Crumbling: The Brooklyn Navy Yards

Google Maps insists that I can pass through the Brooklyn Navy Yards on my way from Williamsburg to Dumbo.

Google Maps is a liar.

The thoroughfares of the yards are hidden behind chain-link fencing, guarded by drive-by sentry booths, walled off with steel gate covered in weathered plank wood and sunk deep in the overgrown ground. I’m not allowed in; the uniformed security folk glare furiously at me when I weave briefly through an open gate before regaining the bike path. Instead, I follow the length of the crumble on two wheels, neck craned like a frustrated spectator, veering onto the sidewalk and straining to see what’s there — the growth of weeds and the grandeur of old stone, visible in flashes beyond the fence.

The glimpses I catch are sad, and shameful.

The yards are falling down. They have been for awhile. Inside, New York’s history is slowly falling victim to apathy and petty struggles and the ravages of time. Here are high-ceilinged warehouses with their grid windows shattered, elegant stone estate buildings with plywood-plugged windows  that look like sightless eyes. Old homes, two and three stories with heavy wooden staircases splintering and sagging beyond their yawning entryways, rise grandly out of their overgrown lots and then lean against each other, as though looking for support. One has given up; gravity has sucked the roof down in a cascade of shingles and beams, spilling from the windows and out the front door. In the surrounding neighborhoods, residents fight with developers who fight with city officials over how and by whose hands the Brooklyn Navy Yards should find purchase in an evolved New York.

While they fight, the weeds crawl further into the doorways and another roof collapses.

In some places, the original wrought iron perimeter still stands, left over from the city’s old life. An era of maritime commerce and cobblestone streets. The elderly fence is gesturing, beckoning, rusting in curly flourishes that are decorative, not protective. Vines twine up and embrace the curling tops. Here, there are places where the bars bend apart, opening at elegant angles like the knees of a ballet dancer; I think that the space between is big enough to let my body slip through.

One day, when I’m feeling brave, or when I have friends who could post bail, I’ll try it.

But today, with the January sun creeping toward the river horizon and the tangled weeds creeping higher beyond the gate, I’m only here to look.

It’s like staring into a graveyard.