Historic Brooklyn Navy Yard gets modern makeover

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

The first ship built there, in 1798, was the frigate USS Adams, burned by its crew in 1812 to avoid British capture. The last, the amphibious transport USS 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; USS Niagara, which helped lay the first trans-Atlantic undersea cable; and USS 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.

USS Maine, America's first battleship, was commissioned in 1889 and exploded at its dock in Havana in 1898, triggering the Spanish-American War that recast the United States as a world power.

The battleship USS 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.

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.

The gate itself is to be restored as nearly as possible to its turn-of-the-20th century look.

The continuing expansion of the Navy yard 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 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.