By Jared Ebersole in Video — 23 Jun 2026

New York's First Concrete Building Became a Tiny Landmark Beside Whole Foods

The Coignet Stone Building was built as a concrete advertisement in 1873. More than 150 years later, it still sits apart from the city around it.

The Coignet Stone Building looks like it is waiting for the rest of its world to come back.

It stands at Third Avenue and Third Street in Gowanus, a small, pale, Italianate building beside a much larger Whole Foods. The contrast is almost too perfect: 19th-century industrial experiment next to 21st-century grocery development, a tiny concrete sales pitch boxed in by modern retail.

That is exactly what the building was.

Where it is

Coignet Stone Company Building, 360 Third Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11215

The Landmarks Preservation Commission calls it the earliest known concrete building in New York City and a pioneering example of concrete construction in the United States. Built in 1872-73 for the New York and Long Island Coignet Stone Company, the structure was designed by William Field and Son as an office, showroom, and full-scale advertisement for artificial stone.

The pitch was simple and radical.

For most of architectural history, stone meant quarrying, cutting, carving, transporting, and setting heavy material by hand. It was durable and prestigious, but expensive. Francois Coignet's system proposed something faster: a concrete-like artificial stone that could be packed into molds, cast into decorative shapes, and used to imitate carved masonry at lower cost.

That matters because the Coignet Building itself is not plain utilitarian concrete. It is concrete pretending to be the kind of carved stone architecture people already respected. Its arched windows, keystones, quoins, pilasters, pediments, and portico were a catalogue of what the material could do. Instead of telling New Yorkers to trust a new building technology, the company built a miniature proof-of-concept at the edge of its factory.

The stunt worked, at least briefly.

The company supplied material for major projects, including St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Cleft Ridge Span in Prospect Park, and the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Queens. Contemporary press praised the little building's appearance. For a moment, artificial stone seemed like it might become a major construction product in New York.

Then the timing collapsed.

The Panic of 1873 hit the country just as the company was trying to prove itself. New construction became harder to finance, demand weakened, and the business reorganized before eventually disappearing. The five-acre factory complex vanished. The showroom survived almost by accident.

That accidental survival gave the building its strange afterlife.

For decades, it was used by later industrial tenants and gradually forgotten. In the 1960s, the facade was covered with imitation red brick, hiding the very material experiment the building was created to advertise. By the time preservationists rediscovered its importance, the building looked less like a landmark than an odd old survivor at a gritty Gowanus corner.

Whole Foods changed the setting.

The grocery chain bought the surrounding property in 2005 for a planned store, while the Coignet building itself remained separately owned. The city landmarked the building in 2006. As the new Whole Foods project moved forward, preservationists worried that the tiny concrete landmark would be swallowed by the larger development. Whole Foods ultimately funded an exterior restoration, completed in 2016, removing the fake cladding and repairing the cast-stone facade.

The restoration saved the face, but not the problem.

The building is still small, isolated, and difficult to reuse. Its exterior is historically important; its interior has remained a challenge. Listings over the past several years have repeatedly put the property on the market, with 6sqft reporting a recent asking price just under $3 million. The sales language turns it into an unusual opportunity, but the deeper truth is that New York's first concrete building has never quite found a second life equal to its first idea.

That makes it compelling.

The Coignet Building was built to sell the future. It promised that concrete could imitate stone, reduce cost, speed construction, and still look respectable. Today, surrounded by a grocery store and a transformed Gowanus, it no longer needs to sell anyone on concrete. Concrete won. The city is full of it.

What remains is the prototype.

Small, stubborn, restored on the outside, unresolved on the inside, and still standing at the corner where New York first tried to make stone without carving it.