgh, which shifted to the Strip District from the Point area after 1906. The produce market was conducted in the rail yards of the Pennsylvania Railroad (stretching from 13^th to 21^st Streets) until the construction of the Produce and Fruit Auction Building in 1926. During that time, there would have been a great demand for ice to keep the fruits and vegetables in the rail cars cold, and to refrigerate the produce after its sale. The same demand for refrigeration of rail shipments was met as well by the factory at 43^rd Street, which was located directly alongside the tracks of the Allegheny Valley Railroad. The construction of the storage/transfer shed at the north end of the factory building indicates the importance of this railroad connection to the company. The rail connections enabled Factory No. 2 to provide ice to industries along both sides of the Allegheny River, such as the slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants on Herr's Island and the breweries of the local beer trust, the Pittsburgh Brewing Company. It was also strategically located to service the dense blue-collar residential neighborhoods of the Strip, Lawrenceville, and Bloomfield. The East Liberty factory, while not provided with direct railroad access, was in a convenient position to provide ice to the burgeoning suburban residential developments in Pittsburgh's East End; today, the neighborhoods of Friendship, Highland Park, Shadyside, and Squirrel Hill. The company's slogan, "Wagons on every street", represents both its goal and its achievement in the local ice industry.

The marketing efforts of the natural and artificial ice industries changed the way that ordinary households preserved food at home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The introduction of the Kelvinator domestic refrigerator in 1918 built on this effort and began the trend toward household mechanical refrigeration that became popular in the 1920s and came to dominate the industry in the United States by the middle of the century. With a drop in household demand for manufactured ice, the ice industry shrank in size and directed its efforts toward other markets, especially brewing and transport. The further development of mechanical refrigeration in those industries, though, as well as the introduction of air conditioning, had a depressing effect on the ice industry in the U.S. There was a shakeout of companies during the Great Depression, and while the Consolidated Ice Company was adversely affected as well, it continued to dominate the industry in Pittsburgh. Of the six Consolidated Ice Company ice factories, the Penn Avenue factory and one of the South Side factories were closed in 1935. However, as late as 1940, the Company had thirteen locations in the city and suburbs, compared to a total of only eight other ice manufacturers and dealers listed in the city directory. In 1948, the Wilkinsburg factory site was sold to a building materials distributor; and in 1951, the Consolidated Ice Company as a whole, including its few remaining factories and branches, was purchased by the City Products Company. The City Products Company shut down the factory on 43^rd Street the same year and sold it to Beacon Storage and Equipment Company for $76,000. Schreiber Industrial Equipment Company bought the former ice factory in 1976. At some point in the 1970s, Pennwalt Chemicals occupied the building, but that occupancy was short-lived. The last occupant was the Penn Custom Manufacturing Company; the building has been vacant since.

The effects of the ice industry in the country and in Pittsburgh in particular were profound. It changed the manner in which many (especially food) products were produced, transported, stored, and consumed. It changed the everyday diet of ordinary citizens profoundly toward more varied and healthier foods. It also profoundly altered the wholesale and retail food industry, leading eventually to the eclipsing of the neighborhood grocery and butcher by the supermarket. The three principal remaining artifacts of the ice industry in Pittsburgh are the former Chautauqua Lake Ice Company warehouse (now the Pittsburgh Regional History Center), at 13^th and Smallman Streets in the Strip District, the former ice factory on Penn Avenue in East Liberty, and the former Consolidated Ice Company Factory No. 2. The Penn Avenue building, while retaining its overall form, has suffered major internal and external changes in the course of its incorporation in the East Liberty Station shopping center during the late 1980s. The other two buildings are more intact. The Chautauqua Lake Ice Company building represents the natural ice industry at its most prosperous; the Consolidated Ice Company factory represents the ascendancy of the artificial ice industry. Both buildings together exemplify an industry that made a significant contribution to broad patterns of economic development and everyday life in Pittsburgh.

Building Description

The former Consolidated Ice Company Factory No. 2 is located in the river plain on the south bank of the Allegheny River, in an industrial area of the Lawrenceville neighborhood of the city of Pittsburgh. The factory is composed of two contributing buildings with two additions constructed during the period of significance and two additions built after the ice factory had closed. It occupies the northern two-thirds of the block bounded by 42^nd, 43^rd, and Willow Streets and the Allegheny Valley Railroad (AVRR). At the south end of the property is a two-story brick office building with Renaissance Revival detailing that was constructed in 1907. A courtyard that served as a loading area for ice wagons originally separated the office building from the main manufacturing plant. The main plant (1907) occupies the rest of the property to the north. It is a two-story-high brick building with two parts, the lower enclosing the ice manufacturing floor and the taller the ice storage rooms. Its main facades have limited fenestration, which, together with Romanesque brick detailing, gives the manufacturing plant a fortress-like appearance. Later, between 1914 and 1923, a tall one-story brick addition was built at the rear of the original courtyard connecting the office building and the manufacturing plant. At the same time, a one-story shed-roofed transfer and storage building was built at the north end of the plant along the railroad tracks. Even later, after the closing of the ice factory in 1951, two small metal storage additions were added to the western side of the Manufacturing Plant. The brick factory buildings and additions maintain the integrity of their original designs (except that the windows have been filled in). To the north of the factory building lie the tracks of the AVRR and the former National Valve Company factory (recently renovated for reuse by the NASA Robotics Consortium), which stands between the tracks and the river. Across the vacated 42^nd Street, to the west of Factory No. 2, is the former Pittsburgh Rolls Corporation mill, which is still being operated by the Mill Equipment and Engineering Corporation (MEEC). To the east, across 43^rd Street, are warehouses and residences. Finally, immediately to the south stands an open metal shed belonging to the MEEC, beyond which is the residential section of Lawrenceville, extending to the business district of Butler Street and beyond.

The Office Building is a two-story-high, five-bay-wide red brick building with a flat roof that was built in 1907. On the principal facade (facing 43^rd Street), there are wide central windows in both stories, flanked by two smaller windows on each side. The central opening on the first floor was probably the original entrance, since there appears to be the remnants of steps in the foundation below it. The windows on the first floor are square-topped, with blind round arches over each window opening. The square-topped windows on the second floor have brick soldier courses at their heads, and a continuous stone stringcourse at their sills. All of the window openings are filled in with translucent glass blocks. At the roofline of the facade is a tall corbeled brick cornice.

The north wall faces the open courtyard, and is six bays deep. On the second floor, five of the six windows have been altered or filled in, except for one wide original opening that remains intact with double wood doors and a projecting hoist beam. All but one of the openings on the first floor have been altered drastically and filled in or covered, although the soldier courses in the brickwork still indicate the locations and sizes of the original openings.

The southern exterior wall is a blank brick wall against which stands a gable-roofed open metal shed. To the west, facing the vacated 42^nd Street, the brick wall is plain except for five openings on each floor, all of which have been filled in with concrete blocks.

On the interior, the first floor of the Office Building (behind a small office area at the front) is an open space, with a row of steel columns (along the longitudinal axis) supporting steel beams that, in turn, support the wooden second floor. Only the office spaces at the front of the Office Building have been remodeled, and this in a utilitarian manner (gypsum board, suspended acoustical ceilings, wood paneling, etc.). At the northwestern corner of the first-floor space is a concrete ramp that connects the lower floor level of the Office Building with the higher floor level of the Connector Addition (and Manufacturing Plant). At the southwestern corner is a metal stair to the second floor, which is subdivided at the front into a number of offices (which appear to have been built or remodeled at mid-century) and a large open room at the rear. Two saw-tooth skylight monitors on the roof, now abandoned and deteriorating, originally provided light to the second-floor spaces below.

The main Manufacturing Plant (constructed in 1907) is a two-story-high, eleven-bay-wide red brick building with flat roofs at two levels. Brick pilasters divide the facade along all four sides into shallow blank bays, each capped by a brick corbel table. The building is divided into two parts: the southernmost five bays rise to a height of approximately thirty feet, while the six bays to the north are about forty-five feet high. The window openings in the southernmost six bays (facing 43^rd Street) are bricked up on the first floor, but still open (though screened by burglar bars) on the second floor. There are, and were, no openings in the northernmost five bays. The roofline of the lower (southern) section is capped by a simple stone coping, while there is a corbeled brick cornice at the top of the taller (northern) section - a taller, more emphatic version of the cornice on the office structure.

Facing the courtyard, the southern wall is divided into six bays, each of which contains a loading dock and large door at the first floor and either one or two smaller windows on the second floor. The loading dock openings are filled with steel overhead doors, while the second-story windows are covered with corrugated fiberglass sheeting.

To the west, facing the vacated 42^nd Street, the brick wall is divided into bays in the same manner as along 43^rd Street. There were originally windows in both the first and second floors of the taller section to the north, and in the lower section to the south there were originally five tall round-arched windows. These windows have all been closed up with concrete blocks.

The wall to the north originally had round-arched openings on the first floor that were filled in when the Transfer/Storage Addition was constructed. There were smaller window openings in the upper panels, but these have been closed up as well. The easternmost three bays had no openings at all. In the first brick panel, next to 43^rd Street, is a faded painted sign that once read "Wagons on every street".

The interior of the Manufacturing Plant is divided into two parts, as expressed on the exterior by the difference in roof heights. The southern section is a single large double-height space, within which there are two rows of steel columns that subdivide the space unequally. The columns support steel beams that carry the wooden roof. The center of the space is dominated visually by a large monitor that rises above the roof and is lined with double-hung windows that provide light to the almost windowless space below, which at one time was occupied by the freezing tanks of the ice plant. The shed roof of the monitor is supported by wooden trusses tied into the steel beams, and its interior surfaces are sheathed with white-painted beaded board siding. At the eastern end of this space (occupying about one-fifth of the floor area) is a mezzanine floor, supported on a brick wall and bordered by steel pipe railings. Under the mezzanine are a couple of rooms that were once used as ice storage rooms.

The northern end of the Manufacturing Plant is occupied by three very tall now-windowless spaces with sloping concrete roofs supported by steel beams. Thick plain brick walls separate these spaces from the main space of the Plant, and from each other. These walls are breached only by a single large opening at floor level per space (filled with either an overhead door or a sliding door), and by small mechanical vents. There is evidence that there once were round-arched windows in the lower sections, and smaller square-topped windows in the upper sections of the exterior walls, but these have been bricked in. These spaces were the original "ice houses" or ice storage rooms, which were insulated by their thick walls and cooled by refrigerant pipes along the walls. The two westernmost tall spaces are separated from the easternmost by a tall narrow passageway that connects the main Manufacturing Plant to the Transfer/Storage Addition at the northern end of the building. In the easternmost of the tall spaces, approximately one-quarter of the space is separated and subdivided into two stories (the upper story being connected by ramp to the mezzanine level of the Manufacturing Plant).

The interior of the Manufacturing Plant is currently empty. The interior brick walls are featureless, except for the openings (former and current) described above.

In addition to the two original buildings of the factory complex, there are two buildings that were added: a "connector addition" that was built to connect the Office Building and the Manufacturing Plant, and a transfer/storage addition on the north end of the Manufacturing Plant. Also, two metal additions were appended to the 42^nd Street side of the Manufacturing Plant after the ice factory was closed.

The Connector Addition, a tall one-story red brick building, was constructed between 1914 and 1923 at the rear (western) end of the courtyard. The eastern wall of this addition, facing the courtyard, has four round-arched openings: a tall loading dock to the south, and three additional windows (all differing in sill height or width) to the north. All of the openings are filled with glass block. The eastern wall is capped by a simple stone coping. To the west, facing the vacated 42^nd Street, four large round-arched windows interrupt the paneled brick wall (a continuation of the west wall of the Manufacturing Plant). The two outboard windows have been filled with glass blocks, while the two inner windows have been closed up with concrete blocks.

The interior of the Connector Addition is a single open space with a concrete floor, spanned by deep steel beams that support the tile and concrete roof. The interior walls to the north and south are the original exterior walls of the Manufacturing Plant and the Office Building. The walls to the east and west are marked by the window openings described above. This addition is vacant except for electrical equipment in the northeast corner.

Attached to the northern face of the Manufacturing Plant is a one-story, shed-roofed brick Transfer/Storage Addition that parallels the tracks of the Allegheny Valley Railroad. It was built between 1914 and 1923 with large openings in both ends and in the northern wall that served as railroad loading docks. These openings are now filled by metal garage doors and concrete blocks.

After the factory was abandoned by the ice company in 1951, two metal additions were built in the vacated 42^nd Street right-of-way and attached to the Manufacturing Plant by a doorway broken through the wall of the westernmost ice house. These metal additions still exist, but are deteriorated. They include a metal-sided shed on stilt-like supports (approximately 10 by 20 feet in plan), access to which is provided by a metal stair on the south side, and a two-story addition (approximately 12 feet square) with a cylindrical tank on top. Under the tank, within the square-plan addition, can be found a hopper and a scale.