Moquette is a kind of carpet. Thick, tufted, high pile. The sort of thing made to look like a hand knotted Oriental rug without costing what one costs.
Yonkers has a street named after it.
The Carpet Shop
Alexander Smith moved his carpet company to Yonkers in 1864. He had already lost one factory to fire, then lost its replacement the same way. Yonkers is where he started again.
It worked. The mills spread until they covered 38 acres along Nepperhan Avenue, eventually taking in dozens of buildings. At their height around seven thousand people worked there.
Nobody in the neighborhood used the company's name. It was the carpet shop.
The Mechanic
The reason any of it was possible was a man named Halcyon Skinner, who worked for Smith as his general mechanic.
Skinner built a power driven loom in 1856 and kept improving on it for the rest of his working life. He finished with ten loom patents.
The big one was the Axminster loom, which everyone called the Moquette loom. He patented it in 1877. The rights got licensed to other carpet companies in America and Europe, at twenty cents for every yard of carpet they made with it.
A machine that could turn out intricately patterned carpet faster and cheaper than a person could weave it by hand. That is the whole business, in one invention, out of one Yonkers workshop.
Moquette Row
Between 1881 and 1886 the company built housing for the people who ran the looms. Two rows of brick houses, north and south, put up directly beside the mills and rented to workers at a subsidized rate.
The people who moved into them had mostly just arrived in the country. They came from Scotland, from Ireland, and from Ukraine.
The company named the street after the carpet they wove on. Moquette Row.
What Is There Now
The carpet shop closed in 1954. The company moved the whole operation to Greenville, Mississippi. On the way out, 2,400 people in Yonkers lost their jobs.
The buildings did not go anywhere. In 1983 the mills and the workers' housing were listed together on the National Register of Historic Places, as the Alexander Smith Carpet Mills Historic District. Moquette Row North lost its end houses in the late 1970s when Nepperhan Avenue was widened, but the rows are still standing.
The mill buildings found new tenants. More than eighty artists work out of two of them on Nepperhan Avenue as the YoHo Artist Community. Other buildings in the complex rent out as studio and film production space.
A hundred and sixty years after Alexander Smith came here looking for somewhere to start over, people are still making things in his buildings.
And there is still a street in Yonkers named after a carpet.
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