China And Canal Street

Until around 1990 Canal Street in Manhattan (New York) was a wonderful source for all things mechanical and electrical. A thriving experimenters pantry: tools, hardware and parts for mechanics, craftsmen, inventors and tinkerers of every kind, professional or amateur. This was the center of the remaining hardware trade in New York. A collection of warehouses, jobbers, dealers, manufacturers and wholesalers. New, used, surplus. Machinery dealers for woodworking, metal working and every other trade. Rubber, plastic, metals. From the East River to the Hudson, from Houston Street south to City Hall. The companies that had supplied the hinges, hardware and tools that build New York City.

But by 1990 the change was well underway, and by now nearly all those shops are gone. All save a few who owned the building they were in, and just plain like it there. At first artists moved in, for the low cost lofts, as manufacturers moved to sensible suburban industrial parks (don't knock it, it is way more efficient to run a plant on one floor). Then the artists' patrons followed. By and by the clients of the hardware dealers departed, the economy changed and now those business have been replaced by more fashion forward enterprises catering largely to tourists.

This is a logical transformation, part of the evolution of the city and the economy. But, or the most part, the industry of the area did not "move" or get "relocated". It is simply gone. There are no longer many cities where a section of town is know for "parts and tools". Such suppliers as are left are widely dispersed, harder to find. Naturally, if manufacturing declines, the number of people at work in manufacturing also declines. Among them also depart the inventors and tinkerers that cooked up wonderful new things (and a few sorrowful failures) on their kitchen tables.

In China, you can find streets full of whatever an aspiring inventor or manufacturer might need. Switches and diodes, motors and gears, metal plastic and row upon row of punch presses, from Half Ton, right up to 25 Ton capacity. You can buy by the one, the handful or the carload. Ready to be trundled off, somehow, to the backyard factory.

The task now before us is to be an active part of a new process: Creating products and solutions in a setting very different from that of the last century.