Brooklyn Navy Yard gets a makeover

 

By Richard Pyle - The Associated Press

Posted : Monday May 19, 2008 7:11:34 EDT

 

NEW YORK — Audrey Lyons was a $40-a-week parts inspector at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1944 when Margaret Truman was invited to christen the brand-new carrier Missouri.

 

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

 

But the daughter of Sen. (and soon-to-be-president) Harry S. Truman needed help to break the champagne bottle on the third try — a less than sparkling debut for the “Mighty Mo,” the last famous warship among hundreds produced at the yard since 1801.

 

The Pentagon closed the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1966, an obsolete facility awash in history but torpedoed by time.

 

Yet behind the nondescript facade visible to motorists rushing past on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the 40-plus buildings of the former shipyard have become a modern beehive of 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 CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp., a nonprofit that manages the city-owned site, said current plans call for spending $250 million 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.

 

The continuing expansion will emphasize “green” construction. Hospital buildings and an overgrown cemetery that once held 1,500 bodies await transformation into a 20-acre “media campus” focused on entertainment, TV and graduate educational programs. (The bodies were reburied in a cemetery in Queens.)

 

Some of the six dry docks remain in use for maintenance. On a recent day, one held a large Singapore-based oil products tanker. The 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.”

 

It didn’t happen overnight.

 

With the Navy gone, the dry docks and cranes that helped win seven wars fell into disrepair. The carved eagles on pillars guarding the main gate vanished, and it 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 unclear.

 

The first ship built there, in 1798, was the frigate Adams, burned by its crew in 1812 to avoid British capture. The last, the amphibious transport Duluth, slipped into the East River in 1965.

 

Other noteworthy vessels included the Fulton II, the first U.S. steam-powered warship to go to sea, in 1837; the frigate Niagara, which helped lay the first trans-Atlantic undersea cable; and the Civil War ironclad Monitor, built elsewhere but commissioned at the yard in 1862. Within weeks, it faced the Confederates’ CSS Virginia in history’s first clash of ironclads — a standoff, but a death knell for wooden warships.

 

The battleship Maine was commissioned in 1889 and exploded at its dock in Havana in 1898, triggering the Spanish-American War, which recast the U.S. as a world power.

 

The battleship Arizona, launched in 1915, remains the best-known symbol of America’s entry into World War II. Moored near its sunken hulk at Pearl Harbor is the Missouri, now a floating museum symbolizing the Allied victory in 1945.

 

In interviews, Kimball and Daniella Romano, the Navy yard’s resident archivist, said development will give that past its due, to include oral histories of former workers such as Lyons, as well as guided tours and an exhibit of photographs and artifacts at a building near the main gate.

 

The gate itself is to be restored as nearly as possible to its turn-of-the-20th century look — with public parking in place of the police auto pound.

 

Navy Time article

The USS Missouri, a Battleship of the Iowa Class is not a "when Margaret Truman was invited to christen the brand-new carrier Missouri. " Very poor research and writing. Missouri was a battleship not Aircraft Carrier, both the Black Shoe Navy and the Brown Shoe Navy have been let down by this mistake.

 

Shawn McCully

Amen to that cullen, you beat me to it.

Sheesh, tough crowd. Never made a typo or error on proof reading?

Sheesh, tough crowd. Never made a typo or error on proof reading?

 

What, you're saying something that calls itself "The Navy Times" shouldn't be held to a slightly higher standard than the MSM?

With all fairness to Navy Times, you'll notice that the article was apparently written by a fellow from that media monster The Associated Press. Besides, its not like somebody said "F-14 Hornet" or "F-18 Tomcat", or some similar unspeakably horrible error.

With all fairness to Navy Times, you'll notice that the article was apparently written by a fellow from that media monster The Associated Press. Besides, its not like somebody said "F-14 Hornet" or "F-18 Tomcat", or some similar unspeakably horrible error.

 

On a related note I cringed while reading The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle: Over Budget, Behind Schedule, and Unreliable when despite the troubling report from the United States House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, they identified the EFV as an amphibious "tank". Well it does have tracks. Just the "carrier" Missouri floated in the water. I would however like to expect more my government than the AP.

With all fairness to Navy Times, you'll notice that the article was apparently written by a fellow from that media monster The Associated Press. Besides, its not like somebody said "F-14 Hornet" or "F-18 Tomcat", or some similar unspeakably horrible error.

 

Okay, you got me on that one ...

Maybe this was authored by the same guy who described an S-3 as a "Carrier Based Fighter aircraft" that allegedly violated Venezuelan airspace the other day.

 

Buddha

Heh ... given that the A-10 is also often referred to as a "fighter" these days, and given that the S-3 has a slight air-to-mud capability, that may actually qualify as an accurate description ...