When Sugar Bought Art

There’s something melancholic about it—the news that the Two Trees Management Company wants to develop the shuttered American Sugar Refining Company. And why, you ask? Well, for one thing, the name American Sugar Refining Company may mean nothing to you, but its finished product? Domino Sugar.

Well, if you’re like me, you can still see the bag in your mother’s kitchen—or kitchens, since I could locate the sugar immediately in my childhood home, were the sugar still there. Sugar tends to figure pretty strongly in the culinary life of kids.

Then there’s the fact that the sugar came from a site across the East River from Manhattan. In fact, the factory had operated from the site since the mid-nineteenth century at least—the ships had come in laden with a sugar cane slurry from the Caribbean or the Philippines or wherever, and the sugar was refined right there in Brooklyn.

Nor was it, as the Times article describes it, “refined” in anything but name. Temperatures could get up to 140 degrees. Here’s what the Times had to say about the process:

In the earliest days, much of the sugar arriving at the Havemeyer family’s refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront had been harvested by slaves. It was mixed into a dirty slurry, boiled in enormous vats and filtered through charred animal bones.

Then it was “whipped, beaten, flayed, hurled into ‘grain,'” The Illustrated American magazine reported in 1894. “The process is very wild and terrible, like a caged cyclone.” Life in the refinery was so infernal that The New York Tribune declared in 1894 that a worker had only one hope of escaping “perpetual torture.”

“Not infrequently,” the newspaper said, “death comes quickly to his relief.”  

Henry Osborne Havemeyer inherited some sugar interests, and then went on to found his company in 1868, when he was just 22. The current building, built after a fire destroyed the original building, was built in 1882, and is the only factory site named as a New York City Landmark. Havemeyer went on to become an extremely rich man, know as the Sugar King, and the company was one of the original 12 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

What happened? Well, the company stumbled on, and sources for sugar shifted from cane to beet sugar to the nefarious high fructose corn syrup. And why the shift? In part, according to Wikipedia, because of tinkering with the marketplace:

A system of sugar tariffs and sugar quotas imposed in 1977 in the United States significantly increased the cost of imported sugar and U.S. producers sought cheaper sources. High-fructose corn syrup, derived from corn, is more economical because the domestic U.S. and Canadian prices of sugar are twice the global price[29] and the price of corn is kept low through government subsidies paid to growers.[30][31] High-fructose corn syrup became an attractive substitute, and is preferred over cane sugar among the vast majority of American food and beverage manufacturers. Soft drink makers such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi use sugar in other nations, but switched to high-fructose corn syrup in the United States in 1984.

Hey wait—the cost of sugar in the US is twice as much as in the rest of the world? So the government is protecting the corn farmers by paying them to grow this stuff—or at least the raw material for it—and also imposing tariffs and quotas on sugar, which may be far healthier?

In fact, a recent study at the University of Guelph in Canada has this to say:

Canadian researchers have found that high-fructose corn syrup can cause behavioral reactions in rats 'similar to those produced by drugs of abuse, such as cocaine'.

Professor Francesco Leri of the University of Guelph, who carried out the research, said it suggested there was an addictive quality to foods that contain high levels of high-fructose corn syrup which could explain, at least partly, the current global obesity epidemic.

Oh, and the same article says this:

Research from Princeton University in 2010 found that rats fed on a sugary diet became nervous and anxious when the sugar was removed. They were thrown into a state of anxiety similar to the kind of stress that people feel during withdrawal from drugs like nicotine and even morphine.

So at some point the Havemeyer family sold out, and in 2003, the refining part of the operation closed down, after a bitter, twenty-month strike, one of the longest in New York history. And then, in 2004, the whole operation closed down.

I tell you it’s bittersweet; here’s why. First, we used to produce stuff, rather than import it. Second, it’s an outrage that we are subsidizing high fructose corn syrup, which has been linked to something called metabolic syndrome: high blood sugar, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, etc.

Lastly, anyone who has been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will know the Havemeyer name; both Henry Osborne Havemeyer and his wife collected art like crazy, and their three children carried on as well. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

Although each of the children collected in their own right, Electra Havemeyer Webb collected on the grand scale of her parents and went on to found a museum to showcase her deep and diverse collections. Louisine identified some 142 works as a bequest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and empowered her children to give the Met's curators free rein. By the time they had finished an inventory of the Havemeyer's three-story Fifth Avenue manse 1,967 works would be assimilated into the Met's holdings.

And here’s the Met itself on the collection:

A legendary assemblage, the Havemeyer collection is famous for its unparalleled groupings of works by Corot, Courbet, and Manet, its great Monets and Cézannes, and its many paintings, pastels, drawings, and bronzes by Degas. But the real depth and the encyclopedic range of this legacy are not well known, because part of it is dispersed throughout the Metropolitan and part dispersed throughout the world. Few know, for example, that the collection encompassed Rembrandts and El Grecos as well as works by other old masters. The Havemeyers were not only the premier American patrons of late nineteenth-century French painting—Mrs. Havemeyer was perhaps the first American to buy a Monet—but also pathbreaking collectors in such uncharted fields as Spanish painting, for which they created a demand and established a taste among their contemporaries.

Will our current crop of magnates do as well?

Portrait of a Cardinal, Probably Cardinal Don Fernando Niño de Guevara (1541–1609)  El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) (Greek, Iráklion (Candia) 1540/41–1614 Toledo)