Brooklyn Navy Yard Breaks Ground On New Manufacturing Hub & Parking Garage

BROOKLYN NAVY YARD – The Brooklyn Navy Yard broke ground Wednesday at 399 Sands Street, a new building that will feature a four-story parking garage and five floors of manufacturing and creative space.

As part of Steiner NYC’s redevelopment of the Admirals Row section of the 300-acre Brooklyn Navy Yard campus, the first four floors of 399 Sands will feature 430 parking spaces for customers of the Wegmans supermarket expected to open in 2019, as well as other tenants at the Navy Yard. Floors five through eight will be dedicated to light manufacturing while the ninth floor will offer creative office space. The parking garage is scheduled to be completed in 2019, and the floors above are slated to be done in 2021.

The building was originally intended to serve as a 160,000-square-foot, four-story parking garage for Wegmans shoppers and Navy Yard tenants, Crain’s New York reported. After Alicia Glen, the Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development, announced the city’s plan to invest $40 million into the project as part of Mayor de Blasio’s New York Works Program, the Navy Yard requested that Steiner add another five floors to the top of the project, providing an extra 230,000 square feet of space for manufacturing and creative tenants, the article states.

With the New York Works Program the de Blasio administration is looking to create 100,000 good-paying jobs in the next ten years, with 20,000 of those jobs being in the industrial and manufacturing sectors. The plan to lease the upper five floors of 399 Sands  to manufacturing and creative tenants is expected to create approximately 700 to 1,000 permanent high-quality jobs.

“Thanks to this investment by the City, 399 Sands will add up to 1,000 more of the high quality middle class jobs we’re so focused on creating here at the Yard,” David Ehrenberg, President and CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, said in a release.

“We’re increasingly hearing from companies who want to be here not just because the Navy Yard provides an opportunity to sustain a business, but also to grow one. With this investment, 399 Sands will be developed with exactly that sort of tenant in mind,” Ehrenberg added.

In November last year, the Brooklyn Navy Yard opened Building 77, a renovated WWII-era building featuring 16 stories and one million square feet of manufacturing space that was expected to bring in 3,000 new jobs. Earlier this year, the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation announced its $2.5B plan to add more than 5.1 million square feet of manufacturing, creative, and innovation space across three sites, which will lead to the creation of more than 10,000 new jobs.