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The Brooklyn Navy Yard, on
Wallabout Bay, was established by the federal government in 1801. By the Civil
War, the Yard had expanded to employ about 6000 men. On the eve of World War I,
the yard contained more than five miles of paved streets, four drydocks ranging
in length from 326 to 700 feet, two steel shipways, and six pontoons and
cylindrical floats for salvage work, barracks for marines, a power plant, a
large radio station, and a railroad spur, as well as the expected foundries,
machine shops, and warehouses. In 1938, the Yard employed about ten thousand
men.
The Yard was the site for the
construction of Robert Fulton's steam frigate, Fulton, launched in 1815. In
1890, USS Maine was launched from the Yard. The battleship Arizona, commissioned
in 1916, was built in the Yard, and the battleship Missouri was launched from
the Yard in 1944.
The Navy decommissioned the
Yard in 1966, but it became an area of private manufacturing and commercial
activity. Now the Yard has over 200 tenants with more than 3500 employees, and
is managed and operated by the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation for
the City of New York.
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