BLDG 92 Shows Off Navy Yard's Past and Present

The Brooklyn Navy Yard has been a city landmark since the end of the Revolutionary War, yet most New Yorkers have only a vague understanding of what goes on behind its walls.

A new visitor, event and job center hopes to finally change that. BLDG 92, , offers a thoughtful and compelling tour through the industrial park’s past, present, and future.

"The Navy Yard has been closed to the public for 200 years," says Emilie Evans, BLDG 92's visitor services manager. "For the first time, through BLDG 92, we are able to connect with the public."

The multi-use space—housed in a restored officer’s quarters at the northern terminus of Carlton Avenue—uses artifacts, videos and maps to illustrate the economic and military importance of the Yard from its founding to the present day.

There is a whole lot of history to cover.

Ships were first built at the site of the Navy Yard in 1781, and the Yard has produced some of the best-known vessels in American history. These include the USS Maine, which was destroyed in Havana Harbor in 1898 and prompted the Spanish-American War, and the USS Arizona, which sank in the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Visitors to the museum can look at scale models and artifacts from these and other ships produced by the Yard.

But the exhibit is just as much about the Yard’s workers as it is about its products.

At its peak during WWII, the Navy Yard operated 24 hours a day and employed 71,000 people, many of them women and minorities. As photos around the museum show, the Yard in those days was a city within a city, complete with dining halls, dorms and athletic leagues.

Shuttered by the military in 1966, the Yard has been converted into an industrial park for private corporations. Although the number of employees at the Yard has fallen to 5,000, it is still home to over 200 companies.

BLDG 92 is an homage to the Yard’s present as well as to its past. There is an entire room devoted to products produced in the yard since the military left, which include paper sugar packets (which were invented by a company based in the Yard), bullet proof vests, solar street lamps, and leather handbags.

The museum’s architects also incorporated products from the Yard’s tenants, into the building’s design, including a massive solar street lamp by Dugall Energy Solutions, which sits in the lobby, and a mural painted by a company called Mason 9.

Taken together, the museum presents convincing evidence of the Yard’s national importance. As Evans puts it:

"[The Navy Yard] might look like a bunch of walls and a chain-link fence, but there is so much happening here, we are trying to share it with the world."