Ken MacKenzie with his now-silent machines.
An historic New Haven business with the motto “Doing it right since 1864” has closed up shop, along with an old-fashioned way of making and repairing metal parts.
It’s doing so with plenty of customers still demanding its products and selling every piece of equipment in a one-day online auction this coming Tuesday.
Unless you have a huge water pump, 50-foot crane, a bulldozer, a dredging barge with a suddenly bum engine, or a Metro-North train wheel and axle to repair, you could be forgiven for not having heard of MacKenzie Machine and Marine.
Its last day of business was March 1.
“It was time,” Kenneth MacKenzie offered on a tour of his now closed shop, a shiny, metallic stroll down industrial history lane.
Part of the reason to close: the ailing health of his two employees, machinists in their 60s and with health problems, whose knowledge of manually operated lathes and other equipment from the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, like a vertical boring machine. MacKenzie said he simply could not replace.
Mackenzie Marine was a small niche business that MacKenzie and his ancestors kept going back four generations. It was always situated at the corner of East and Water Street since the days when actual harbor waters, bearing coal tenders, tugs, lumber boats, and other vessels needing repairs, came right up practically to where the shop’s back door is today.
“You can’t find trained workers today” to run, for example, a vertical boring machine, MacKenzie said.
The wood stove.
“The kids nowadays don’t know the work. We do it all manually. We have no CNC [Computer Numerical Control machines] here. It’s a dying breed,” said Dana MacKenzie, Ken’s wife, who helped make the decision to shut down.
The building that houses the equipment dates from around 1926, when MacKenzie’s great uncle George MacKenzie was running the business. The family emigrated here from Aberdeen, Scotland, and found its way to working on tugs and tankers in New Haven’s harbor.
By the 1980s Ken MacKenzie had built the business up to nine employees machining parts not only for maritime enterprises, but for cities like Bridgeport, New Haven, and Milford, whose water pumps and other vital equipment needed fast repairs.
“Back then you could find people,” MacKenzie said.
MacKenzie at the rail press, site of repairs for Metro North, Essex Steam Train, and Trolley Museum among other customers.
As we walked by the lathes, the collection of “jaws,” huge vise-like steel pieces used to secure a sheet or tube of steel on a boring machine, past the curtains of chains, pulleys, and other hoisting devises, it became clear that the absence of workers who learn manually and through old-fashioned apprenticeship was not the only reason for the decision to close.
If three young people walked in here at this moment who knew how to do this work, MacKenzie, “You and I might not be having this conversation.”
Dana MacKenzie disagreed. It was indeed still time to close down while they are both healthy and comfortable and are proud of the work accomplished, she said.
Photo from the 1920s showing few tanks and how the water reached nearly to the shop.
The on-call quality of the work was also a factor. The essence of MacKenzie’s niche was not only to do highly detailed milling work to repair industrial equipment but to do it extremely fast, he said.
Why fast? “When there’s a machine breakdown, there are 20 people waiting” and unable to do their jobs, he said. So the crew would work through the night if necessary.
“If I got a call at two in the morning, I’d [often] be the first there,” he said.
He described one memorable job in the mid-1980s when a large dredging barge broke a shiv way at the top of its 50-foot reach in the middle of Bridgeport Harbor.
When he responded to the call, he was taken on a boat out to the barge, where he proceeded to climb up 50 feet in the middle of the night. He then took the measurements of the part to be replaced, drew pictures, and climbed down.
“I assess what has to be done. I call my guys,” and then they proceed to do the work and stay up as long as they have to because so many other people’s ability to do their jobs depended on MacKenzie’s skill and speed.
He said he got that Bridgeport job done in 12 hours. “You’re always on. They expect that of us.”
The demanding work of serving as a machinist’s version of an EMT dictated, at age 70 and in good health, that the time had arrived to close, he acknowledged.
“We had a backlog of work,” he said. When he sent out letters to 30 or 40 of his regular clients two months ago, people wrote back: “Where are we going to go?”
The MacKenzies said they have no plans to sell the building. Over the next two weeks, all the lathes, jaws, the horizontal rail press, chains, pulleys, and other equipment will have to be disassembled and moved out of the building. Ken MacKenzie will be overseeing that.
After that, he will move his “toys” into the space — snowmobiles and a 1956 Austin Healey, which he tinkers with. The East Haven couple has sufficient means so that, Ken MacKenzie said, no offer would make him sell the place where he has worked daily for the last 53 years, where the presences of Great Uncle George and all the other MacKenzies are still felt.
City economic development chief Matthew Nemerson said he hadn’t known about the closing.
“Obviously I wish they had reached out to us – these are the sorts of firms who can benefit from a custom apprentice program at a place like Gateway, Housatonic or Eli Whitney,” he said. “You know we are all very history oriented here and don’t like to lose any rare or endangered species to extinction -– especially ones that hire people!”
“Call me in six months,” Ken MacKenzie told this reporter.
Ken and Dana MacKenzie.
If only the city had employees specifically focused on small businesses.