NEW YORK, NY — The Brooklyn Navy Yard’s Building 77, a one-million-square-foot, state-of-the-art 
manufacturing building and the largest on the 300-acre industrial campus is now open for business. The $185 million renovation of the World War II-era storage facility is an important milestone for the growth of manufacturing in New York City. Located within the City-owned Brooklyn Navy Yard at the corner of Vanderbilt and Flushing Avenues, the 16-story building will be home to more than 3,000 jobs. Building 77 is the centerpiece of a billion-dollar investment currently underway at the Yard to add over two million square feet of space and 10,000 good-paying jobs by 2020.
“As a major driver of quality middle-class jobs, investing in and expanding manufacturing space is key to growing and diversifying our economy and boosting wages. As we re-open this historic building we re-imagine New York’s future,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said.
Long a symbol of America’s industrial might, the Brooklyn Navy Yard is now among the country’s leading urban manufacturing center. The complex includes over 400 companies currently employing more than 10,000 New Yorkers. In the next three years, that number is expected to more than double.
Building 77, the largest in the Navy Yard, includes a 60,000-square-foot ground-floor Food Manufacturing Hub that will serve as a public gateway to the Yard, as well as the central gathering point for Navy Yard businesses, employees and guests. Built in 1942 as part of the U.S. Navy’s wartime mobilization, the huge concrete building had been a storage facility with fewer than 100 jobs and no windows on its first 11 floors. More than three million pounds of concrete have been removed and replaced with 50,000 square feet of windows as one component of the upgrade.
