Inside Industry: Space Suit Maker Final Frontier Design at the Brooklyn Navy Yard

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Inside the Brooklyn Navy Yard, on the fifth floor of the cavernous Building 280, sits a small studio with very large ambitions. Inside you will find bolts of high-tech fabrics, spools of nylon chord, helmets and gloves of all varieties, and a small team of designers.

This is the home of Final Frontier Design, a company that designs and builds space suits for the burgeoning commercial space travel industry. While the industry is in its very earliest stages, Final Frontier is working with a number of companies and with NASA to create a better, safer, and more cost-effective suit to take citizens into space.>> Continue reading

The Brooklyn Reader: Take a Tour of the Navy Yard

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The Brooklyn Reader, January 27, 2015

by C. Zawadi Morris

The Brooklyn Reader took a photo tour of the facility with Turnstile Tours, which offers a variety of tours at the Navy Yard, to learn more about this re-developing historical landmark, located right in our backyard.

First stop: Building 92 (BLDG 92). BLDG 92 is, for most who do not work in the complex, the first destination for all entering the yard. The center was built to be meticulously sustainable and environmentally friendly, as a re-introduction to the community to celebrate the Navy Yard’s past, present and future. BLDG 92 is an exhibition, visitors and employment center that is operated as a program of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC), the non-profit corporation that manages the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

BNYDC’s mission is to promote local economic development and job creation, develop underutilized areas and oversee modernization of the Yard’s infrastructure and assets while maintaining its historical integrity.

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Atlas Obscura: Ruins and Revitalization at the Brooklyn Navy Yard

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Atlas Obscura, January 23, 2015

by Shereen Malek

Earlier this month, the New York Obscura Society embarked on a behind-the-scenes tour of the Brooklyn Navy Yard to explore the rich history of the vast 300-acre property. Led by Andrew Gustafson of Turnstile Tours, the tour chronicled the Yard’s evolution, which originally served as a shipyard from 1776 to 1965 and is now an industrial park with thriving manufacturing and commercial activity where over 200 businesses employ more than 5,000 people.

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BLDG 92 & Brooklyn Historical Society: Brooklyn Navy Yard STEM and Sustainability Research

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Research and content development for STEM-based K–12 programs // 2014

Turnstile was commissioned by the Brooklyn Historical Society (now known as the Center for Brooklyn History at the Brooklyn Public Library) and the Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at BLDG 92 to create a research document about STEM and sustainability-related topics, both historical and contemporary, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This research project was designed to be the content foundation for the development of STEM-based K-12 programs at the Yard.

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“We Need Your Skills”: Pearl Harbor and the Brooklyn Navy Yard

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The Brooklyn Navy Yard is 5,000 miles from Pearl Harbor, and though the reverberations of the events there on December 7, 1941 were felt across the globe, they hit especially hard on this small stretch of the Brooklyn waterfront.

Already 140 years old at the time, the Brooklyn Navy Yard had established itself as one of the most venerable shipbuilding and ship repair facilities in the Navy, and the Yard would be pushed to the limit during World War II, building, repairing, and servicing more than 5,000 vessels in just four years. Not only would ships be brought from across the world to be patched up and pushed back into the service at the Yard, but the Yard’s skilled craftsmen would be dispatched to other shipyards to help keep the fleet in fighting order.>> Continue reading

News 4 New York: Pearl Harbor Day

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News 4 New York, December 5, 2014

Andrew Gustafson, vice president of Turnstile Tours, speaks with Roseanne Colletti regarding Brooklyn Navy Yard’s exhibit, “The ‘Can-Do’ Yard: WWII at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.”

“We’re especially proud of the fact that the Brooklyn Navy Yard built the USS Arizona, which was sunk on December 7, 1941, with the loss of 1,177 sailors aboard. We also built the USS Missouri, which is where the peace treaty that ended World War II was signed, so we have the bookends of the war that were built here at the Navy Yard.”

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Brooklyn Navy Yard Visitors Share Memories and Mementos

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Earlier this month, we hosted a group of retirees from central New Jersey on a tour of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. On nearly every tour we lead, we have visitors who have personal connections to the Yard – they’ve worked or served there, or had family members who did – but this tour was special for the sheer number and depth of people’s connections to the site.

One woman said she used to babysit the children of naval officers at the homes along Admirals Row; another went on a date at the old Officers Club. Two women had fathers who worked at the Yard, and in their spare time (and with a little spare metal), they fashioned jewelry for their daughters in the Yard’s workshops, which they still have – one was even wearing it on the tour!

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The Perrys of Newport and the Brooklyn Navy Yard

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Last week, Cindy and I spent our brief honeymoon in Newport, Rhode Island. Even though we were told to relax, how could we resist not doing a little bit of work while in the hometown of perhaps the most celebrated family in American naval history, the Perrys! We started our trip at the Naval War College Museum, which has many artifacts and exhibits about the famous Perry brothers, Oliver Hazard and Matthew Calbraith.>> Continue reading

Adams, Jefferson, and the Unlikely Founding of the Brooklyn Navy Yard

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Two hundred and thirteen years ago today, the Brooklyn Navy Yard was founded, the last of the six original shipyards established by the US Navy. Today we celebrate the yard’s history of shipbuilding and innovation, and its continued importance to the economy of Brooklyn as an industrial park, but it almost never existed. Its founding in 1801 was rife with controversy, and around it swirled one of the central political battles of the early American republic. Today the Navy is one of the cornerstones of American power – possessing 10 of the world’s 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and more than one-third of all the naval tonnage in the world, the US Navy is 3.5 times the size of its nearest competitors, China and Russia. But at the end of the 18th century, the American navy was small and, at times, a non-existent force. While it achieved some notable victories in the Revolutionary War over a far superior British adversary, by 1785, economic constraints forced the nascent republic to sell off the last of its warships.>> Continue reading

WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY Exhibit Reveals Brooklyn Navy Yard Stories of WWII

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If you have not yet been to the Brooklyn Museum to see their stunning exhibition WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY, make no delay – the show closes on Sunday, February 2, when its three-city tour will also come an end.

Rather than arranging the works of journalistic, artistic, and combat photography by conflict or photographer, in this show they are instead arranged into thematic clusters that draw links between war’s common denominators through the ages.  Images range from the Crimean War of the 1850’s to present-day conflicts around the world.  And beside the images of fighting are those of the more mundane daily life in a war zone – “Camp Life,” “Leisure Time” – as well as the human costs beyond the battlefield – “Executions,” “POWs,” “Refugees.”>> Continue reading