The Yard That Armed a War

On your right, warships were once built by a workforce that, for the first time in its history, included thousands of women. The Brooklyn Navy Yard employed roughly seventy thousand people working around the clock at the height of the Second World War, turning out battleships, destroyers, and aircraft carriers that would fight across two oceans.

What made that wartime workforce unusual was who filled it. For the first time in the yard's history, women were hired as mechanics and technicians, taking jobs as pipefitters, electricians, welders, crane operators, and sheet metal workers. By the final year of the war, thousands of women were working skilled trades on this site, not helping out at the edges, but building warships themselves, right alongside the men.

The work could not last. With the war over and the Navy shrinking its fleet, the yard's usefulness to the government faded fast. In February of nineteen sixty six, the federal government announced the yard would be eligible for around ten million dollars in aid to help convert it into an industrial park. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara ordered it closed that same year, one of more than ninety military bases and installations shut down in a single round of cuts across the country. The Navy formally decommissioned the yard on June thirtieth, nineteen sixty six.

New York City bought the property and spent decades filling the empty piers and machine shops with smaller manufacturers instead of one giant employer. Today the yard still functions as a working industrial park, home to makers, fabricators, and film studios, built around the same dry docks where aircraft carriers were once launched for a war fought on two oceans.