A Hamden aluminum manufacturer with roots dating to 1909 has shut down after years of rising operating expenses. Owner Howard Goldfarb said tariffs were the “final nail in the coffin,” but he also pointed to energy, insurance, taxes and labor costs that had squeezed the business long before its closure.

Leed Himmel Industries, a custom aluminum manufacturer in Hamden, Connecticut, has closed after more than a century of operations, NBC Connecticut reporter Len Besthoff reported Aug. 25. Goldfarb said the shutdown followed a long buildup of expenses that made it increasingly difficult to justify keeping the plant running.

The closing turns a warning Goldfarb gave the station in 2024 into a concrete outcome. At the time, he warned that electricity and other expenses could eventually make continued production uneconomic. Two years later, he walked through a largely empty factory and said costs had moved beyond what the company could sustain.

A business dating to 1909

Leed Himmel’s history stretches back to Himmel Bros., founded in 1909 as a provider of custom aluminum extrusions and storefront glazing and entrance systems. Leed Architectural Products, a Hamden custom metals manufacturer founded in 1946, acquired Himmel Bros. in 1989, creating Leed Himmel Industries.

The combined company built a vertically integrated operation around custom aluminum work. Its own materials describe extrusion, machining, fabrication, anodizing, powder coating and painting under one roof, serving architectural and industrial customers. Its product history includes components for airport control towers, storefronts, curtain walls, railings, louvers, wall panels and other fabricated aluminum systems.

That history makes the closure more than the disappearance of a small storefront business. Leed Himmel occupied a manufacturing niche in which machinery, skilled labor, power consumption and working capital all matter. Custom jobs can require a company to buy substantial quantities of metal and carry inventory well before a customer pays an invoice.

Goldfarb told NBC Connecticut that if the company’s costs had remained near their levels of eight years earlier, he would not have shut it down. His account presents the closure as the result of accumulated pressure rather than a sudden decision triggered by a single expense.

Operating costs kept piling up

Goldfarb gave NBC Connecticut a detailed list of expenses he said had become increasingly difficult to absorb. Health insurance for workers cost roughly $840,000 in the previous year, he said. Insurance covering buildings, vehicles and workers’ compensation added more than $400,000.

Electricity was another major burden. Goldfarb said the company’s power bill exceeded $500,000 even after operations had been reduced. The business also paid about $160,000 a year in local property taxes.

Those figures come from the owner’s account, not an independently published audit of the company’s books. But federal data support his broader description of Connecticut as an expensive electricity market. Through May 2026, the average industrial electricity price in Connecticut was 19.18 cents per kilowatt hour, compared with 18.54 cents for New England as a whole.

Goldfarb also cited Connecticut’s scheduled minimum wage increase and costs associated with public programs on electric bills. The state’s minimum wage is $16.94 an hour in 2026 and is scheduled to rise to $17.48 on Jan. 1, 2027, under an inflation linked formula. State officials say the automatic adjustment is intended to protect lower wage workers’ purchasing power.

Tariffs added another pressure point

Goldfarb described tariffs as the last factor that pushed the company beyond the point he was willing to continue. He said the duties increased the cost of aluminum and other inputs while also forcing the business to commit more money to inventory before customers paid.

That distinction matters. The available evidence does not establish that tariffs alone destroyed an otherwise healthy company. Goldfarb’s own account describes a business already under pressure from electricity, insurance, taxes and other expenses. His claim is narrower: tariffs added cost and cash flow strain when the company already had little room left.

For an aluminum fabricator, tariff effects can appear even when the company is not itself the importer of record. Duties can affect U.S. market prices and premiums for metal, depending on supply, country of origin and product classification. American aluminum buyers faced exceptionally high costs as steep tariffs interacted with tight inventories.

Reuters reported in January that U.S. aluminum costs had risen about 40% since Trump doubled tariffs on many aluminum imports in June 2025. The Midwest premium paid by U.S. consumers also reached record levels amid reduced inventories and constrained supplies. That does not establish Leed Himmel’s precise material costs, but it provides market context for Goldfarb’s account.

The tariff ruling was narrower

One major claim in the account circulating around Leed Himmel’s closure needs qualification. The Supreme Court did strike down a major part of Trump’s tariff program, but it did not rule that all Trump tariffs were illegal.

On Feb. 20, 2026, the court held in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, did not authorize the president to impose the tariffs challenged in that litigation. The court concluded that IEEPA’s power to regulate importation did not provide the tariff authority the administration asserted.

That ruling did not eliminate tariffs imposed under other statutes. The distinction is particularly important in an aluminum story because Trump has also relied on Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, a separate law permitting action when imports are determined to threaten national security.

Trump raised Section 232 tariffs on aluminum to 25% beginning in March 2025 and then increased many aluminum and steel duties to 50% in June 2025. The administration continued modifying the Section 232 metal tariff system in 2026, including changes to rates, product categories and treatment for particular trading partners.

The Supreme Court itself drew attention to the statutory difference, noting that Section 232 contains explicit tariff related authority that IEEPA lacks. It is therefore inaccurate to describe every aluminum tariff remaining after the ruling as a simple continuation of tariffs the Supreme Court had already invalidated.

Trump says tariffs protect industry

The administration’s case for aluminum tariffs is almost the mirror image of Goldfarb’s complaint. The White House argues that imported aluminum weakened domestic producers, reduced U.S. capacity and created a national security vulnerability. Its stated objective is to make American production more competitive and encourage investment in domestic smelting and metal manufacturing.

In July 2026, Trump announced another aluminum initiative under Section 232 that would provide reduced tariff treatment for companies making approved commitments to build, expand or refurbish U.S. aluminum smelters. The administration said the tariff regime was strengthening domestic aluminum production and supporting new investment.

Such a policy can produce sharply different effects across the same supply chain. A domestic primary aluminum producer may benefit from protection against lower priced imports. A downstream manufacturer that buys aluminum to extrude, machine, coat or fabricate into custom products can instead face higher input prices, particularly if domestic supply cannot quickly substitute for imports.

Leed Himmel operated on that downstream side of the market. Goldfarb’s account illustrates why a policy designed to strengthen one segment of American manufacturing can impose added costs on another segment that relies on the protected material.

A possible sale also fell apart

Goldfarb told NBC Connecticut that he had come close to selling the company to a European buyer. According to his account, the prospective purchaser backed away after the outbreak of the U.S. Iran war created another layer of uncertainty.

The conflict began in February 2026 and remained unresolved six months later. Fighting and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz have affected energy markets, shipping and business conditions well beyond the immediate combat zone, creating uncertainty for companies making international investment decisions.

NBC Connecticut did not identify the prospective buyer, disclose the proposed terms or report independent confirmation from the buyer explaining its decision. The precise conclusion is therefore that Goldfarb says the war contributed to the collapse of the transaction, not that the conflict has been independently established as its sole cause.

The wording matters politically as well. The United States is engaged in sustained hostilities with Iran, but describing Trump as having formally “declared war” can imply congressional action that did not occur. The constitutional and statutory authority for the military campaign has itself been contested by lawmakers and legal experts.

Connecticut faces its own questions

Goldfarb’s criticism was not confined to Washington. He also blamed Connecticut’s overall cost of doing business, pointing to power, insurance, taxes and state level expenses as pressures that existed before tariffs became the final factor in his decision.

Connecticut officials have acknowledged the importance of energy affordability. In response to the closure, the state Department of Economic and Community Development told NBC Connecticut that reliable and affordable energy is a central problem and called for a broad regional supply strategy encompassing renewables, nuclear power, natural gas and other resources.

The state has also taken steps that reduced some electricity costs in 2026. Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection said residential public benefits charges shifted from a cost to a credit beginning in May because of benefits flowing from nuclear contracts and other state energy policies. Those residential changes do not establish what Leed Himmel paid as an industrial customer.

For Hamden, the closure also means losing a longtime industrial taxpayer. Goldfarb said Leed Himmel had been paying roughly $160,000 annually in local property taxes, adding a municipal fiscal dimension to the loss of the manufacturing operation.

What happens to the plant now

Goldfarb is still trying to find a buyer for the Hamden facility, according to NBC Connecticut. His preference is for the property to remain a manufacturing site rather than be converted into storage space.

That leaves one part of Leed Himmel’s story unresolved. The operating company has closed, but the industrial site could still host another manufacturer if a purchaser emerges. Whether that happens will depend on the property, equipment, demand and the same cost environment Goldfarb says contributed to his decision.

The closure ultimately offers a more complicated lesson than the original “deathblow” framing suggests. Trump’s tariffs were not the only expense Goldfarb blamed, and the Supreme Court did not strike down every tariff affecting aluminum. But the owner of a company with roots going back 117 years did identify tariffs as the final pressure that made continued operation no longer worthwhile.

For policymakers, the case illustrates a trade off embedded in industrial policy. Protecting upstream metal production can increase costs for downstream manufacturers. State policies that finance workers, energy programs and public services can create expenses employers feel directly. A factory that survives each burden separately can still become uneconomic when several pressures arrive together.

Leed Himmel’s closing is therefore best understood not as proof that one policy single handedly destroyed a century old manufacturer, but as a documented example of how tariffs, energy, insurance, taxes and geopolitical uncertainty can compound until an owner concludes that the economics no longer work.