America may never recover its glory as a manufacturing powerhouse, but the Brooklyn Navy Yard is doing what it can, transforming itself from a 20th-century warship builder to a 21st-century high-tech hub.
Now it’s about to unveil a $2.5 billion building plan that would more than quadruple its current workforce.
The navy yard’s ongoing expansion -- which includes the reconstruction of Admiral’s Row, where naval officers once lived, and the creation of a waterfront office building that the co-working startup WeWork Cos. helped design -- should raise the job count to about 20,000, from the current 7,000, according to the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp.
The new building plan is for 5.1 million more square feet (474,000 square meters). A little more than half of it will be in a single, vast complex with about the total square footage of the Empire State Building, bringing the yard’s total workforce to about 30,000.
The expansion would allow for startups to design and test products while giving them space to grow when they go to full production. The city has had trouble holding on to creative manufacturers once they become successful, said David Ehrenberg, president and chief executive officer of the development corporation, a not-for-profit that manages and develops the property on behalf of the yard’s owner, New York City.
It’s a far cry from the yard’s shipbuilding peak during World War II, when about 70,000 people worked at the site -- and a long way from the blue-collar culture of the borough’s wartime years. Nearby Williamsburg and Dumbo have become magnets for affluent millennials in tech and media.
The navy yard has sought a balance of creative types and traditional working-class Americans at the site where the U.S.S. Arizona was launched. A representative employer there is Steiner Studios, a Hollywood-style film lot where about 60 percent of the jobs are for carpenters, woodworkers and other people who work with their hands. And the yard has thrived.
“When we started here, it was a bombed-out mess,” Douglas Steiner, chairman, said of the studio’s birth in 2004, when the surrounding neighborhoods were just starting to be gentrified. Steiner is celebrating Academy Award nominations for “The Post” and “The Greatest Showman,” parts of which were shot at the studio, along with TV shows such as “The Deuce” and “Girls.”
“Now everybody wants to be here,” he said.
But can everybody get a job here? Since 2016, about 2.75 million square feet of office space has been built in Brooklyn, with an additional 2.4 million square feet under construction, according to Cushman & Wakefield. The navy yard is a different animal, but 5.1 million square feet is a lot of manufacturing space to create in a service economy. The current yard has about 4.8 million square feet.