David Ehrenberg:
We're now at about seven thousand, Seven thousand five hundred people working at the yard, doubled in the last 15 years or so, but in the next four years, based on the projects that we've been talking about, and these are not speculative projects, these about projects that are under construction there, nearly complete. We will go from 7,000 to approximately 20,000, nearly tripling the number of jobs at the Navy Yard
New Speaker:
Hey BK with Ofer Cohen
Ofer Cohen:
Welcome to Hey BK, the show about the people behind the Brooklyn transformation and when talking about transformation. We're talking about Brooklyn. There's no better place to start at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. David Ehrenberg, the president, CEO. of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Welcome.
David Ehrenberg:
Thank you.
Ofer Cohen:
I remember a few years ago, and I don't remember exactly when it was. We had lunch at Sushi restaurant in Park Slope and David told me: How do you feel about joining the board of the Navy Yard? There's a lot going on and I remember questioning it a little bit, doubting it a little bit. That's the way we kind of started this relationship.
David Ehrenberg:
It's kind of the way I started the relationship with the Navy Yard myself. I had been doing economic development for the city for seven or eight years and so knew of the Navy Yard, but didn't really have a full appreciation of its scale or the amazing potential of the place until frankly I started, but I was really in my first week struck by how much was going on already and how much Andrew Kimball, my predecessor had kind of set in motion, but also how much more potential there was. I think that that's really one of our challenges, continues to be to get that story out there to the wider world that there's a huge amount of stuff happening at the Navy Yard. We're also, you know, right up against Dumbo and Clinton Hill and Williamsburg and all these amazingly dynamic and diverse neighborhoods. But we're still kind of a little bit unknown. I do think that there's still an element of, you know, the Navy Yard, where is that ? Like kinda hard part to get to. I'm convinced that a big part of that is that if you look at the subway map where one of those gray blobs on the subway map and there are very few of them, and if you're not on the subway map, you're not on the average New Yorkers mental map of the city.
Ofer Cohen:
David says the secret will get out in the next year or two when the high quality supermarket chain, Wegmans opens at the yard
David Ehrenberg:
We're expecting that people from all over the city are going to kind of all of a sudden wake up the next day and say, oh my God, I got to go to the Navy Yard.
Ofer Cohen:
At its peak in World War II, 70,000 people worked in the Navy Yard building warships. During peacetime, that number was more like 20,000.
David Ehrenberg:
You know, it was really the life blood of New York and Brooklyn's middle class. This was back in the day when every street car dead ended into into the waterfront. That's where the jobs were. The subway was secondary. It was the streetcars that led to the waterfront. That was really the path that people talk to you to the middle class. The Navy closed down in 1966, and by the time I was growing up in Brooklyn in the seventies and eighties, there were like two or three hundred people working in the yard down from 70,000 to 200 and you know, growing up you hear about the Dodgers moving out of Brooklyn and that was the worst day of Brooklyn history and and that's just silliness. It's the closing of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the subsequent disinvestment that happened along the Brooklyn waterfront, but really it was that day when Mcnamara announced maybe Brooklyn Navy Yard was closing. That was the Gut Punch to Brooklyn.
Ofer Cohen:
The Navy Yard has slowly crawled back from stabilization to rebuilding its infrastructure. The Bloomberg administration made huge investments and money started pouring in.
David Ehrenberg:
There's an interplay, I think between the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Brooklyn and the Brooklyn brand is extraordinarily strong and who knows what it would have been without the Navy Yard. But to a large extent I think the Navy Yard really has led the way back to the bar. You know, us and what Jed Walentas has done in Dumbo really kind of convinced a lot of people that there is potential and commercial potential along the Brooklyn Waterfront, which is now a large part of the strength of Brooklyn and, and why I think Brooklyn's kind of best days are ahead of it. We're now at about seven thousand seven thousand five hundred people working at the yard that doubled in the last 15 years or so, but in the next four years, based on the projects that we've been talking about, and these are not speculative projects, these are projects that are under construction that are nearly complete. We will go from 7,000 to approximately 20,000 people for nearly tripling the number of jobs at the Navy Yard,
Ofer Cohen:
The Art for Film, the largest film and television studio outside of Los Angeles and manufacturing facility Building 77 along with New Lab, the advanced technology hub created by David Belt.
David Ehrenberg:
At the end of the day, we have this extraordinary asset. We have 300 acres on the Brooklyn waterfront. Uh, but it's owned and controlled by a nonprofit. So what we're trying to do is really take all of the good things about the resurgence of Brooklyn and the revitalization of Brooklyn and pivot it ever so slightly to say how do you include the widest diversity of Brooklyn Heights and New Yorkers in the success of Brooklyn. We do that by focusing on trying to curate a set of companies and recruiting a set of companies to create high quality middle class jobs and then connecting local job seekers and local students and workforce and all that to those opportunities. So we're really trying to kind of leverage the market and leverage all the extraordinary stuff happening in Brooklyn that all of your other guests talk about, but also asks, you know, for the greater good of Brooklyn, how do you take all of that energy, all of that capital flowing back into Brooklyn, and make it as equitable and accessible as possible. You know, we're really a city within a city. Uh, and it gives us a lot of flexibility to think about what does that equitable city really what does that equitable economy really look like and what are all the ingredients that need to be put into it.
Ofer Cohen:
David Ehrenberg is Brooklyn, born and raised. He knew he wanted to lead the Navy Yard even before the job was open and he put himself in the running. It was the tail end of the Bloomberg Administration and David was working for the city on some it's biggest projects
David Ehrenberg:
And at my level I became just, you know, the kind of the fix it person. So when a project got off the rails, I went in and had to solve it, which is great learning experience and I've got to say I learned most of what I know about negotiating by negotiating Atlantic Yards across the table from Maryanne Gilmartin very early in my career. I like to say I learned a lot by just watching how Maryanne was screwing me, how she was setting me up in the negotiations and then kind of going home that night and saying what did she do right, and what did I do wrong in that situation? So, you know, I got to a point where I kind of needed to make a change just for my lifestyle. I've had two kids getting home really late at night, stressed out and frazzled and all that kind of stuff. The thing that really attracted me to, it was twofold. One was the scale. We're adding two and a half million square feet of space to the yard today. That's a big development project by any scale. Uh, I believe it was the second day on the job I got onto the roof of our Building 77, which is our largest building. And I was up there with our chief operating officer and head of construction and a few other people and they kind of pointed out to the horizon like, okay, so the Navy Yard goes from there to all the way over here and then back along there and I remember just standing up there trying to keep a good game face on in front of my new team. But just thinking, oh my God, what did Mayor Mike do? How did he put me in charge of this? But we're also really deeply connected to the community. And that spoke to the job. The work that I had done before, the movie administration where i had been a community organizer here in Brooklyn or four or five years and had lived abroad in southern Africa studying community based economic development models in rural southern Africa. And so the combination of being able to do big projects, which is academic kind of intellectually stimulating, interesting gets your kind of negotiation, juices flowing and all that. But also being able to turn around and really say like, how does this effect the community? How does this affect these people? That I know,was really what attracted me to it and I think is actually the special sauce of the Navy Yard.
Ofer Cohen:
When you recruited new people for the board, when you recruited your new team, you had to create the vision. Now I think it's easy now people see Building 77 to complete and they see Dock 72 top out, and New lab is open.
David Ehrenberg:
When I spoke with Mayor de Blasio to try to keep my job, what I said to him was, look, Mr Mayor, if we haven't done something extraordinary in a few years at the Navy Yard, you should fire me because we have all of the ingredients to really elevate the place to something that just New York can be proud of, but that the country should be proud really. We really should establish a national model or what this kind of development kind of place based mission oriented policy oriented development should look like because we've got 300 acres on the Brooklyn waterfront and something like 16 million square feet of unused FAR over one zoning.
Ofer Cohen:
Most recently David's proudest moments was working with students at the new technical high school at the Yard. The aim was to create new paths to success from culinary arts to media.
David Ehrenberg:
When you really dial it down, like these kids and these kids are going to have a better high school experience because of this. It's really exciting.
Ofer Cohen:
You felt like you were proud of the impact on sort of the real. How meaningful your contribution there.
David Ehrenberg:
Exactly.
Ofer Cohen:
Building 77 in that regard was unique because it wasn't a public private partnership.
David Ehrenberg:
Yeah. We do development a couple of different ways. The Wegmans supermarket and the building we call Dock 72, which is going to be a creative economy, office building. We ground lease to private developers and they build those buildings because we're not. We're not a retail developer or landlord. We don't want to be, but for Building 77 and the green manufacturing center, which together is about 1.3 million square feet of development. We've done. We've self develop those, you know, soup to nuts. It's us and it gives us a level of control to make sure that the and the tenants that end up there and the programming ends up there is really true to who we are. The ground floor is another really good example of Building 77 where most of the yard is behind a security wall because we're an industrial facility and there is kind of big forklifts and things like that rumbling around the Navy Yard. But we took the opportunity to open up Building 77 to Flushing Avenue. People will walk right in, bike ride in off the Greenway. And we really curated, to an extraordinary degree, the tenants who are on the ground floor where we're doing a food manufacturing facility, similar to what Chelsea market used to be like where there's real large scale food manufacturing happening, but then they're all selling retail into the lobby. And when we sat down with the team and said, okay, I said, okay, here's what I want in the tenant base. I said, I want good food. I want a diverse set of entrepreneurs. I want diverse kinds of food. And by that, you know, God bless the hipsters have of Brooklyn, but I don't want a bunch of pickle makers. I want like New York, Brooklyn Diversity, um, and, and I want all the food to be really good but also really cheap because our average workforce here is a middle class worker who can't afford $12 for a sandwich. And the team just went out and pounded the pavement across all kinds of neighborhoods in Brooklyn and found some of the best food entrepreneurs they truly stocked. And some of them, the owners of a food company called food sermon, which is this amazingly good cafe in Bed Stuy and really got freaked out by our work, by our team as they were kind of coming by pretty much every day and saying, hey, you want to move to the navy yard that's a, that's a Caribbean food company that does some of the best food, I think in Brooklyn. Look them up. And we just went out and kind of did the hard work to find this awesome diversity of, companies. And again, it's like what the Navy Yard is all about.
Ofer Cohen:
Give me some other examples of some interesting or some of your favorite kind of tenants. Big Picture, not just Building 77.
David Ehrenberg:
So I love all of our tenants equally, but so I'll tell you one of the stories, and this really kind of symbolizes what the art is about. So we had a tenant, called Fera Design and they are one of the highest quality metal working companies in the country. We gave them a beautiful large building for them can move into. They knew they were going to have a long term home with the yard. We offered affordable rents, but most importantly we offer stability to these companies. And so this company did exactly what we want. When we take that longer term risk company, they went off and bought a $500,000 laser cutter, the laser cutter that laser cutters, and perhaps not surprisingly, can't cut reflective metal. This laser cutter, can. It is the only one of its kind in the region. And the owner was running this extraordinarily important complicated piece of machinery. The truck driver came to him and say, can I take the manual home? Uh, ended up finding a training in Wisconsin or Michigan somewhere, went out there, got trained on it, and now has become the operator for this, you know, this extraordinarily complicated piece of machinery has a very high quality job now and is employable, you know, forever basically. And that's the kind of career path and the growth that we see both in our companies and also in our, in the employees of the companies.
Ofer Cohen:
Mayors from all over the country and the world have visited the yard taking note of what's happening in the long abandoned property.
David Ehrenberg:
When we say to the folks who come to visit us from the other cities is, look, you can look at Brooklyn and say, well, of course, right, like the Brooklyn Navy Yard and you're in the middle of Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Of course you're being successful. But 12, 15 years ago it was radically different. You know, there were packs of wild dogs, I think 15 years ago who would chase our tenants and investors off their property. And so what we say to them is look the city could have taken what perhaps would have been an easier path years and years and years ago and just sold the Brooklyn Navy Yard and what happened there would have been great for sure, right? But it would have been another residential and retail development and New York's got a lot that. What it doesn't have is a lot of areas that are solely dedicated to curated for the sole purpose of creating high quality middle class jobs and the city, the scale of New York and certainly lots of other cities. They need that diversity and you don't want to become a mono culture. We kind of council other cities to take a longer view of it. You have to start that reinvestment cycle, but if you've got cool, old buildings are cool old areas, take a breath, take a moment and ask yourselves, in 20 years if the rest of everything we're doing is successful, what awesome thing could we do here that would it be different than everything else and set it aside and put it under control of an onsite passionate group of people who are just going to take the incremental steps that are required to get you there.
Ofer Cohen:
In the next two to three years. David expects the Navy Yard to employ as many people as the day it closed its doors back in 1966. That will be his proudest moment.
David Ehrenberg:
The amazing thing about the yard bring this full circle is it's scale and we really can say, look, we're adding 10,000 jobs to the Navy Yard in the next couple of years and what are all of the ingredients that's necessary from high school and lower? We have programs we do with middle schools and elementary schools all the way up through an adult to make sure that those opportunities are accessible to all New Yorkers
Ofer Cohen:
And a lot of these things to not happen anywhere else in New York, right?
David Ehrenberg:
That's right. I mean this is a lot of what we do is not the job that provided something that just isn't yet. We also, you know, you asked me how some of this can happen. We have 300 acres on the Brooklyn waterfront and we don't pay rent on it, so you know, our acquisition costs, our basis is zero. That gives us an enormous amount of flexibility that the private sector just doesn't have.
Ofer Cohen:
Thank you. David Ehrenberg, the Brooklyn guy with the coolest job in New York City. You're listening to Hey BK, the podcast about the people behind Brooklyn's transformation. You could find us at heybk.nyc or wherever you get your podcasts, please download and subscribe to our episodes. I'm Ofer Cohen. Thanks for listening.