Time Table

At the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s Visitor Center, the Time Table documents 400 years of American history as it has progressed through the waters of the East River and Wallabout Bay.

History at the Navy Yard has not merely been witnessed, but physically manifested in the evolution of the Yard itself. It is this incredible and massive change over time that the Time Table was designed to visualize.

In five minutes at the table, Native American long houses turn to Dutch farmland, a British Revolutionary War outpost becomes an American Naval installation, a massive churning World War II shipyard transforms into a twenty-first century movie studio and incubator for small businesses. Seeing these changes unfold one after the other, visitors quickly gain a sense of the site’s history as well as its bright and burgeoning future.

Visitors can watch the Time Table evolve, or they can dive deeper by touching any of the sites displayed on the map. These sites feature buildings, boats and even the BQE. Visitors access photographs, illustrations and text describing the state of the site at different points in time. Sites also include personal stories of the exceptionally industrious people who have populated the yard over 400 hundred years of history.