Historic Brooklyn Navy Yard is given modern makeover

NEW YORK -- When the Pentagon closed the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1966, it became an obsolete facility awash in history but torpedoed by time.

Yet within the past 15 years, the 40-plus buildings behind the nondescript facade have been filled with activity.

Its old machine shops and warehouses hum with small entrepreneurs -- makers of furniture, clothing, industrial equipment, theatrical sets and computer software -- as well as medical suppliers, fashion designers, printers, carpenters and artists, altogether employing 5,000 people.

Andrew Kimball, president and chief executive officer of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp., a not-for-profit that manages the city-owned site, said current plans call for spending $250 million in public and private money to add 1.3 million square feet of space and 1,500 more jobs by 2009. In a decade, he said, there should be 5,000 more jobs.

"The Brooklyn Navy Yard has added another chapter to its rich history by becoming a thriving hub of industrial business," Kimball said.

It didn't happen overnight.

With the Navy gone, the drydocks and cranes that helped win seven wars fell into disrepair. The carved eagles-on-pillars guarding the main gate vanished and front entrance eventually became a police department auto pound, where citizens pay $200 or more to reclaim stolen and towed vehicles.

At the old naval hospital, a marble ghost dating from 1837, the wide corridors and patient wards echo with emptiness. On Admiral's Row, six graceful turn-of-the-century mansions once occupied by top officers and still owned by the federal government, are falling into ruin, their future still unclear.

Kimball and Daniella Romano, the Navy yard's resident archivist, said the new development will give the Navy yard's past its due, including include oral histories of former workers such as Audrey Lyons who was a $40-a-week parts inspector in 1944 when Margaret Truman was invited to christen the brand-new USS Missouri.

The daughter of Sen. Harry S. Truman, who was soon to be president, needed help to break the champagne bottle on the third try -- a less than sparkling debut for the "Mighty Mo," the last truly famous warship among hundreds produced at the yard since 1801.

"We all took time off to see it," recalls Lyons, now 84 and retired in Essex, Conn.

At the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a parking lot will replace the police auto pound and building near the main gate will offer guided tours and an exhibit of photographs and artifacts.

Some of the six drydocks remain in use for maintenance. On a recent day, one held a large Singapore-based oil products tanker. The U.S. Coast Guard tug Sturgeon Bay occupied another. "Maritime is still part of what we do," Kimball said.

The yard's biggest tenant is Steiner Studios, a Hollywood-style operation in a cavernous former machine shop with sound stages where large pieces of vessels were once assembled. It, too, is expanding.

There is a fish wholesaler to fancy restaurants, a shroud-maker for Orthodox Jewish funerals and a factory producing coffee-sweetener packets.

At Ferra Designs, Inc., partners Robert Ferraroni and Jeff Kahn use a powerful water jet to cut steel for custom-designed furniture and sculpture. They found space at the Navy yard after rising rents forced a move from the nearby Williamsburg neighborhood.

"The Navy yard is a great resource for networking with other businesses," Kahn said. "I feel like we're in a community here. We do business together, and it reinforces the feeling that we are in the right place."