Saturday, July 18, 2026, 11am​

 

Brooklyn is Kings County, and DUMBO, the waterfront neighborhood beneath the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges lives up to the name.

 

Kings of DUMBO include Joshua and Comfort Sands, the 18th Century power brokers who laid DUMBOs Streets; Robert Fulton whose steam ferry spanned the river and built the borough; John Arbuckle the coffee roasting revolutionary whose DUMBO plant roasted more coffee than any other place in the world; Robert Gair, the cardboard box impresario who built so much of DUMBO’s industrial architecture that the neighborhood became known as Gairville, and David Walentas, the real estate developer who bought so much of that industrial architecture in 1981 that in the decades since, he has been able to almost single-handedly shape the neighborhood.

 

This walking tour traces the building and rebuilding of DUMBO. As we uncover the neighborhood’s exceptional industrial history, explore its spectacular examples of architectural adaptive-reuse, and situate modern DUMBO within the larger story of New York’s reclamation of its post-industrial waterfront, we’ll consider the way the Kings of the Waterfront each consciously sought to shape this place, and ask, how does a neighborhood get made?

 

Wednesday, July 29, 2026, 6:30pm​

 

Brooklyn is Kings County, and DUMBO, the waterfront neighborhood beneath the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges lives up to the name.

 

Kings of DUMBO include Joshua and Comfort Sands, the 18th Century power brokers who laid DUMBOs Streets; Robert Fulton whose steam ferry spanned the river and built the borough; John Arbuckle the coffee roasting revolutionary whose DUMBO plant roasted more coffee than any other place in the world; Robert Gair, the cardboard box impresario who built so much of DUMBO’s industrial architecture that the neighborhood became known as Gairville, and David Walentas, the real estate developer who bought so much of that industrial architecture in 1981 that in the decades since, he has been able to almost single-handedly shape the neighborhood.

 

This walking tour traces the building and rebuilding of DUMBO. As we uncover the neighborhood’s exceptional industrial history, explore its spectacular examples of architectural adaptive-reuse, and situate modern DUMBO within the larger story of New York’s reclamation of its post-industrial waterfront, we’ll consider the way the Kings of the Waterfront each consciously sought to shape this place, and ask, how does a neighborhood get made?