7/8. The Cunard Building and Staten Island Warehouse
Belgian immigrant Edgar Sengier, the director of Union Miniere du Haut Katanga, kept his office inside the Cunard Building at 25 Broadway. Union Miniere du Haut Katanga was a Belgian mining company that operated in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the first half of the 21st century. During World War II, Sengier feared that the Axis powers would capture the precious uranium ore the company extracted, so he had multiple tons of it shipped to the United States. Some of this ore ended up in a warehouse on Staten Island owned by The Archer Daniels Midland Company. The warehouse was located at 2351 Richmond Terrace below the Bayonne Bridge.
Uranium ore was stored at this waterfront site from 1940 until 1942 when it was purchased by the Manhattan Project. The warehouse was then torn down. Radioactive contamination was discovered at the site by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in 1980, but it wasn’t until May 2020 that The Archer Daniels Midland Company/Manhattan Project site finally made it into the Department of Energy’s Formerly Utilized Site Remedial Action Program. The program “identifies and remediates sites contaminated as a result of the country’s early atomic energy program in the mid-20th century.” Awareness of the Archer Daniels site is largely thanks to the efforts of Beryl Thurman, president, and executive director of the North Shore Waterfront Conservancy (NSWC).
Next, check out the story of Untapped Cities Founder Michelle Young’s grandfather, who survived the atomic bombing at Hiroshima.
