Who are we?
We are three New Yorkers who are interested in integrating the technology and wealth of knowledge that already exists in our city for climate resiliency. As students at the CUNY Graduate Center’s department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, our research is forward-thinking and service-oriented, with the goal of preparing and protecting our city’s most vulnerable inhabitants from climate change. Our specific concern is flooding, and with 72% impervious cover and 520 miles of shoreline, New York City is especially vulnerable to flooding from precipitation (pluvial) and storm surges (coastal). New Yorkers are resilient, and the solutions are out there, our goal is to bring them together so we can all learn to live with water.
Who are you?
You are anyone, but hopefully someone who cares about the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a place to grow, thrive, and share. The Brooklyn Navy Yard has a fascinating history as it has transformed from a salt marsh to a ship building site to a business hub through the last few centuries. Between the bike lanes, public housing, event venues, the Naval Cemetery, the businesses, and more, the Brooklyn Navy Yard has something to offer everyone, and we created this dashboard as a way for everyone to offer something back. Read on to learn about the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s history, current challenges, and to add to its ongoing story.
Contents:
Historical Context of the Brooklyn Navy Yard
Originally a salt marsh in a highly (biologically) productive estuary, much of the Brooklyn Navy Yard (BNY) as we know it today is a human construct. To understand the unique flood risks of this area as well as the current landscape and ability for the public to access the space we explain selected parts of this area’s transformation since early colonization began. A timeline from Brooklyn Navy Yard can be found here.
Early Colonization:
The salt marshes seen in the top left rendering were first modified by farming and the building of dams to create tide driven mills by the Dutch in the late 1600s, which are represented in the map below. It was named Wallabout bay, and some people still refer to the neighborhood as Wallabout. During the American Revolutionary War, English prison ships and warships were stationed in the bay.
Industrial period:
The bay’s use evolved into a ship building site, which included creating new land upon the marsh. In 1859, a survey of the remaining underlying marsh was conducted to determine if the Washington Ave extension could be built, which it was and is now the present site of Steiner Studios. From the following map, one can see the extents of the salt marsh mapped out with relative accuracy when they surveyed it.
Land Use Changes in the Military Industrial Era
In the era of 1939-1945, the BNY employed a staggering 70,000 employees who built warships and commercial ships. The NYCHA housing surrounding the Brooklyn Navy yard- specifically, the Farragut, Ingersoll, and Whitman houses were built in 1944 to “address the pressing housing needs of the thousands of employees at the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard”. The land that the houses are built upon, as well as the bordering Commodore Barry park, have lots of lawn space, which likely help absorb more rainwater than the streets and other built up areas around it. The NYCHA housing complexes are generally in dis-repair and in need of investment. See the below map for the extent of the housing complexes and the park, which surround the southern edge of the BNY.
The military-run industrial ship building industry at the BNY closed officially in 1966. The City gained control of the yard in the same year and created a non-profit to run the space. Some commercial ship building companies remained operating, albeit in a smaller scale. The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC) was established in 1981 (the second non-profit to be set up) and is still managing the space to this day. As the economic contraction of the ship-building industry progressed, the BNYDC sought other tenants and created several programs to encourage businesses to set up. Presently, there are 500 small businesses operating in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with a high concentration of green or climate related businesses. As these businesses thrived, more investment was made in the area- over 700 million dollars of development was in process by 2017. However, the remains difficult to access by public transportation.
Contemporary land use and stakeholders
Prior to the creation of a NYC ferry stop in 2019, the BNY was inaccessible to non-employees. Now, the public can enter through the highly policed and surveilled gates of Building 77, which has a food court, and into the outdoor interior of the yard to access the ferry stop. However, the public is not allowed into any other part of the Brooklyn Navy yard asides from this access corridor.
Recently, there has been a focused effort to demilitarize the Brooklyn Navy Yard by evicting two tenants: Crye Precision and Easy Arial, “which produce gear and technology for the Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Israeli Occupation Forces (officially known as the Israeli Defense Forces)” Many community members are shocked to learn that the BNY houses military contractors, since those businesses are labeled as “Fashion” and “Fine Art/Photography” respectively. Crye Precision manufactures tactical gear for warfare and Easy Arial manufactures military drones. The reputation of the Brooklyn Navy Yard over the past few decades has evolved into being a tech hub for mission-driven, creative or sustainable entrepreneurs, and yet the presence and BNY’s protection of the two “open secret” military contractors is very much at odds with this vision.
Present Flooding concerns
The current land use of the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a tech hub is one of the major reasons this low-lying coastal area is being targeted for better water management to mitigate coastal and pluvial flooding. Although there have been significant investments made to the Brooklyn Navy yard to update the infrastructure from it’s civil-war era construction, water pools quickly on the interior, non-public streets where sewers are unable to convey water (see site visit photos during a short cloudburst rainfall event), and water will flow downhill into the area, as it was originally a salt marsh fed by tributaries.
There remains lots of interesting research questions about how best to manage flooding in the BNY for the future. Many green and blue infrastructure projects use soil permeability as a tool for absorbing stormwater runoff, but this is a more complicated issue at the BNY. One, the coastal soil will already be saturated with salt water to a certain level, limiting absorption of surface stormwater. Additionally, US Army and Navy bases have not and are not subject to environmental rules the same way that other land within the US is, and given the heavy industrial history, uncapping soil in this area might have unintended consequences.
Despite a 300+ year history of development, stormwater flows roughly the same way into the BNY. One of the green companies at the BNY’s tech hub is Scalgo, which maps out flow patterns and flooding over topography. In the screenshot below, their own model shows the main contemporary tributaries (where the water flows over the impervious surface). These flow paths are similar to the streams seen in the Welikia map rendering (first figure), as well as the Wallabout Bay Map (second figure). By starting with a deeper contextual understanding of the hydrologic and social history of the site, our conceptual data monitoring dashboard can better facilitate and evaluate effective and regionally appropriate site specific interventions to mitigate flooding.
Today:
We have a variety of tools at our disposal to monitor and model rainfall, flooding, tides, trees, and more. Here are some of the tools relevant the Brooklyn Navy Yard! outlines current challenges: cloudburst, storm surge, imperviousness
Shahela: NYC tree map, CSO outfalls, NYC Floodnet, etc.
Tomorrow:
The Brooklyn Navy Yard still struggles with water management, and parts of it are projected to be underwater at future high tides due to sea level rise. Here, we’ve proposed a series of monitoring techniques on a specific site and infrastructure updates to ground-truth existing models and adapt the Brooklyn Navy Yard to live with water.
Case Study: The Wegman’s Parking Lot
We saw a lake and a beautiful waterfall form in the Wegman’s parking lot after a short, intense burst of rain in June, 2025. As water flowed off the sidewalk and into the street, we also witnessed it flowing over a sewer grate – not into, over!
As beautiful as this impromptu river and waterfall may be, we don’t think it belongs where people are walking, and we’re concerned at how quickly the sewer was overwhelmed. We asked ourselves two questions: how is this being modeled (i.e., was this a predictable flooding event?), and what can we do?
To answer the first question, we turned to SCALGO, a geographical digitization tool that can provide a visualization of water movement and flooding based on the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s topography. Here’s what it looks like for the Wegman’s parking lot:
The blue pin on Sand Street is where we saw water accumulating and flowing into the sidewalk and street. Just below it, SCALGO did successfully model a small flooded area! Interestingly, it also modeled flooded areas in the parking lot that we did not observe, including a flow path right though the Wegman’s building itself, which must be too new for the model to recognize, since it isn’t highlighted in yellow. We can work around that, which brings us to our next question – what can we do about the flooding? We broke this down into two more sections: monitoring for accuracy and managing water in the meantime. do picture in a picture here
Monitoring
precipitation Water always wins, but water is also generally predictable: it moves downhill. As a result, it can come from two places: the sky, and upstream. To measure water coming from the sky, we need a weather station, and the nearest weather station to the Brooklyn Navy Yard is located in Manhattan, on 13th and 16th. This is fairly useful, but precipitation events can be highly localized. The Brooklyn Navy Yard needs its own weather station to accurately measure the amount of precipitation it receives, and we propose putting it on top of building 77, where the Brooklyn Grange is currently located:
That takes care of water coming from the sky, now we need to deal with water coming from upstream. “Upstream” is a function of elevation, infrastructure, and precipitation amount, duration, and location. The weather station takes care of precipitation, and we used SCALGO to model the watershed:
electromagnetic, floodnet, soil moisture, salinity, temperature on cement vs plants, make it a place on inaturalist (microcosm of what the wetland used to be – window to the past to show yesterday, include discussion of lenape people, include QR codes, different species of native grasses – what did the lenape harvest from the wetlands)
Dashboard Concept:
Given everything we observed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, we propose the concept for a neighborhood-specific urban water dashboard based on a monitoring proposal, current initiatives, and opportunities for people to provide feedback and submit photos and information.