Made in Brooklyn

Made in Brooklyn has even more resonance today than it did when first released over a decade ago. Manufacturing clearly matters, and this film shows us how we must nurture it to rebalance, strengthen and sustain our local economies.

A seamless document of urban change that I am happy to use in my classroom again and again. It is accessible and provocative to undergraduate and graduate students alike.

I screened your documentary with admiration. We don't see many films like this, and I wish we did.

Explodes the myth that service economies are sufficient to sustain metropolitan areas. Manufacturing clearly matters, and it's nice to see that manufacturing, and not just a tree, still grows in Brooklyn.

Though Made In Brooklyn sets out to expose the folly of urban-planning policies that zone manufacturing out of existence, its polemic is only part of its power. Ultimately, the documentary is a love letter to the people who make New York crackle, the individuals who, as Richard Aneiro of the Brooklyn Navy Yard industrial park puts it, "bet everything they have" on "whatever business they're crazy enough to get into." These people (with faces and accents you will never forget) tell how they started businesses that brew beer or design furniture or sculpt gargoyles. Among other benefits, these enterprises keep people off welfare and stabilize troubled neighborhoods. Vicki Feit, who assembles lamps, says, "I never really did good sitting in a classroom, and I love working with my hands." Manufacturing jobs pay more than their service-sector counterparts, and they create three times as many secondary jobs. But even though New York has more than a million people on the dole, city planners have decided that lawyers and bond traders will save the city. Where will the immigrant or the unskilled laborer find work in this brave new service economy? NYU Urban Research Center director Mitchell Moss, a fervid proponent of rezoning industrial spaces for residential use, says: "When you have people earning $100,000 in an office building, you also have people earning $15,000 cleaning that building at night. Filmmaker Isabel Hill told me she felt embarassed for Moss when he said that. Most viewers will want to rezone his face. Criticisms? The film could have acknowledged that sometimes small manufacturer can mean sweatshop. How much do the workers in the film make? Do they get health insurance? Maybe Hill never asked these questions because she was, understandably, won over by the salty good nature of the people in the film--bosses and employees alike--who obviously enjoy their work and each other.