Bronx’s Yula Corp Welds On, Cooling Pharma Since 1926—Thermodynamics Still Unimpressed

In an era of relentless churn, a century-old Bronx factory reminds New York that steady craftsmanship may be more enduring than disruption.

For nearly a hundred years, the clatter and flicker of welding torches have echoed through Hunts Point, where Yula Corp.—a family-owned Bronx firm—quietly bends thermodynamics to its will. On a recent weekday, the shop floor hummed with the steady, unglamorous production of custom heat exchangers, devices that regulate temperatures for pharmaceutical manufacturing but rarely catch the public eye. Though their handiwork seldom earns headlines or disrupts entire industries, the Feldman family and their 30-odd employees have become New York’s unlikely bulwark against the more fashionable malaise of deindustrialisation.

Yula, founded in 1926 by Henry Yula, is now helmed by cousins Matthew, Michael, and Jason Feldman, the third generation to keep the company’s flame (quite literally) alight. Each exchanger, taking up to 12 weeks to fabricate by hand, monitors temperatures in the making of myriad pharmaceuticals—a “behind-the-scenes workhorse,” as Michael Feldman puts it. If the team turns out 25 per month, the year is considered buoyant. Yula’s machines do not court consumer recognition, but their necessity is rarely in doubt, at least among drug makers keen to avoid catastrophes in their factories.

A century on the margins

The company’s longevity is an oddity in modern New York City, where light manufacturing long ago ceded ground to logistics, real estate, and fintech. Yet Yula doggedly persists, its continuing presence in the South Bronx owed as much to family tenacity as to the immutable laws of physics. “As far as we know, [thermodynamics] are not going to change anytime soon, so we will remain the best mousetrap for now,” says Michael Feldman, with a grin that could not be easily feigned in Silicon Valley.

Since the younger Feldmans took the reins in 2008, they have quietly overhauled the production line—introducing new fabrication technology and upskilling a workforce that ranges from engineers to welders. These upgrades, while unshowy, have let Yula fend off the slow encroachment of cheaper rivals overseas. The company’s operating logic, however, remains anchored in community and geography: access to New York’s rich hiring pool, proximity to distribution networks, and, not least, deep family roots. “This is just where our family is from, and where we want to stay,” says Matthew Feldman.

The first-order effects are manifestly local. Amidst the Bronx’s shifting industrial landscape—with warehouses and fulfilment hubs crowding out legacy workshops—Yula holds fast as both employer and economic anchor. Even as many of its neighbours have shuttered or decamped, the firm remains a source of stability, offering skilled union jobs in a borough more associated with service-sector churn. Its persistence, while modest by headline metrics, is a small but vital vote of confidence in the notion that some forms of manufacturing still have a place in the city.

Economically, the second-order ripples are subtler but no less significant. Firms like Yula portend an alternative to New York’s standard narrative of inexorable gentrification and routine business exodus. Technological upgrades have enabled the family to compete on precision and expertise, rather than on the puny margins of mass production. Clients—chiefly pharmaceutical giants requiring custom, quality-assured equipment—appear to accept that a price premium is warranted, if only to avoid the costs of a production mishap. Skills developed on Yula’s floor, meanwhile, remain stubbornly hard to automate or offshore, providing a rare pocket of wage resilience in an otherwise precarious labour market.

Socially, the Feldmans’ operation undercuts the persistent myth that New York’s industrial era is exhausted, or that its working class has no future in the five boroughs. This is not Detroit—no titanic assembly lines, no sprawling corporate headquarters, just a discrete firm trading in trust and technical conviction. The cousins’ avowed refusal to decamp for a cheaper zip code is as much about familial history as hard-nosed economics; but it also supports the intangible glue—community pride, intergenerational ambition—that sustains neighbourhoods buffeted by market whims.

A modest rebuke to industrial decline

What lessons does this Bronx anomaly offer the broader American context? Nationally, small-scale manufacturing continues to shrink: its employment share nationwide has dropped by more than 30% in four decades, and even resilient metros like New York lose about 10,000 manufacturing jobs per decade. Yula’s endurance is not easily replicable, hinging as it does on accumulated know-how, an idiosyncratic family arrangement, and clients who cannot simply pivot to cheaper imports without risking regulatory headaches. Yet its existence hints that niche specialisation—and an unwillingness to relocate at the first sign of higher rents—can, on occasion, outlast market sclerosis.

By European standards, the survival of a hundred-year-old, multi-generational manufacturing business in a major city would scarcely merit notice. In Germany or northern Italy, long-lived Mittelstand firms still form the backbone of local prosperity. In the American context, by contrast, such constancy feels both improbable and (perhaps unfairly) heroic. US industrial policy, whether federal or municipal, has seldom been tailored to reward small industrialists who merely endure.

We suspect that companies like Yula—quiet, privately held, and allergic to PR campaigns—do not figure high in mayoral talking points or economic-development plans. Yet their inconspicuous stability offers ballast to a metropolis otherwise hooked on venture-capital fizz and the quick fix. There is, of course, a risk in romanticising any family business: succession can turn inward, founders’ legacies can ossify, and nostalgia rarely shields against market change. Commodity costs can spike; global competitors may yet devise their own ‘better mousetraps.’ Skipping the Bronx for Jersey or Indiana might eventually make numbers sense.

Nonetheless, Yula’s story is a useful rejoinder to the assumption that cities must choose between finance and faded factories, or that all legacy industries are simply waiting to be swept aside by the next algorithm. Sometimes the best “disruption” is simply showing up, decade after decade, with one’s eye on the weld and a wry faith in the second law of thermodynamics. In Hunts Point, the sparks seem likely to keep flying—quietly, capably, indomitably—for some time yet. ■