OUR ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO THE BOROUGH OF KINGS
COURIER L PS IFE, DEC. 18–24, 2020 25
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
A former subway operator has
painstakingly recreated a model of
industrial rail yards and buildings
at Gowanus and Sunset Park, including
a custom 3-D printed replica of the
iconic former Kentile Floors sign!
“It’s a part of Brooklyn I grew up in
as a kid,” said 65-year-old Park Slope
native Bill Graham, who now lives in
Staten Island. “The sign immediately
invokes a ton of memories.”
The red-lettered sign atop a Second
Avenue factory near Ninth Street
became a popular subject among area
artists after more than half a century
as a staple of the Kings County skyline
for commuters on the Gowanus Expressway
or the F and G lines — but
was eventually removed by the building’s
owners in 2014 despite fi erce opposition
from locals.
“You took it for granted, it was there
but you never really saw it,” said Graham,
who passed the sign as a train operator
for 30 years.
The factory started operations in
1898 and cranked out tiles for almost
a century, employing more than 400
workers at its peak in the 1960s — including
at one point Graham’s father,
who worked as a checker there.
The company advertised its goods
as easy to install for homeowners, but
the product contained the carcinogen
asbestos, and the organization fi led
for bankruptcy in 1992 while facing a
rising tide of consumer lawsuits.
Graham included the Kentile
Floors’ sign into his room-fi lling
train setup — or layout, in modelmaking
jargon — that was inspired
by the South Brooklyn Railroad, a
subdivision of NYCT that still runs
an industrial freight train operations
near 38th Street between Fifth Avenue
and the waterfront yards at Second
Avenue.
Fellow model train enthusiast, Missourian
Miles Hale, 3-D printed the
sign for Graham true to scale, 87 times
smaller than the original, using schematics
from the city’s Department of
Buildings.
Graham added some of the local former
industrial hubs to his layout, like
the Bush Terminal and Union Street’s
South Brooklyn Casket Company near
the Gowanus Canal, which he showed
off on his YouTube channel.
“It’s a compressed selection, it’s just
a fl avor of Brooklyn,” he said.
The layout — which is set in the
gritty 1980s, when Graham would occasionally
fi ll in for workers at the
yard — shows Brooklyn’s post-industrial
urban decay, such as graffi ti,
overgrown weeds, rusted corrugated
fences, and junk gracing the smallscale
buildings.
“It’s what I remember as a kid, graffi
ti and decay held together by spit and
bubblegum,” he said.
Floored!
Train enthusiast
recreates iconic
lost Kentile sign
SMALL WONDER: (Above) Bill Graham next to his model Kentile Floors sign. (At left) The
original sign towering above Second Avenue in Gowanus.
Photos by (above) Georgean Graham, (left) Stefano Giovannini