BNY OHNY

For real, the last couple of drawings from the Brooklyn Navy Yard for the foreseeable future. I did these, as well as a couple at Woodside Press, during a visit during Open House New York in October.


Building 313, the former Ship Superintendent's Office and Tool room, built 1942. I think it's unused today. The 19th century dahlgren gun I drew sits outside this building.

A barge moored at Dock 72. Probably the biggest change from when I was a Visiting Artist and this subsequent visit was that the giant WeWork building site had been opened. When I was in the Visiting Artist Program, this dock was fenced off for construction. It's now accessible and has a stop for the NYC Ferry service.

A giant buoy on that same ferry. It wasn't until I spent so much time around these docks that I realized how many old tires are used by the maritime industry. Are these tires bought new, or is it a secondary market for old tires?

Woodside Press

Open House NYC is an annual event where buildings and sites in the city that are usually not accessible to the public are opened up to visitors. Last year, it coincided with the end of my time as a Visiting Artist at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Although I'd had access to the Yard for months, I hadn't actually been inside many of the businesses. So I spent much of that day drawing inside Kings County Distillery and Brooklyn Roasting Company. At the very end of the day, I was wandering through Building 2, visiting various shops and studios, when I came across a room full of old printing presses. It was Woodside Press. All the old machines looked so cool, but it was the very end of the day and there was no more time to draw anything, and I wasn't able to make it back before the residency ended. So when Open House rolled around this year, I made a return trip to the Yard and made it a point of dropping by to sketch. It is a traditional letterpress printing studio that produces business cards, posters, stationary, etc., and does book-binding. They sometimes host tours and workshops.

These are just two of the presses they own. They are Chandler & Price platen letterpresses, dating back to the mid to late 1940's. This post from another printmaker, Tiny Dog Press, has a good step-by-step demonstration of how these presses work.

Chandler & Price founded in 1884 in Cleveland by Harrison T. Chandler, an Illinois banker, and William H. Price, son of a builder of printing presses. The company came to dominate the market through the 1960's, when offset duplicating led to the decline to the letterpress. The company went out of business in 1964, but its machines are still in use by printmakers today.

Below are two process pictures for the above drawing. First, down in 2H pencil. This was done very fast, and rougher and looser than I usually do, because of time. Then, finished in ink, mostly with Micron pens. I relied heavily on photo reference I'd taken for some of the machine details. Then applied the color with watercolor and Derwent Inktense pencils.

History of Chandler & Price: C & P - Pressman's Favorite

The last batch of Navy Yard drawings

Here's the last batch of drawings I did during my time with the Visiting Artist Program at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I spent nine months, from April through December, of 2018 at the Yard, drawing every corner I could get to. There were four other terrific people in the group: Filmmaker Mark Street, artists Niki Lederer and Amy Lemaire, and poet Gerald Wagoner. Over these nine months, I produced 96 finished drawings. I have done series of studies of a place or theme, but this was, by far, the longest sustained project I've done. It's taken me almost another year to get everything scanned and posted. I tried to batch them by location or theme or subject, but this last bunch is just in the category "Miscellaneous."

At the start, I did not have a specific agenda; my plan was to just draw everything. As time went on, I found myself focusing most on the smaller remnants of the Yard's past - unused structures, discarded equipment, old street furniture, rusted machinery, century-old canons, and the like. These objects were almost like characters, silent observers of the bustling activity around them. I also thought of this phrase "industrial palimpsest" to describe my focus. "Palimpsest" refers to manuscripts, scrolls, or paper which has been reused; the original writing having been erased, but traces of which are still visible beneath the new text. This is the fascinating thing about a place like the Brooklyn Navy Yard; it is full of active businesses, many of whom are quite high-tech and modern, but everywhere you look are remnants of an industrial past, from the 1940's and sometimes even much further back, pushing through the modern veneer.

First Ave. doesn't exist anymore. It's shown on a 1904 map, but by the 1943 map it is gone, a large building which I think is now the NYPD Tow Pound in its space. I guess they just never got around to taking down this sign. In the background is the Sand Street Gatehouse.

Building 20, originally the Machine Shop and Auto Repair shop.

A security booth. I don't remember why this caught my eye at the time. Sometimes something strikes me visually, and later I can't see what that was. One interesting note is that I visited the Navy Yard again a few weeks ago, and that green fence and concrete barrier are gone. It's now open to the entrance to the gigantic WeWork building on Dock 72.

Giant satellite dish for Hispanic Information and Telecommunications Network, outside Building 292. HITN is the largest Spanish-language network in the United States.

Dry Dock No. 4, The "Hoodooo" Dock

I am almost done posting all the Navy Yard drawings, almost a year after completing the visiting artist program. Here, a number of drawings done around Dry Dock 4. This dry dock has an overall length of 723', and could receive a vessel 717' 3" in length with a draft of 32' 5 1/2". The most distinctive feature of Dry Dock 4 is the remnants of two giant Orton cranes which I did several studies of. Like the Orton cranes, this dry dock is now defunct. It's just a long, stagnant rectangle of water, separating a qaudrant of the Navy Yard from the rest. As far as I know, there doesn't seem to be a plan for it. Around its perimeter are unused remnants and relics of the past.

The tour guide from Turnstile Tours (which I recommend) claimed that this was the smallest building in the Navy Yard. It's the dry dock pumpwell dating back to 1914.

Standing forlorn in the weeds near this building, an old capstan. These motorized devices rotate on a vertical axis, for hauling ropes and cables.

Laying on the ground near the second, mostly-demolished Orton Crane, a seemingly-discarded block hook.

The view from the edge of Dry Dock 4, of a pier at the junction of dry docks 2 and 4. In the far distance, you can see the top of one of the World War II-era radio antennas, and to the left is the edge of the giant new office building on Dock 72. This building was meant to be a giant WeWork space. I wonder what's going to become of it now that that company's demise seems imminent.

Here's some photos of the dry dock in its heyday. First, the USS Utah, the first ship to utilize the dry dock, circa 1912.

Photos via Brooklyn Navy Yard Archives

The battleship New Mexico, 1918.

Library of Congress

Dry Dock #4 was authorized by Congress in June 1900, with a budget of $1,000,000, to accommodate the new dreadnought-style battleships that were in development. Construction began in 1905, and lasted 7 years. Located near Dry Dock #1, contractors encountered the same problems that plagued that project; a tidal marsh with very soft and sandy soil, crisscrossed with underground waterways and quicksand. The first contractor, George Spearin, quit after just 18 months, having severely underestimated the scope of the project and seriously underbidding the cost. Under the second contractor, the project was beset by regular setbacks and accidents, resulting in delays, hundreds of workplace injuries, and between 8 and 20 deaths, earning it the nickname, "The Hoodoo Dock."

The NY Naval Shipyard Buildings Historical Review chronicled its long journey:

April 12, 1907
Spearin [the original contractor] had stopped work in August 1906 over a dispute about who should pay for a repair job to a broken sewer which threatened to drown men working in the dock. It was the confident belief of government officials that Spearin would never resume work at the dock; that he decided to quit, realizing that he can only lose money by continuing. 

Aug. 4, 1908
There was talk of abandoning the project of building DD#4. . . Not only quicksand, but subterranean streams have been contributing to the general apprehension. 

Jan. 30, 1909
Navy Department stated it may be necessary to annul the contract due to the unsatisfactory completion of the work. . . .  Quicksand in the dock foundations was the cause of all the trouble. 

Jan 31, 1909
The first concrete for the foundation of the big basin was laid amid great jubilation. There is now hope that it can be finished. 

Aug. 26, 1909
Williams Engineering Co, was reported "sick of contract", having stopped work on the weak excuse that one of the cable towers that operates one of the orangepeel buckets is said to be weak. . . . The contractor never had more than 200 or 300 men on the job at one time, whereas at least a thousand should have been employed. 

Nov. 4, 1909
It was decided that, with Williams Construction Co. out of the picture, that this dock will be finished, either by the government by use of day labor under the direction of the civil engineer, or by a contractor. . .  Two contractors already have forfeited their jobs. The government was plunged into litigation in an effort to recover damages . 

. . . An agitation was commenced to have the dock completed by day labor, with local Navy Yard officers in charge. This would mean the employment of hundreds of Brooklyn men who have qualified through the labor board of the Navy Yard, instead of cheap European labor, such as had been employed by the contractors. 

Dec. 2, 1909
Drydock 4 became known as the "Hoodoo" dock. A landslide occurred which practically wrecked the dock. 

Dec. 16, 1911
On 15 December 1911 the drydock was flooded, intentionally, for the first time. This marked an important milestone in its construction. 

May 9, 1912
Drydock No. 4 which had just been completed was given its first real test when the battleship UTAH was towed into dock and the water pumped out. Thus the drydock was finished at a cost of approximately $2,800,000, 400 men injured, and the number of workers killed variously reported from 8 to 20 men.

I think it's hilarious that this government document official Navy document is so bitchy and side-eyed!

Dry Dock 1

Dry Dock 1 is the oldest dry dock in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the third-oldest in the United States. It is now the last dry dock operating in Brooklyn, now operated by GMD Shipyard, and one of very few in the area.

The site was first surveyed in 1826, with construction beginning in 1841. It was completed in 1851 at a cost of precisely $2,146,255.36. It is constructed from 23,000 cubic yards of hand-cut and hand-sanded blocks of granite excavated from quarries in Connecticut, Maine, Staten Island, and upstate New York.

Though modest in size by today’s standards, at the time it was a major engineering feat, being the first large project to use a steam-powered pile driver, and utilizing the largest pumping engine built at the time. Over the 20 years it took to construct, the project ran through at least three civil engineers and had to contend with a variety of setbacks, including 75’ deep quicksand, underground springs, and a faulty dam design which flooded the worksite.

Ships built and serviced there included The Niagara, which laid the first transatlantic cable; Halstead’s Folly, the prototype of the first submarine; The Maine, the destruction of which triggered the Spanish-American War; and The Monitor, the first iron-clad, steam-powered warship of the US Navy during the Civil War. It was declared a New York City Landmark in 1975.

There are several working docks and piers at the Navy Yard, most of which are off-limits to enter and not easily observed, but there's a handy viewing platform overlooking Dry Dock 1. It's the one spot where you can view the goings-on pretty up close and personal. 

Ships are no longer built there, but it is still used for maintenance, repair and inspection of tugboats, barges, and other smaller vessels. Two ships were serviced while I was there; the tugboat Evening Light and the Coast Guard cutter USCGC Dauntless.

Here's a cool time-lapse video showing this dry dock in action.

Cranes Cranes Cranes!

More from my Brooklyn Navy Yard project . . .

One of the most distinctive features of the Navy Yard is the cranes, of course. While no longer an active shipyard, there are still several cranes at work, unloading cargo ships and barges, and several remnants of defunct machines. Big, old, complicated industrial structures are one of my favorite things to draw, but after months at the Navy Yard, I don't need to draw another crane anytime soon. I already posted a series of studies of the two Orton cranes by Dry Dock 4. Nearby, this derelict old crane stands in Dry Dock 1.

But it's not just derelict cranes and crane remnants. There are still working cranes servicing active docks.  These hulking behemoths are all on tracks that let them travel up and down the docks and piers. You'd think they'd be slow and lumbering, but they actually move along at quite a clip!

Wallabout Channel

More Brooklyn Navy Yard drawings. These two from the Wallabout Channel. I don't know what they are. The mysterious tower looks like some sort of lookout post, perhaps, but how would one access it? The other machine I have no idea. A pump of some kind, I guess, but so long abandoned, teetering on a dilapidated, collapsing pier, its purpose can only be guessed at. In the background of the first drawing, you can see the Williamsburg Bridge, the Empire State Building in the far distance, and to the left edge of the page, the Railroad Transfer Bridge.

These two structures sit in Wallabout Channel, a small inlet from Wallabout Bay, forming the north-western boundary of the Navy Yard. To the north of it is the Satmar Hasidic section of Willliamsburg. Wallabout Bay is the section of the East River where the Navy Yard sits. The whole area is sometimes called Wallabout. The bay is most infamous for being where the British kept prisoners of war in prison ships during the Revolution. More than 12,000 prisoners died in terrible conditions on these ships. The name "Wallabout" is an English corruption of "de Waal Boght," the Walloon Bay, so-named after the Walloons, French-speaking Protestant settlers from Netherlands, who settled area in 1637.

In 1951, Joseph Mitchell, described Wallabout Bay in the New Yorker:

"This backwater is called Wallabout Bay on charts; the men on the dredges call it Potter's Field. The eddy sweeps driftwood into the backwater. Also, it sweeps drowned bodies into there. As a rule, people that drown in the harbor in winter stay down until spring. When the water begins to get warm, gas forms in them and that makes them buoyant and they rise to the surface. Every year, without fail, on or about the fifteenth of April, bodies start showing up, and more of them show up in Potter's Field than any other place. In couple of weeks or so, the Harbor Police always finds ten to two dozen over there - suicides, bastard babies, old barge captains that lost their balance out on a sleety night attending to towropes, now and then some gangster or other. The police launch that runs out of Pier A on the Battery - Launch One - goes over and takes them out of the water with a kind of dip-net contraption that the Police Department blacksmith made out of tire chains."

I didn't see them pull any bodies out of the water while I was working at the Navy Yard.

The channel is all that remains of Wallabout Creek, which originated around Marcy Ave. in Bed-Stuy and entered the bay near Washington Ave. In the later part of the 19th century, the area became home to a variety of food and grocery industries, and a large-scale marketplace began to grow. The creek, as well as the wide streets, numerous trolleys, and Myrtle Ave El made transportation and shipping easy. The original market was a slapdash affair that grew organically and haphazardly, but between 1894 and 1896, the city of Brooklyn (it was still its own city, independent of New York at the time) engaged architect William B. Tubby to design a permanent market. He constructed an entire village of brick buildings whose architecture referenced the area's Dutch origins, arranged around a central plaza with a prominent clock tower.

With the advent of World War II, the Navy Yard needed the land for expansion, and there was also fear that the Wallabout Market would be a hotbed of spies and saboteurs. In 1941, the tenants were relocated to the new Brooklyn Terminal Market in Canarsie, and the Wallabout Market was razed. Over the years, parts of the bay and the entirety of the creek had been filled in for expansion. The site of the Wallabout Market is now occupied by Steiner Studios. This small inlet is all that remains of Wallabout Creek. It is essentially unused, except for a few small craft moored in it, and a non-descript ferry stop by the river.


Source: Hidden Waters Blog

             Brownstoner: The Great Wallabout Market

Flushing Avenue

I still have many drawings from last year when I was working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard that I never got around to posting. I'm trying to get them all up in the next few weeks. This batch is all of structures along Flushing Avenue, which forms the southern boundary of the Yard.

I couldn't find out exactly what this building, between Ryerson St. and Grand Ave., was used for, but it was part of the Naval Yard Hospital campus. Up a hill beyond that fence is the main building and the Surgeon's House of the Hospital. The hospital operated from before the Civil War through World War II. The property is now controlled by Steiner Studios, which has proposed various uses for it. Nothing has come of those plans yet, and the buildings remain, hidden behind fences, shrouded in overgrown trees, intact but abandoned, and very spooky. If you're lucky, a quick visit is sometimes included in the tours run by Turnstile Tours.

Not officially part of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, this building nonetheless is an important remnant of the yard's history. During its heyday, Sands Street and Flushing Ave., forming the perimeter of the Navy Yard, were lined with dozens of stores supplying uniforms and clothing for sailors (as well as the other two businesses indispensable to sailors: bars and brothels). In Brooklyn! An Ilustrated History, Michael Faiella, the second-generation owner of Reliable and Franks, is quoted as recalling that "when the fleet was in, from the gate to the Navy YMCA at the top of Sands Street, all you could see was a sea of white hats. Some of [the supply stores] stayed open all night."

Reliable Naval Tailoring was established in September, 1927, on Sands Street by Natale Faiella. His son, Michael, took over the store in 1964, and moved it to the Flushing Ave location in 1971, when he bought out the Frank's Naval Uniforms building, hence "Reliable & Franks." Michael's son, Vincent, later took it over. This site has some 70's-era photos of the interior.

Obviously, business dropped dramatically when the Navy Yard was decommissioned in 1966. Reliable & Franks continued for some time, selling Army-Navy-style clothing to hippies, uniforms to cruise ships and private yacht crews, and costumes for the Village People's "In The Navy" video. But by 2006, the store finally closed, with the NY Times reporting that the entire stock was being moved to central New Jersey, where Vincent Faiella lives. I did see the roll gate up one day, but the windows were papered over, so I couldn't see what was going on inside.

As for M&J Navy Yard Sub, I think they just cashed in on the name. It's just a deli. 

Sculpture atop the Clinton Ave Gate. Some years ago, I was sketching in Lower Manhattan, when two people with cameras started talking to me about a documentary they were filming about all the eagle statues of New York City. I wonder if they found this one, or ever finished their film.

This structure is one of the most distinctive and iconic features of the Navy Yard. It is one of a pair of WWII-era radio antennas atop Building 1 (the cable/bridge coming from the top connects to a twin structure). The antennas allowed communication with the U.S. Naval fleet across the Atlantic. The building was constructed in 1942 as the Material Sciences Laboratory, the main site of research operations, where radio, radar, sonar, and other navigation equipment, including the navigation system for the Polaris nuclear submarine, was developed and tested. It's now part of Steiner Studios, which has the antennas lit up in blue and white at night, making it a striking landmark seen from the BQE. I drew it once before, in 2015.

Navy Yard Rooftops

My residency at the Brooklyn Navy Yard ended several months ago, but I still have a bunch of work in my sketchbook that I haven't posted, so here's some more. This batch is of views of the rooftops of the Yard.

This is the one of the most distinctive sights of the Navy Yard, atop Building 1 right on Flushing Ave. This mysterious structure is a World War II radio antenna. This building originally housed the Materials Science Laboratories; now it's part of Steiner Studios.

Smokestack of Building 292, which now houses the BNY administrative offices, as well as a scene shop.

Building 12, the former Pipe & Copper Shop.

The Central Power Plant, now operated by BNY Cogeneration.

Orton Cranes

One of the most common pieces of advice for artists is to work work work, and this experience confirms it. I created around 100 drawings over the course of my residency as a Visiting Artist at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and I returned to this spot many times. This group of drawings of the cranes of Dry Dock 4 represents some of the first drawings I did during this project and some of the final ones, and I can see a definite development. Not a dramatic change in style or quality, but more solidity and confidence, in the line, the color, and composition.

Dry Dock 4 cuts 700' into the west side of the yard. It is now defunct. Either side of the dry dock is anchored by giant diesel-electric cranes, built by the Orton Crane Company in 1935. They traveled around the dry dock on super-wide gauge railroad tracks. One still stands, though it is (I presume) non-functional. The other was scrapped in the 1997, according to Bartelstome's book, leaving only the lower part. This photo from the BNY Archives shows them in their heyday.

There are several things like this around the site; iconic structures that stand like monuments, but are defunct. Like the Railroad Transfer Bridge and the airplane spotting towers, they are cool relics of the Navy Yard's past, and strangely beautiful in their way. But they are non-functional and would be near-impossible to restore. And even if they were, they would no longer serve any purpose.

Or consider the Admiral's Row Mansions. They were a row of ten mansions on Flushing Avenue that once housed the officers of the Navy Yard. Once beautiful, classical mansions built in the latter half of the 19th century, they had been abandoned and neglected for decades and fallen into complete ruin. Some beautiful ruin-porn can be found online, including here. They were levelled in 2016, save for one, to make room for a Wegman's Supermarket and parking lots. There was some protest against their demolition, arguing that Brooklyn's waterfront history was being erased. But it seems to me that they were lost to history long ago, and that derelict buildings and structures are not particularly informative or educational as history. And while a supermarket doesn't sound romantic (though lots of people are super-excited about this Wegman's), a supermarket serves a concrete purposes in that neighborhood that a row of collapsing mansions does not.

The giant gears that turn the cab of the crane. A co-worker saw this drawing and informed me that it's called a slew ring.

The remnants of the second Orton Crane . . .