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Commentary By Kay S. Hymowitz

Two Candidates and Two Brooklyns: Hillary and Bernie at the Navy Yard

Cities, Culture New York City, Culture & Society

In a few days, the Democratic Party will bring us the Battle of Brooklyn between scrappy hometown upstart Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and establishment stalwart, sometime New Yorker Hillary Clinton. Though I doubt the two campaigns realized it when they chose the Duggal Greenhouse in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard for the debate, they couldn’t have picked a more apt location.

“During WWII, when Bernie Sanders was just a lad playing stickball a few miles away in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, the Yard was Brooklyn’s largest employer...”

The venue could serve as the symbol of all the class tensions that have whipped this election season into a national nervous breakdown. A former asbestos-covered warehouse, the now ecologically pristine Duggal Greenhouse is the new, postindustrial Brooklyn at its most glamorous — set on the Navy Yard’s East River site with stunning views of Manhattan.

The company’s promotional materials promise customers they can arrive by car or “yacht . . . steps from the Duggal Greenhouse and its private waterfront patio.” The site has been used for product launches, a Lady Gaga release party and designer Alexander Wang’s fall 2014 runway event, the first-ever New York Fashion Week show to appear in the outer boroughs.

Brooklynites with any borough memory at all are shaking their heads. The Brooklyn Navy Yard was once the capital of old industrial Brooklyn, itself one of the largest industrial centers in the United States. For well over a century, tens of thousands of Irish, Italians, Poles, Scandinavians and Jewish immigrants who lived in nearby Fort Greene, Williamsburg and Prospect Heights schlepped their lunch pails to the piers, dry docks, machine shops and warehouses that spread over its 300 acres.

During World War II, when Bernie Sanders was just a lad playing stickball a few miles away in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, the Yard was Brooklyn’s largest employer, sustaining 70,000 men and women electricians, mechanics, welders and the like and, by extension, their nearby neighborhoods.

It scarcely needs saying that those days — and those jobs — are gone, transformed by time and a new, globalized knowledge and service economy. The Navy Yard’s own metamorphosis from blue-collar hub into contemporary business and event center puts the winners and losers of that economy in stark relief.

Instead of manufacturing anchors and torpedoes, 330 mostly small firms produce niche products, many of them primarily for the pleasure of the local upper middle class: eco kitchen counters, “kinetic” tables, museum displays and artisanal whiskey. And instead of relying on a workforce of tenement-dwelling immigrants clawing their way out of Old World poverty, New Brooklyn firms are just as likely to be manned by skilled, microbrew-drinking college grads.

This is not to say today’s Navy Yard has nothing to offer the less educated of the New Brooklyn. The employment center at the Yard lists job openings and tries to place local, low-skilled, minority workers. To take just one example, seamstresses, many of whom commute from Sunset Park’s Chinatown, hand-sew the camouflage vests for Crye Precision, a high-tech military apparel maker. Just outside the boundaries of the Yard are the 10 buildings of NYCHA’s Farragut Houses, some of whose residents are getting a Yard paycheck.

Still, the big picture is sobering for anyone dreaming of a blue-collar revival. Farragut probably never had a large number of workers at either the Yard or other factories along the Brooklyn waterfront; by the projects’ completion in 1952, Brooklyn’s industrial sector had already plateaued. Even with the Navy Yard’s revival, the employment center has placed about 2,500 low-income workers — mostly from Brooklyn — since 1999.

The biggest beneficiaries of the New Brooklyn’s economy are likely to remain “creatives” able to seize opportunities created by manufacturing’s new partnership with design, technology and the arts. This is the crowd that has already helped to gentrify nearby DUMBO, Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

The Yard itself appears to be undergoing gentrification in their image. The soon-to-be-completed, one-million-square-foot Building 77 will turn a concrete, windowless hulk of a warehouse and ammunition depot into offices and shared work spaces. On the ground floor will be a food hall anchored by Russ and Daughters, New York City’s renowned smoked fish and caviar emporium. Nearby work has begun on a spectacular glass 16-floor building called Dock 72 that will offer “co-working office space.” The developers promise a basketball court, specialty food market, bike valet, rooftop conference center and health and wellness facilities.

Will Brooklyn’s postindustrial winners and losers, both of them core constituents of the Democratic Party, be the target audience for Thursday’s debate? They should be. One thing’s for sure: neither Bernie Sanders nor Hillary Clinton will arrive at Duggal Greenhouse by yacht. We’d need Donald Trump for that.

This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News

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This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News