Museum honors Brooklyn Navy Yard history

The story of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and its vital role in American history as a major military shipbuilding site spans more than 200 years. But it's also the story of the adaptive reuse of a historic site as a bustling industrial park that today employs thousands of people in such diverse fields as film production and green-energy manufacturing.

The two stories of the Navy Yard -- decommissioned by the government in 1966 -- are the themes of a new museum opening today, Veterans Day, on the sprawling grounds of the 300-acre Brooklyn Navy Yard Industrial Park campus located on the Brooklyn waterfront across from Lower Manhattan.

The design of the $25.6-million Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at Building 92 also reflects those stories. The museum is housed in the restored 1857 house of a former Marine commandant and is connected to a modern three-story visitors center featuring a solar screen with an image of the cruiser USS Brooklyn leaving the yard in 1936.

A 22,500-pound anchor from the amphibious assault ship USS Austin -- one of the last ships built on the site -- is one of the first yard-manufactured artifacts visitors will see upon entering the glass atrium lobby, along with a wind-solar street lamp.

"These will show the public right there what the exhibit in the building is all about: the past, the present and the future," said Andrew Kimball, president and chief executive of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp., which manages the yard for the city.

"For the first time the public is going to be able to come in behind our gates and learn about the extraordinarily rich history of the yard and also about how we've become a national model for sustainable urban industrial parks," Kimball said.

The exhibition is drawn from more than 41,000 blueprints, historic photos, drawings, maps and yard artifacts and fills six galleries on three floors of the historic building that was designed by Thomas U. Walter, an architect of the U.S. Capitol.

"You are going to see the whole history of the United States projected through a very specific lens of Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Navy Yard," said museum archivist Daniella Romano.

New York City purchased the yard in 1967 but attempts to revitalize it failed until 2000, when the city began to invest in stabilizing its infrastructure.

It's the first time the story of the yard has been told in a comprehensive way, Romano said.

At Building 92 the story unfolds with a timeline and a 40-foot-long wall mural of the different classes of ships built or launched at the yard -- sailing frigates, Civil War ironclads, gunboats, 20th-century warships and submarines. They included such storied ships as the Fulton II, the first U.S. steam warship assigned to sea duty, and the USS Arizona, which went down in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. An interactive table map allows multiple users to navigate the evolution of the yard through geography and time. And ambient sounds of pistons, steam engines and hammering re-create the atmosphere of the yard's bygone era.

In "Today's Yard" gallery, portraits, videos and products tell the story of the yard's 6,000 workers and 275 businesses.

Museum-goers also can take a guided bike or bus tour of the vast campus, driving past a pre-Civil War dry dock, a gargantuan 1899 machinist's warehouse slated to become a green manufacturing center, and the naval hospital that stands frozen in time.