Historic Brooklyn Navy Yard gets modern makeover

Yet within the past 15 years, the 40-plus buildings behind the nondescript facade have become a modern beehive of activity that includes almost everything but, well, bees.

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 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 says.

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.