Navy Yard Pump House

My stint as a visiting artist at the Brooklyn Navy Yard wrapped up in November, but I still have a buttload of work that I’ve been finishing up, so there will be several more posts with lots more Navy Yard images.

One of the places I discovered was a small building at the Northeastern corner of the Yard, at the junction of Piers J and K. It is nondescript, abandoned and unused, and inside are two gigantic machines that look like the Daleks from Doctor Who, and an assortment of huge, rusted pipes and valves, electric panels, and mysterious-looking equipment, surrounded by garbage, debris, forgotten piles of supplies, and random stuff. It didn’t seem like a place I was supposed to be in, but the door was wide open, and there was no “Do Not Enter” sign, so . . .

It took me a long time to find out what this building and machines were. I was able to identify it was Building 991, but the Navy Yard Building Survey just listed it as “Pump House,” under a list of buildings “which do not appear to have sufficient historical significance to warrant individual historical review write-up.”

Eventually, I found a photo of these things in John Bartelstone’s photography book with a caption that said they were Salt Water Fire Pumps. I then found a brief write up from American Manufacturer and Iron World, dated 1900:

A new system of fighting fires is being perfected in the Brooklyn navy yard. It was found that salt water not only saves supply of fresh water, but will put out a fire much more quickly than fresh water will. The plant now being constructed will follow, on a larger scale, the plan of the one placed in the Norfolk navy yard some two years ago. At the Brooklyn yard the supply of water will be taken from the river at a point three feet below low water mark and will be carried by gravity through a main thirty inches in diameter to a new electric power house, where the reservoir and two driving pumps will be situated. Each of these pumps will be able to deliver, from 3,000 to 4,000 gallons a minute, through 14 or 15 streams of water, which can be thrown almost immediately upon receipt of the fire signal. This salt water method, where conditions permit, diminishes the chance of frozen fire hydrants in winter.

I found further information in Harry Granick’s Underneath New York. He explains that in 1908, New York City’s Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity constructed a series of high-pressure water systems to supply the city’s fire hydrant system. Manhattan and Brooklyn were covered in three zones, and 

There is a fourth zone which covers the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This was built by the United States Government. It too is complete with high pressure mains and a pumping station. The system is connected to the Brooklyn high pressure main, so that, should the station break down, the valve separating the two systems can be lifted to permit the Brooklyn station to furnish water at high pressure.

The pump house is still something of a mystery to me, because the Navy Yard Building Survey has it being built in 1961, just a few years before the U.S. Government shut down the Navy Yard, and almost six decades after the initial high-pressure hydrant system was built. So, was this an entirely new structure, or were the machines relocated to the new pump house, or was it built around the existing pumps? 

It does, however, answer the mystery of this post, another building I’d sketched that was a FDNY pump house, but at the time I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was pumping. I love it when things circle around like this. Eventually, all mysteries can be solved!