Butler is now in partnership with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. They are transforming an 84-year-old, 150,000-square foot one- time Studebaker automobile service center last used as a warehouse for legal documents in Crown Heights -- the site of a notorious race riot in 1991 -- into what he describes as an “office building for the 21st century.”

Its tenants will include the nonprofit Brooklyn Community Foundation, video-production facilities, a yoga studio and an online bookseller. A beer hall will occupy 9,000 square feet, with some libations created nearby at the Brooklyn Brewery -- founded in 1988 and now distributed in 25 states and 20 countries.

‘Good Wife’

Five miles (8 kilometers) north in Greenpoint, across the street from a sewage-treatment plant, is the one-time pots-and- pans factory that now houses the offices of Broadway Stages, with 1 million square feet of studios. It produces dozens of movies and television shows, including CBS’s hit series “The Good Wife” and “Blue Bloods.”

The enterprise, one of the city’s four major film sound- stage complexes, is part of an industry that produces 29 episodic television series in the city, up from seven in 2003. Fourteen are shot in Brooklyn.

The television and film industry pumps $7.1 billion a year into the New York economy and employs about 130,000, according to the city’s Office of Film, Theater & Broadcasting. Broadway Stages has grown over the years, building its studios on what had been acres of trash-strewn lots.

Rooftop Farm

The studio has a rooftop farm that grows vegetables for local consumption and solar panels that supply 30 percent of its electricity. As it prospers, so too do about 150 local merchants -- restaurants, printers, plumbers, electricians, hardware, paint and stationery stores -- serving the companies and their crews, said Gina Argento, 41, whose family owns and runs the business.

“We located in what was once one of Brooklyn’s centers of heavy industry and export, and now we’re manufacturing and exporting new American products -- films and television shows,” Argento said.

Even with the resurgence, Brooklyn’s 9.4 percent average unemployment rate for 2013 is second-highest after the Bronx, according to the state labor department.