Brooklyn Navy Yard Improvements – Brooklyn NY

Description

In 1934, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that Brooklyn and Queens received their largest allotment of funds to-date, “in the government’s drive to spread employment and aid industry.” Improvements to drydock 2 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, were part of the Public Works Administration’s (PWA) metropolitan-wide program which added “1,079,328 man-months of direct employment,” as well as indirect employment, much of it in the construction trades (Brooklyn Daily Eagle).

Forty percent of the $250,000,000 that the PWA allocated to the New York metropolitan area went to Brooklyn and Queens. A significant portion of these funds were used to improve and extend the city’s transportation system, including additions to dock and pier facilities (Long Range Public Investment).

The WPA provided labor toward the operations of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. According to the Federal Writers’ Project:

“The yard is traversed by more than five miles of paved streets, and contains four drydocks ranging in length from 326 to 700 feet, two huge steel shipways, and six big pontoons and cylindrical floats for salvage work. In addition to the numerous foundries, machine shops, and warehouses, it has barracks for marines, a power plant, a large radio station, and a railroad spur. The activities of the yard in 1938 required the services of about ten thousand men, of whom one-third were WPA workers.”

The Brooklyn Navy Yard closed in 1966, and became a development corporation in 1981 (Brooklyn Navy Yard Industrial Park). GMD Shipyard Corporation now uses the dry docks for commercial ship repair (Turnstile Tours).