Campus Was What Drew Steiner to Navy Yard in the First Place
By Sarah Ryley
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
NAVY YARD — On opposite ends of the Brooklyn Navy Yard from the dilapidated Admiral’s Row houses, which preservationists have for years been fighting to save, is a relatively forgotten expanse of land three times the size where wounded seamen were treated and buried. Abandoned since 1948, save for an officers’ club with a bar and swimming pool now partially reclaimed by nature, the Naval Hospital Campus only recently came back into public consciousness when it was announced that a media campus could go there.
Only a handful of civilians submitted comments about the intended reuse of the campus during its review process in the 1990s. And community members who were asked this week about their thoughts on the project kept reverting to Admiral’s Row, where the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation wants to put a supermarket and space for industrial jobs.
But not everybody had forgotten about the Naval Hospital Campus, 18.2 acres of mostly undeveloped space save for a cemetery and a few dozen buildings that span two centuries. Steiner Studios, the full-service television and film production facility, is a growing empire stuffed into a 310,000-square-foot box, and has been eyeing the campus since before it moved into the Navy Yard in 2004, said Chairman Douglas Steiner. The hospital campus “is what attracted us to the Navy Yard in the first place, to have this as a back lot,” he said. “The bucolic, historic, beautiful setting is evocative of the lots in LA in terms of the natural parks setting”
Steiner said at least three other previously unannounced sites within the yard are being eyed for expansion. Ultimately, Steiner Studios would like to be a home for all the production-related businesses currently being displaced by residential development in Manhattan.
Andrew Kimball, president of the Development Corporation, said a “Request for Expressions of Interest” — an exploratory planning phase that gauges the interest of potential tenants — would be released this month. “Until we get responses … it is hard to know exactly what uses might go into what buildings,” he said. “A site like that,” with no running water or electricity, and in need of significant historic restoration, “is never going to get rebuilt unless you get viable proposals.”
Change in Plan
The closed-off campus, only accessible through the Navy Yard’s secured gates, was originally conceived as being opened to the public through street entryways, according to an Environmental Impact Statement from 2000 and a Navy decision to approve the transfer five months later.
“The preferred alternative would dedicate 18.3 acres in the center of the base, designated as the Hospital Campus, to institutional and non-profit activities and to open space and recreational activities,” said the decision. “About 11.2 acres of active recreational space and 8.8 acres of passive recreational space, including the 1.7-acre Naval Cemetery, would be available to the public.” Other uses explored were residential, museums and more industrial and retail space.
Ultimately, the property was transferred with few stipulations other than the city finding the use that “produces the highest monetary return from the property, promotes its maximum value, or serves a public or institutional purpose.”
According to the documents, no specific uses were mandated for the buildings and planners at the time didn’t see a market for expanded industrial space. Clearly, that prediction has proven faulty, as space in the Navy Yard fills up before ground is even broken.
And Steiner Studios didn’t enter the scene until more than three years later.
“Here you have a company that’s invested $100 million in building a movie studio and invested another $50 million in [the laboratory] for related and entertainment media. It is only logical that you would explore a broader media and entertainment campus, whether it’s for-profit or non-profit uses, and it could also include a graduate school,” said Kimball.
Steiner’s Expansion Plans
If the preliminary planning process proves fruitful, Steiner Studios would be the lead development partner in the expansion of the studios and related businesses and institutions, said Steiner. A graduate-level film and media institution would fit into the non-profit mission, said Kimball, and the studios could use some of the open space for outdoor sets, making the location more attractive for film, now a $1.5 billion industry in New York.
The Civil War-era buildings, such as the Surgeon’s House, where feral cats are currently being vacated, and the Naval Hospital, would be preserved. Kimball said the basement of the hospital has rooms with bars, which some speculate held injured Confederate soldiers while they were being treated. Such details could make the campus a go-to place for period shots.
Meanwhile, Steiner is busy renovating a seven-story, World War II-era laboratory just outside the hospital campus, which would nearly double the studio’s space for shoots and post-production, animation and other media-related companies.
Steiner said the studio is also looking to expand into three other sites, though they haven’t started the approval process: The “Kent Avenue” site, which would be 16 acres once a portion is filled in with dredged material, could provide space for new sound stages and support facilities. A large building directly behind the original studio will be vacant once B&H Photo moves deeper within the Yard. And another 5-acre site used by the federal government to process prison supplies could provide more space for parking, studios and ancillary services.
“At some point down the road we might work collaboratively [on the federal property],” said Kimball. “It depends on how quickly [the laboratory] gets built up and developed, and on how the responses play out on the campus that we can really see what’s there.”
As for the hospital campus, any plan would have to comply with historic preservation laws, which Steiner said he considers an advantage. But with bones and gas tanks, among other things, occasionally unearthed, “this place is filled with surprises,” Shani Leibowitz, deputy master planner for the Navy Yard.
Skeletons in the Soil
An estimated 2,000 bodies — many causalities of wars with Mexico, Spain and the Confederacy — were buried in the hospital’s small cemetery between 1831 and 1910, when it was closed after reaching capacity. In 1926 the Navy exhumed the bodies, put each in new coffins, and buried them at the Cypress Hills National Cemetery.
The plot of land was quickly put to reuse — roads were built, gas tanks and utility pipes buried, and the rest turned into ball fields for enlisted men. Not until the 1990s did a soccer player kick up a human bone fragment. Further research was conducted, and a report determined that at least 517 dead are unaccounted for. Radar testing and archeological digs unearthed bone and coffin fragments, and a fully intact human skeleton less than two feet below the surface.
Research found that conditions at the cemetery didn’t exactly lend to the systematic tracking and transferring of bodies. Besides grave registration not being formalized until World War I, the hospital cemetery in Brooklyn was a soggy, poorly graded plot of land. One hospital employee wrote that bandits “find access for stealing flowers and on election-night, purloining wooden head-boards to feed their bonfires.” Other wooden grave markers quickly deteriorated, the bodies they identified only discovered later when accidentally dug up to bury a new one.
Now, a fence and sign mark the cemetery, to be preserved in perpetuity. Abandoned cars are parked nearby.
Kimball said he’s been working with City Councilwoman Letitia James and Milton Puryear of the Brooklyn Greenway to turn the cemetery into a memorial park, a point of interest along the growing citywide network of bike paths.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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