Brooklyn Navy Yard serves as a Brooklyn arts hub

January 29, 2019 By Raanan Geberer Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Photo courtesy of the Brooklyn Navy Yard

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For years, the Brooklyn Eagle has covered the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s role as an incubator for small manufacturers and startup tech companies. Now, it is serving the same function for art studios, arts-related nonprofits and businesses that serve the arts.

Of the Navy Yard’s 400 tenants, 50 are artists, painters or sculptors, David Ehrenberg, president and CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp., told amNewYork. In a wider sense, almost all of the yard’s occupants are “creatives,” he added.

AmNewYork spotlighted several artists and arts entities that have space at the yards. These include Dieu Donne, a nonprofit whose workers create colorful paper by hand; Woodside Press, which creates business cards and other documents by the old-fashioned letterpress method; and painter Elizabeth Yamin.

The presence of creative artists has led to a boom in business in the surrounding area.

“Local property owners are certainly seeing what’s going on here and they’re reacting,” amNewYork quotes Ehrenberg as saying. “That’s all to the good for us … I believe when you’re talking about a city and an economy, success breeds more success.”

The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp., an industrial park, is located on the campus of the old Brooklyn Navy Yard, a U.S. Naval shipyard that closed in 1966.