Meet the Makers

Abbot & Abbot Box Corporation has been around since 1888 and they’re not stopping anytime soon. It was in 1964 that the current owner, Stuart Gleiber, bought the business from the original owner’s grandson. Today, it’s a joint operation run by Stuart and his son, Doug. It’s a family business and Doug finds it to be an “absolute joy” to work with his father.

They make crates for everyone—for industries, the commercial sector, military, and sub-military contractors, as well as for the art handling business. They’ve put all sorts of objects into their wooden crates—onsite and in their workshop in Long Island City, Queens. Sometimes they pack pianos, and animal sculptures made out of Legos, or are even lucky enough to enclose a Rodin sculpture. But for fine art, they usually build the crate and keep their hands off the priceless artworks.

“I enjoy the challenge of designing some things that are different,” says Doug. Earlier this summer, Abbot & Abbot was tasked with crafting a crate by an auction house for a painting by a renowned artist. The crate was driven around on a flatbed through Manhattan to promote the name of the auction house and inspire bystanders to guess what soon-to-be auctioned artwork was inside.

They’ve also manufactured coffins when the city was in dire need of them. And they’ve seen the city through it all—the AIDS epidemic in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, the aftermath of 9/11, and more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, they struggled with the stress of manufacturing coffins within a short deadline while several members of their workforce got infected with the virus. As challenging as it was, Abbot and their employees got it done for NYC. Stuart laments: “Somebody’s got to do it.”

Going forward, they would like to expand outside the tri-state area and develop a second shift to accommodate more employees. For manufacturers, they believe that the challenges in New York City are high taxes, strong competition from New Jersey and Long Island, and their employees’ struggles with the cost of living crisis. The hardest part of the business, according to the Gleibers, is finding the right people. For Abbot & Abbot, hard work is the primary qualifier for their employees, as the other requirements are fairly simple: “We just want somebody that: (a) can read a tape measure, and (b) has experience with power tools.”

Abbot & Abbot proudly refer to themselves as crate engineers. They’ve crafted bespoke boxes for the Northrop Grumman group, an aerospace and defense company, and even built scaffolding for a painting to be hoisted into a house. Sometimes they have to design and build crates to fit objects as simple as a painting or as difficult as a uniquely-shaped industrial valve for the Navy. Doug Gleiber aptly sums up why they’ve kept their doors open since 1888: “There’s not many people like us around. What we do is unique in itself.”