Streetscapes - Brooklyn Navy Yard Gatehouses Shed Barnacles - NYTimes.com Office for Metropolitan History A 1906 postcard view of the castlelike gatehouses at the Sands Street entrance to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. THE venerable Brooklyn Navy Yard is a 300-acre industrial complex of vintage factory structures and shiny new modern buildings. But the latest work there is a careful re-creation of the two little 1896 castles known as the Sands Street gatehouses, through which millions of workers poured to build the battleships Arizona and Missouri, among others. The protected waters of Wallabout Bay, on the Brooklyn shore of the East River, were used for shipbuilding in the 18th century, and in 1801 the United States Navy acquired much of what became the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Bars and liquor shops quickly sprang up nearby, turning the area around the main gate at the foot of York Street into "a disgrace," as Commodore Francis Ramsey said in 1891. By then the Navy had already decided to build a new entrance to the yard at Sands Street. The bars clustered around the York Street entrance opposed the move, having "reaped a harvest" from thirsty sailors and workers, according to The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. But they held no sway with the Navy. In 1893 The New York Herald published a sketch of the proposed gate, four stories high, with a peaked roof, crenelations and a fortified air; a central archway ran through the middle of the $50,000 design. No architect was specified, but the newspaper called it "elaborate and striking," one of the handsomest buildings of its type in the country. This was a period when professional architects were jockeying for federal work and most government buildings were done in-house; the design exasperated American Architect and Building News. In a lead editorial, the journal mocked The Herald's fulsome, cheerleading description. On the contrary, American Architect said, the gate looked like a giant medical syringe, although more could not be expected from "a clerk in the Government plan factory." The power of the purse is greater than that of any critic, and when the budget was reduced to $20,000, the design was scaled down to a pair of one-story castlelike structures. The new entrance opened in 1896. Again, no architect was listed, but early references strongly suggest it was designed in the Navy's "plan factory." The gatehouses are not sophisticated works of architecture, nor do they have to be. Of tan rock-faced brick, they are essentially rectangular buildings, each with the fillip of a crenelated turret. The year after the opening, The Eagle reported that the cleaner, more hospitable surroundings at Sands Street were "much appreciated by the young women of Brooklyn who are enthusiastic Navy Yard visitors." The account did not mention the nature of their enthusiasm, but it was probably not maritime. In April 1898, a few weeks after the U. S. S. Maine exploded in Havana Harbor and not long before the beginning of the Spanish-American War, The New York World reported that a thousand men fought both the Marine guards - armed with clubs - and each other to get past the gatehouses to enlist. Some were well dressed, but The World said that most appeared to have had a "knock about existence"; many were enlisting because they were out of work. But human frailty is enduring, and Sands Street was soon also tarnished with taverns and tattoo parlors, among other businesses. In 1915, 50,000 visitors had to face down temptation on their way in the yard to see the launching of the battleship Arizona, later sunk at Pearl Harbor. By 1924, The New York Evening Post reported that the area around Sands Street was the scene of "flagrant carousing," and the entire area was placed off limits to yard and Navy personnel. Lines again began to form at the gate in the late 1930s, as naval construction increased. In 1940, as the yard went to two shifts, 3,500 applicants lined up. John F. Kennedy's PT-109, although built in New Jersey, was fitted out at the yard in 1942, and the battleship Missouri was launched there in June 1944. That was the month that the yard began to allow women to take factory jobs. The Missouri was the scene of the Japanese surrender in 1945. The yard closed in 1966. Acquired by New York City, it opened as an industrial park in 1976. Since the 1930s or before, the Sands Street gatehouses had been engulfed by accretions, including second and third floors enclosing the open entrance. The turrets were beheaded sometime later. Until recently, the gatehouses were the main entrance to the city tow pound, and not a popular passage. Its last battleships and aircraft carriers sailed long ago, but 5,800 people are now employed at the yard and there is almost no vacant space left, said Andrew Kimball, the president of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation. Businesses include a soundstage, a whiskey distillery and a rooftop farm. Mr. Kimball says the Sands Street entrance was restored because "it was ugly, an ugly face to the community; and the community is part of our mission, along with creating jobs." The architects Beyer Blinder Belle worked from old photographs to recreate the original gatehouses. Even if out of a "plan factory," they form a fitting entrance to one of New York's oldest industrial enterprises.