Videos About Brooklyn History

We worked closely with the BNY curatorial and archive team to choose which stories about inventors, war heroes, ships and commerce would best capture this spirit of the Yard.

The first program, Building The Yard, begins with the early days when Wallabout Bay was full of British prison ships, and includes the establishment of the New York Naval Yard, and stories about Commodore Perry, the discovery of Ether (a great boon to Union soldiers), fabled ships like The Monitor, The Maine and more. It remained one of the most important military bases in the United States until 1966.

Reinventing the Yard picks up the story in 1966 at the moment when the U.S. Navy decommissioned the Yard. The 1970s and ‘80s were bleak decades that nearly destroyed this once vital hub of industry, where 70,000 people worked during WW2.

Today the Yard has become a thriving sustainable urban industrial park. The video comes together in a deftly woven combination of archival news footage and original interviews we filmed with many of the key players during the summer of 2011.

We also produced the “Building 92 Stories,” a series of short videos about the historic Building 92 site, and the process of designing and building their new exhibition center to meet LEED Platinum standards. In addition we created several oral histories, slide shows and other media pieces for the exhibition. The entire project was summed up nicely by Andrew Kimball, then President and CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, as you can see below.

Working closely with the team at Building 92, we researched and wrote all scripts; conducted image research in private, government and news historical archives; organized multiple shoot days to film more than 20 people on location, as well as b-roll. We managed post-production, commissioned graphics and animation and supervised the sound mix and design for more than 25 programs.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at BLDG 92 opened to the public in November 2011 as an exhibition and visitors center, operated by the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC).