The Brooklyn Navy Yard
The Brooklyn Navy Yard is in the early stages of a more than $100 million renovation, one its overseers hope will give a further boost to the long-neglected former shipbuilding site, which has bounced back in recent years and now has more than 200 tenants. Demolition is to begin early next year on Building 128, a former machine shop as big and hulking as an airport hangar; three new buildings are planned in its place.
Elsewhere in the 300-acre industrial park, which sits along the river between Williamsburg and Dumbo, and half-dozen projects are in the works. There hasn’t been this much activity here since the mid-1960’s, when the Navy pulled up stakes and the yard became caught up in a tangle of local politics.
But before any work is done, engineers and architects must consult the plans: 32,000 engineering and architectural drawings, some dating to the 1800’s, that make up the Navy Yard’s archive. Housed in a tiny room overlooking the Williamsburg Bridge, the documents form a kind of bolts-up history of the yard, which dates to 1801, boomed during World War II and today, with its brick warehouses and cobblestone roads, resembles nothing so much as a 19th-century factory town.
The collection includes blueprints of floor plans, electrical grids and water mains. Yellowing maps trace oxyacetylene lines (used for welding) running under the yard and specify the weight that can be borne by the foundations of the aged buildings. A map of soundings for the dry docks shows, in characters resembling hieroglyphs, hundreds of depth measurements for Wallabout Bay, the inlet of the East River that laps against the yard.
As the Navy Yard remakes itself, the plans have served as not just a historical curiosity, but an invaluable planning tool.
“This infrastructure goes back hundreds of years,” said Andrew Kimball, president of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, which manages the city-owned site. “We need to make sure we’re doing everything right.”
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