Metro

19th Century home turned into Brooklyn Navy Yard museum (VIDEO)

It took over two centuries, but the Brooklyn Navy Yard is finally giving up the secrets behind one of the city’s most historic sites.

A former 19th Century marine commandant’s house at the 300-acre, ex-navy shipyard turned city-owned industrial park has been restored and incorporated into a stunning $27 million, 33,300-square-foot museum and visitors center.

The center, which opens Friday on Veterans’ Day, celebrates the yard’s vast history dating back to its 1801 through a series of state-of-the-art interactive displays, oral video histories of former workers and other exhibits – including a massive naval-operations records collection only rivaled by National Archives in Washington DC.

“We are sharing an incredible history that few people have ever heard of, from the Yard’s role in Navy operations worldwide to the development of manufacturing technology here,” said Andrew Kimball, CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp.

Among the more than 80 ships commissioned or built there were the USS Monitor (1862), America’s first iron-clad warship; and the USS Arizona (1915) which was sunk during Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Among the many medical breakthroughs at the site was ER Squibb, introducing anesthetic ether there in 1854 while a Navy surgeon.

Friday’s opening will be the first time in the site’s 210-year history that the public will be allowed onto any of the yard’s heavily guarded grounds without going through security first. The building’s entrance is near the intersection of Flushing and Carlton avenues. Admission is free.

Daniella Romano, the museum’s curator, has spent the past five years going through more than 40,000 maps, blueprints, photos and other navy yard documents – much of which has been scanned so the public can review electronically.

“We have enough boxes of records to fill a 1,000-square-foot room,” she said.

Among the finds is a 1814-1815 log book from shipyard staffers who worked on vessels sent out to combat pirates and construction plans for the USS Maine, which was sunk off Havana Harbor in 1898, precipitating the Spanish-American War.

But perhaps the greatest treasure is a telephone set up for people to hear a 90-second conversation from 1964 in which then-Mayor Robert Wagner pleaded with then-President Lyndon Johnson to save the Navy Yard from closing.

Johnson says “God Bless you Bob” and that he’d try to help but that the decision would ultimately be made by his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, who pulled the military out of the site two years later.

The city bought the ex-shipyard in 1968, and after decades of little activity, has transformed it into a popular industrial park where roughly 275 private sector busi nesses – including Steiner Studios – employ nearly 6,000 employees. The museum sets aside some space to show off the industrial park’s tenants.