Navy Yard Plans to Build $400M Film and Media Complex

The Brooklyn Navy Yard’s 300-acre Naval Annex Historic Campus will be made over into a film, media and technology hub, helmed in part by the adjacent Steiner Studios, says the New York Times.

The nonprofit Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp. and Douglas Steiner, a private developer and chairman of , came to an agreement on the future of the land, which will take 12 years to transform.

Of the new features will be a media campus, which will use the nine historical buildings on the site and create five new structures for a total of 328,000 square feet, housing media companies and academic programs. 100,000 square feet of new stages for film and TV are also planned, says the Times, including the country’s first underwater stage and the first back lot on the East Coast to feature a New York City streetscape.

The developers estimate that the project will create 2,500 direct jobs, many of which promise to be high-paying union positions; 1,500 indirect jobs from services like carpentry and dry cleaning, and 2,600 construction jobs. The media campus alone will provide jobs for 6,000 New Yorkers.

Steiner has agreed to commit almost all of the $346 million to renovate the complex. The developers are asking New York State and New York City $35 million for the project, and $2.5 million from the federal government, according to the paper.

“This is a very unique and special part of the yard, and we have wanted to be careful, as the stewards, that we really have the right plan for it. And this time we feel like we do,” said Andrew Kimball, president and chief executive of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp.

Kimball hopes the backlots will become a draw for tourists, and told the paper he hopes to one day see double-decker buses making stops to glimpse celebrities filming at the Navy Yard.