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By: Hellen Zaboulani
The Navy Yard is exploring plans for its first new manufacturing building under its master plan.
As reported by Crain’s NY, the Navy Yard released a request for proposal for conceptual designs for a new industrial and commercial building along Kent Avenue. The RFP stipulates that the building should be suitable for manufacturing. It will also need to feature public amenity, retail and showroom space on the ground level, as well as logistics, loading and parking space on the ground floor and second floors. Additionally, office space should be planned on the upper floors, per the request issued. “‘Chunky’ is the right way to describe it,” Brooklyn Navy Yard CEO Lindsay Greene said. “When your reference point is football field-sized manufacturing, if you’re taking that vertically, chunky makes sense.”
The building will be massive, expectedly spanning between 700,000 and 1 million square feet. The RFP says it should take about five years overall to complete the project, Greene said. She added that more details about the project will be divulged during the RFP process. “It’s not going so far as to say, ‘These are our specific instructions, and we’re going to go file the permit,’ but it is getting you to the point of knowing what your rough estimate of that stuff looks like,” she said.
As per Crain’s, the Navy Yard also stipulated that it wants the building to be environmentally friendly with net-zero emissions, as well as to feature a design that will hold up against rising sea levels. The planned building will accept a wide array of tenants, but Greene said they are especially looking forward to its capacity to bring in companies in green industries such as electric vehicles and renewable energy. “This will be one of our first really big opportunities to walk the walk in terms of being a place focused on supporting businesses who are helping solve some of the climate change challenges that we face,” Greene said. “We see the growth being principally around all different types of climate solutions, particularly around transportation and buildings.”
In order to submit a proposal, companies must have experience working on at least one project spanning a minimum of 200,000 square feet and one spanning a minimum of 1 million square feet. They also must have worked on 5 million square feet of projects overall. Interested companies must submit their proposals for the building by Nov. 3rd. The Navy Yard anticipates that it will award the contract speedily and start work in December of this year.
The project would be the first major ground-up project under the Navy Yard’s master plan set in 2018. Per Crain’s, the master plan consists of a $2.5 billion investment that hopes to add roughly 5 million square feet of new manufacturing buildings to the area. The “Kent Site,” as this area is called, is the first of three planned big developments pointed to in the master plan. The other two sites, Flushing and Navy, will also include similar expectations for ground up development of vertical manufacturing and amenity space.
