Absolutely Electrifying, LIC Was

By 1915, there approximately 40,000 automotive trucks plying the streets of New York City.

What’s surprising is that 25 percent of them were electric.

This unassuming self storage warehouse in Queens is the last mortal remains of the General Electric Vehicle Company – found at 30-28 Starr Avenue, Long Island City – who were the manufacturers of a substantial number of those electrical trucks.

More after the jump…

Here’s the way the place looked just before the time of the first World War, courtesy Google Books. Another historic view can be seen in this NYTimes.com archive article.

General Electric Vehicle Company was originally the Electric Vehicle Company, until it was acquired by one of the so called “scientific manufacturers” – a small but growing firm which called itself “General Electric.” GE was a direct creation of a fellow named Edison, whose little power generating concerns in NYC hadn’t quite “consolidated” itself yet.

General Electric Vehicle, like all automotive companies, was in competition with an upstart from the midwest named Ford. Things hadn’t been decided yet, from a consumer point of view, between electric motors or gasoline ones, but there was another company out there which had strong feelings on the subject called Standard Oil.

I’ve read allusions to some deal between Ford and Edison to stay out of each others way, but for awhile Edison was manufacturing (and driving) electric cars.

Here’s A GEVC truck from 1906, courtesy Google Books.

In the early 20th century, this was the second largest factory space in Long Island City (after the Loose Wiles bakery) sitting on three entire blocks of the 19th century street grid and comprising some eight square acres. 2,000 people worked there. The largest of the structures, conspicuously displayed throughout this post, survives and serves modernity as a gargantuan self storage facility. Other structures of the complex survive, and remnants of the rail spur that served it can be observed on Review Avenue just beyond Borden. Part of its footprint is occupied by the Silvercup Studios East location.

GEVC became the premier manufacturer of Electric Vehicles here, as well as being the only concern in the Untied States licensed to build Daimler’s “Mercedes” gasoline cars and trucks.

From The American review of reviews, Volume 51 By Albert Shaw, courtesy Google Books:

The big principle is that electricity is now the world’s best source of power, and enables business men to “team by electricity.” The Company long ago learned that the work to be performed decides the building of the vehicle. But very interesting is the fact that while all the six G. V. models but one were standardized seven years ago, each truck is built to fit the industry, the locality, and the use it will meet. Starting with a standardized chassis, a body suitable for a given business is built and placed on the chassis, but not before experts have adjusted battery, motor and speed to fit local road conditions. That is, the “power plant” of a 2-ton truck as revealed in battery, motor, etc., is specifically adapted to hilly

Seattle or level Washington, D. C, as the case may be. In the splendid Long Island City plant of the General Vehicle Company the exact facts of the customer’s condition and his locality now determine what that truck must be to succeed. And it does succeed. The haphazard peddling of job-lot trucks must disappear, just as the stock-jobbing era has passed in automobile truck manufacture.

Consequently you can buy an electric truck to-day with the same certainty of what it will do under your particular circumstances as you can buy any other staple commodity. A concern like the General Vehicle Company will actually refuse to sell you a truck which is not what your work requires. It will not promise you all kinds of free service, new tires, free bodies, and free rebuilding. It does not have to do this, as the now bankrupt concerns did have to, in order to try to offset the serious deficiencies in the service a truck was supposed to give. A General Vehicle truck does what it is built to do—and is sold on a business basis, with no secret about what will happen to the man who buys it after he has used it awhile. A table of standard costs to fit various types, conditions and requirements, works out as accurately as a multiplication table.

General had an interesting scheme to provide power to their trucks, which involved the shipping of batteries to and from a power plant in Connecticut, which would charge industrial base rates for charging them. A series of labor actions and the emerging predominance of the gasoline powered internal combustion engine served to weaken and eventually bankrupt General, and the company was ultimately done in by the first World War because of that Daimler contract.

Nobody wanted German cars or trucks anymore, you see.

In 1918, the War Department of the United States engineered the sale of the plant to the Wright Martin Aircraft company, in order to facilitate the manufacture of airplane engines at the factory. When Wright Martin took over, the payroll skyrocketed to include an astounding 8,000 employees.

From Wikipedia:

In order to overcome the limited operating range of electric vehicles, and the lack of recharging infrastructure, a exchangeable battery service was first proposed as early as 1896. The concept was first put into practice by Hartford Electric Light Company through the GeVeCo battery service and initially available for electric trucks. The vehicle owner purchased the vehicle from General Vehicle Company (GVC, a subsidiary of the General Electric Company) without a battery and the electricity was purchase from Hartford Electric through an exchangeable battery. The owner paid a variable per-mile charge and a monthly service fee to cover maintenance and storage of the truck. Both vehicles and batteries were modified to facilitate a fast battery exchange. The service was provided between 1910 to 1924 and during that period covered more than 6 million miles. Beginning in 1917 a similar successful service was operated in Chicago for owners of Milburn Light Electric cars who also could buy the vehicle without the batteries.

Wright Martin Aircraft – Wright as in Wright Brothers, and Martin as in Martin Marietta – departed the place at some indeterminate point in the early 20th century. References have been found which identify the interim 20th century tenants of the structure as having been engaged in the manufacture of exotic lithographic and photographic equipment, included both industrial landscaping and floral supply businesses, and a host of smaller operations involved in warehousing, interstate shipping, and local trucking companies also called this building home base.

Ultimately, it became a self storage warehouse which is how it greeted the 21st century.

This is Building 3 of the General Electrical Vehicle Complex, there were at least seven.

Contemporaneous accounts of the place describe it as occupying a spot between Review, Starr, and Borden avenues, bounded by the no longer mapped Fox and Beaver Streets.

Certain sources and allies were taken aback by my queries about the two streets, thinking that I was being ribald, but such profane interpretations of my question were later greeted with scans of a historical map (which I cannot present here for copyright reasons) that confirmed the location and identity of the modern structure.

Suffice to say that Fox and Beaver follow the course set by 30th Street and 31st Place were they to continue to the Newtown Creek waterfront. An effort was made to contact the employees of the self storage warehouse, and though they were thoroughly friendly and attentive, the current staff were somewhat taken aback by my queries. I displayed the historic shot of the building, but they did not have any anecdote to offer about historic remnants or curious machinery, which means that the structure must have been thoroughly gutted before modern times.

If you want to experience the wonders of LIC yourself, this weekend (Saturday the 27th), I’ll actually be conducting a walking tour of the Dutch Kills area which includes the GEVC site. Come with?

Newtown Creek Alliance Historian Mitch Waxman lives in Astoria and blogs at Newtown Pentacle.