Irving T. Bush - Bush Terminal

Bush Terminal

But Irving T. Bush's connection with Edison's motion pictures was brief. Soon after, during the mid-1890s, Irving T. Bush started the planning and construction of Bush Terminal on the Brooklyn waterfront site where his father's former oil refinery had been located.

To induce railroads to use his car floats, (i.e. using the barges that transported railroad cars across New York Harbor), Irving had to resort to ordering dozens of carloads of hay from Michigan himself. To show shippers that using the wharves and warehouses at the new terminal could be profitable, Bush entered the banana business. Within two decades, the complex originally derided as "Bush's Folly" became a great success. Though the complex was seized for government use during the First World War by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, Irving T. Bush complied with government demands. He even helped to design the Brooklyn Army Terminal for General Goethals in 1918.

Irving T. Bush was named Chief Executive of the War Board of the Port of New York during the First World War, an early version of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

During this period before and during the First World War, Irving T. Bush planned and had built Bush Tower, a landmark 30-story Neo-Gothic skyscraper on 42nd Street in Manhattan, just east of Times Square. The tower was conceived as display space for the manufacturers and shippers of Bush Terminal and New York. An even more ambitious venture was Irving T. Bush's attempt to meld commercial displays and social space in London at Bush House, an elaborate and large office building built in three phases during the 1920s, but the concept was not fully carried through at that project. Bush House was known around the globe today as the headquarters of the BBC World Service, which broadcasted in 32 languages to all parts of the world.