September 18, 2025 • 8 mins
New York City's Brooklyn Navy Yard has evolved from a collection of warehouses into a model for 21st-century manufacturing, where climate-tech, smart city solutions, and advanced fabrication companies grow alongside distilleries, designers, and robotics startups. Now, the mission-driven industrial park is prompting a broader rethink of what manufacturing looks like in big cities, and how to solve some of today’s biggest problems, from climate change to health care access.
Lindsay Greene, President and CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, discusses her vision for the Big Apple's business ecosystem. Lindsay speaks with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Businessweek Daily.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. You're listening to Bloomberg
Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenoveek on Bloomberg Radio.
On the Brooklyn Waterfront sandwich, between South Williamsburg and Dumbo,
bordering Fort Green, you can find the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
It's three hundred acres. It's an industrial park. It's home
(00:23):
to more than five hundred and fifty businesses and employees
eleven thousand people. The businesses do and according to the
Navy Yard, it generates more than two point five billion
dollars per year in economic impact for the city. Now,
before it was home to firms in medtech, green tech, materials,
and more, it was a shipbuilding site that built and
launched ships including the USS Main, USS Arizona, and USS Missouri.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Is such a great history, right.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
It's pretty cool. Yeah, it's really cool. Back with us
here in the studio is Lindsay Green. She's president and
CEO of the Brooklyn at Navy Yard. Lindsay, good to
see you.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Welcome, baoh, thank you.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
You know you were in here over a year ago.
I couldn't believe it had been that long. Actually, when
I was looking at the notes, from our producer Ari.
A lot has changed in the narrative around manufacturing in
the United States since you were last with us. Just
to contextualize this, Joe Biden was running against Donald Trump
when you were last in our office, you know, so
it was a completely different world. The President won the election,
(01:19):
he's talked about bringing manufacturing back to the United States.
Talk about manufacturing in the context of what's happening in
the Brooklyn Navy Yard, because you are a big believer
that manufacturing needs to happen in cities.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
It does.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
It needs to happen all over the country, and we
believe that there's a slice of it that always makes
sense to happen in urban settings. And that's what the
Navy has been about since the Navy started. And it's
really about businesses who capitalize on the talent that is
here in New York in particular, and that's both shop
floor workers and talented engineers of different types, and a
(01:53):
proximity to their customer base. That's big corporations that are
based here, the eight and a half million consumers. Just
being a big metropolis is a great place to see
and feel the applicability of whatever it is that you make,
and so that's what a lot of businesses, that's why
they want to be attracted to when they locate at
the yard and we offer them a home base to
(02:13):
do that.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Remind us about the manufacturing that is at the yard.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
So the yard is home to a wide variety of
manufacturing businesses. They do everything from ingredients for food companies
to custom couture and fashion like La Fayette one forty eight,
to people making electric motorcycles, medical device companies. We have
a still functioning shipyard. They're using the infrastructure that the
(02:37):
Navy built. That's GMD Shipyard. It kind of pretty much
everything you think of sort of like mining.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
They're not building iPhones and they're not sewing soccer balls,
and they're not making shoes.
Speaker 4 (02:49):
No, it tends to be high value things that require
the talent and can candidly justify the expense of operating
inside a big city. Or it is things that are
directly consumed by the big metropolis that we are all
a part of.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Is that the reality of manufacturing in the US, it's
got to be a higher end manufacturer. I mean, we
kind of talk about this when when certainly the President
stress is bringing manufacturing back to.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
The which he wants. The iPhone's built in the US.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
Yes, and can we at some point possibly It requires
a lot of runway and investment, because that is just
a whole set of skills from the types of plants,
the type of machinery use in an iPhone plant, the
type of skills that workers in an iPhone plant have.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Why don't we have those skills here?
Speaker 4 (03:30):
We, I think, just stopped investing in them decades ago,
all across the country.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
It changed our education.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
System, it changed the way businesses invested their money, and
a lot of that expertise and new manufacturing techniques just
located overseas.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
What are those skills though? So it's the time I think,
I think we have like this old a lot of us.
Maybe it's me guilty as charged in terms of what
manufacturing is today. So how educate us?
Speaker 3 (03:57):
So it's it's high tech.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
You have to be very computer literate, but not really
any more computer or literate.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Than the rest of us.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
Have to be at a function in daily life, but
you have to have a familiarity with it because something
that you used to do with your hands as a
tradescraftsman is now done with a machine and you have
to know how the machine is using that same skill set,
but it means that a worker's safety risk is much
lower because they're not putting their hands or other body
(04:24):
parts in tiny places, and they can work much faster.
So it allows them to be economically competitive and keep
up with the heavily automated factories that might exist elsewhere.
So it's principally that you're doing the same thing. You
have to have the same mental training because sometimes the
machines break you to be able to triage and troubleshoot,
but you need to know how to work in both
the analog and the new high tech environment. And it's
(04:45):
hard to tell that story. And most manufacturers are so
focused day in and day out on producing the thing
they make. They're not marketing the sexiness of what it
is that they do. They're marketing their thing, and it's
hard to expect them to do both. So it's storytelling
that we take on the Navy Yard because it's about
our mission and supports what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
On Sunday, Governor Kathy Hokele endorsed Zorn Mandanie to be
the next mayor of New York City. I said, we're
at interesting times right now compared to when we last
spoke with you. I know that Mondanni is going out
and reaching out to a lot of business leaders and
meeting with them. Have you had a chance to speak
with him?
Speaker 2 (05:20):
I have not.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
No, I'm aware of his campaign obviously.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
I serve at the pleasure of Mayor Adams, and what
we do is I think a boon for all everyone
in the city.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
You would your job change? Would you? Would? It be
likely that you would. He would bring somebody new in.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
It's up to him.
Speaker 4 (05:38):
I'm an appointed position, just like most other agency heads.
It is city property and it's about good news for
the people.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Of New York.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
I just wanted to ask about the New York City
economy because you have such a good view of it.
How would you characterize it right now?
Speaker 4 (05:54):
I'd say, like most New Yorkers, like businesses here are
built to grow it out and hustle and get it done,
and that's what you see people doing. The tariffs have
an impact, I think principally on the uncertainty level right now,
but they also have had an impact on how people
manage their inventory and how they plan. I think some
folks are feeling pinched, but they're getting by.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
It's Paul, but I want to.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Talk about the people who feel pinched because we're going
to talk about New York housing in just a moment.
It's expensive, yes, and we're not even talking about ownership,
we're talking about renting.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
And I'm just curious.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
So many of the people who work at the Navy Yard,
who are manufacturing, what kind of jobs are these?
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Are they well paying jobs? Are they jobs that give you.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
An easy life in New York City or you're living
outside New York City.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
For a true I think production employee, it's a really
good life, sustaining wage. It is a traditional middle class job.
You can support your family with these wages, and there's lots.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Of researching in New York City.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Living in New York City, yes, you know.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
Not you don't make as much as you do as
a tech worker or someone with degrees, but you can
do well here. And that's why we support it and
try to make sure that as the jobs get more
high tech, they're still super accessible to someone with the
high school education. It's why we have the Steam Center,
and it's why we connect adults to some of these
advanced machinery trainings.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
What's vacancy look like there right now.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Vacancy is generally low. We are pretty occupied, but we
always have room for new people.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Where does it compare with other parts of your tenure?
Speaker 3 (07:21):
As far as I.
Speaker 4 (07:22):
Know, the Navy Yard's always done a pretty good job
being occupied. The only time it's been higher, it's because
we didn't have a chance to renovated building the Navy
had built and it maybe had a tree.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
Growing through it. Tenants who come in, they stay, Yes,
very much.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
It's part of our special sauce that we help tenants grow.
And you know, we call it the Swiss Cheese of
moving people around between different buildings in different different spaces
as they grow. Sometimes we bring them all back together.
Sometimes they have one set of operations in one building
and a different set of operations than another.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
It's we may get work for them.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
We have an ecosystem, we have a campus. We want
them to succeed and run their business and employee Yorkers,
and we do what we can to help them do that.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
And there's also some good food there. I'll just throw
it out there.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
There's good food. There's there's good you get good food.
There's good twenty one plus beverages.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Also, Lindsay always good to see you. Thanks so much
to see you, Thanks for the studio. Lindsay Green, President
and CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard,
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. You're listening to Bloomberg
Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenoveek on Bloomberg Radio.
On the Brooklyn Waterfront sandwich, between South Williamsburg and Dumbo,
bordering Fort Green, you can find the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
It's three hundred acres. It's an industrial park. It's home
(00:23):
to more than five hundred and fifty businesses and employees
eleven thousand people. The businesses do and according to the
Navy Yard, it generates more than two point five billion
dollars per year in economic impact for the city. Now,
before it was home to firms in medtech, green tech, materials,
and more, it was a shipbuilding site that built and
launched ships including the USS Main, USS Arizona, and USS Missouri.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Is such a great history, right.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
It's pretty cool. Yeah, it's really cool. Back with us
here in the studio is Lindsay Green. She's president and
CEO of the Brooklyn at Navy Yard. Lindsay, good to
see you.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Welcome, baoh, thank you.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
You know you were in here over a year ago.
I couldn't believe it had been that long. Actually, when
I was looking at the notes, from our producer Ari.
A lot has changed in the narrative around manufacturing in
the United States since you were last with us. Just
to contextualize this, Joe Biden was running against Donald Trump
when you were last in our office, you know, so
it was a completely different world. The President won the election,
(01:19):
he's talked about bringing manufacturing back to the United States.
Talk about manufacturing in the context of what's happening in
the Brooklyn Navy Yard, because you are a big believer
that manufacturing needs to happen in cities.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
It does.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
It needs to happen all over the country, and we
believe that there's a slice of it that always makes
sense to happen in urban settings. And that's what the
Navy has been about since the Navy started. And it's
really about businesses who capitalize on the talent that is
here in New York in particular, and that's both shop
floor workers and talented engineers of different types, and a
(01:53):
proximity to their customer base. That's big corporations that are
based here, the eight and a half million consumers. Just
being a big metropolis is a great place to see
and feel the applicability of whatever it is that you make,
and so that's what a lot of businesses, that's why
they want to be attracted to when they locate at
the yard and we offer them a home base to
(02:13):
do that.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Remind us about the manufacturing that is at the yard.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
So the yard is home to a wide variety of
manufacturing businesses. They do everything from ingredients for food companies
to custom couture and fashion like La Fayette one forty eight,
to people making electric motorcycles, medical device companies. We have
a still functioning shipyard. They're using the infrastructure that the
(02:37):
Navy built. That's GMD Shipyard. It kind of pretty much
everything you think of sort of like mining.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
They're not building iPhones and they're not sewing soccer balls,
and they're not making shoes.
Speaker 4 (02:49):
No, it tends to be high value things that require
the talent and can candidly justify the expense of operating
inside a big city. Or it is things that are
directly consumed by the big metropolis that we are all
a part of.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Is that the reality of manufacturing in the US, it's
got to be a higher end manufacturer. I mean, we
kind of talk about this when when certainly the President
stress is bringing manufacturing back to.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
The which he wants. The iPhone's built in the US.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
Yes, and can we at some point possibly It requires
a lot of runway and investment, because that is just
a whole set of skills from the types of plants,
the type of machinery use in an iPhone plant, the
type of skills that workers in an iPhone plant have.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Why don't we have those skills here?
Speaker 4 (03:30):
We, I think, just stopped investing in them decades ago,
all across the country.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
It changed our education.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
System, it changed the way businesses invested their money, and
a lot of that expertise and new manufacturing techniques just
located overseas.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
What are those skills though? So it's the time I think,
I think we have like this old a lot of us.
Maybe it's me guilty as charged in terms of what
manufacturing is today. So how educate us?
Speaker 3 (03:57):
So it's it's high tech.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
You have to be very computer literate, but not really
any more computer or literate.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Than the rest of us.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
Have to be at a function in daily life, but
you have to have a familiarity with it because something
that you used to do with your hands as a
tradescraftsman is now done with a machine and you have
to know how the machine is using that same skill set,
but it means that a worker's safety risk is much
lower because they're not putting their hands or other body
(04:24):
parts in tiny places, and they can work much faster.
So it allows them to be economically competitive and keep
up with the heavily automated factories that might exist elsewhere.
So it's principally that you're doing the same thing. You
have to have the same mental training because sometimes the
machines break you to be able to triage and troubleshoot,
but you need to know how to work in both
the analog and the new high tech environment. And it's
(04:45):
hard to tell that story. And most manufacturers are so
focused day in and day out on producing the thing
they make. They're not marketing the sexiness of what it
is that they do. They're marketing their thing, and it's
hard to expect them to do both. So it's storytelling
that we take on the Navy Yard because it's about
our mission and supports what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
On Sunday, Governor Kathy Hokele endorsed Zorn Mandanie to be
the next mayor of New York City. I said, we're
at interesting times right now compared to when we last
spoke with you. I know that Mondanni is going out
and reaching out to a lot of business leaders and
meeting with them. Have you had a chance to speak
with him?
Speaker 2 (05:20):
I have not.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
No, I'm aware of his campaign obviously.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
I serve at the pleasure of Mayor Adams, and what
we do is I think a boon for all everyone
in the city.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
You would your job change? Would you? Would? It be
likely that you would. He would bring somebody new in.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
It's up to him.
Speaker 4 (05:38):
I'm an appointed position, just like most other agency heads.
It is city property and it's about good news for
the people.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Of New York.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
I just wanted to ask about the New York City
economy because you have such a good view of it.
How would you characterize it right now?
Speaker 4 (05:54):
I'd say, like most New Yorkers, like businesses here are
built to grow it out and hustle and get it done,
and that's what you see people doing. The tariffs have
an impact, I think principally on the uncertainty level right now,
but they also have had an impact on how people
manage their inventory and how they plan. I think some
folks are feeling pinched, but they're getting by.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
It's Paul, but I want to.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Talk about the people who feel pinched because we're going
to talk about New York housing in just a moment.
It's expensive, yes, and we're not even talking about ownership,
we're talking about renting.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
And I'm just curious.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
So many of the people who work at the Navy Yard,
who are manufacturing, what kind of jobs are these?
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Are they well paying jobs? Are they jobs that give you.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
An easy life in New York City or you're living
outside New York City.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
For a true I think production employee, it's a really
good life, sustaining wage. It is a traditional middle class job.
You can support your family with these wages, and there's lots.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Of researching in New York City.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Living in New York City, yes, you know.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
Not you don't make as much as you do as
a tech worker or someone with degrees, but you can
do well here. And that's why we support it and
try to make sure that as the jobs get more
high tech, they're still super accessible to someone with the
high school education. It's why we have the Steam Center,
and it's why we connect adults to some of these
advanced machinery trainings.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
What's vacancy look like there right now.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Vacancy is generally low. We are pretty occupied, but we
always have room for new people.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Where does it compare with other parts of your tenure?
Speaker 3 (07:21):
As far as I.
Speaker 4 (07:22):
Know, the Navy Yard's always done a pretty good job
being occupied. The only time it's been higher, it's because
we didn't have a chance to renovated building the Navy
had built and it maybe had a tree.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
Growing through it. Tenants who come in, they stay, Yes,
very much.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
It's part of our special sauce that we help tenants grow.
And you know, we call it the Swiss Cheese of
moving people around between different buildings in different different spaces
as they grow. Sometimes we bring them all back together.
Sometimes they have one set of operations in one building
and a different set of operations than another.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
It's we may get work for them.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
We have an ecosystem, we have a campus. We want
them to succeed and run their business and employee Yorkers,
and we do what we can to help them do that.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
And there's also some good food there. I'll just throw
it out there.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
There's good food. There's there's good you get good food.
There's good twenty one plus beverages.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Also, Lindsay always good to see you. Thanks so much
to see you, Thanks for the studio. Lindsay Green, President
and CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard,
Hosts And Creators
Tim Stenovec
Carol Massar
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