Building Brooklyn: Women on the Waterfront

Episode Transcript

Jennifer Egan Did you -- you've both mentioned how you've ended up talking so much about these years afterward. When you were there, did it feel like a big deal? Did it feel like an historic thing?

Ida Pollack Well, we didn't feel like heroes at all. We just felt it was the thing to do.

Sylvia Everitt Did it feel like a big deal, did she say? Working there? I mean it was a big, you know. 

Ida Pollack Yeah, but we didn't think we were doing anything special.

Sylvia Everitt No, not special. But it was a --

Ida Pollack It was special, obviously.

Sylvia Everitt It was so unusual, to say the least. To have women working in something like this.

Penny Lathers So, let's say you meet a stranger or something, and they say, "Well, what do you do?" And you say, "Well, I'm a welder at the Navy Yard." Did you watch the reactions?

Ida Pollack Oh, sure, you couldn't miss it.

Sylvia Everitt Well, people were shocked.

Adwoa Adusei Today on Borrowed we’re taking you back to New York City in the 1940s, in the midst of World War II. At the start of the war, 200 women were employed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which was then the largest dry docks in the world. In three years, there were nearly 7,000 women at the yard, making up ten percent of the work force. Then, they were gone as rapidly as they appeared: By the war’s end, in 1946, the Navy Yard workforce returned to almost entirely male.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras To better paint a picture of that unique moment in time, we’ve turned to oral histories conducted with several women some 45 years after they worked at the Navy Yard.

[Sound of heels on cobblestone]

Helen Gagliardi I used to arrive about 6:00 AM in the morning, maybe a little bit later, and it would be quite dark. And I disappeared into the Sand Street gate and that was the end of that.

[Construction sound]

Diane Esses Did it feel strange to be doing work that was typically male?

Lucille Kolkin Oh, of course. It was also romantic and exciting. You know, to wear pants and —

Diane Esses Uh-huh. 

Lucille Kolkin The physical conditions were very rough, and I must say I wasn't crazy about the cold or the heat or the — we stood on things that were very uncomfortable all day. I mean, ten hours a day.

Bettie Chase What they would do, they -- men would walk around, especially the bosses, and they stepped on your toe. Hard. They stepped on your toe and if you didn't have on those shoes, you're in trouble.

[Boat sounds]

Lucille Kolkin And you know, nobody ever asked for a hammer, they asked for a fuckin' hammer. You know, it's —

Diane Esses Did you begin to speak that way? Or did the women begin to speak that way?

Lucille Kolkin Yeah, I guess we — we sort of — Well, like I said, it was part of the freedom that we kind of — those of us who liked it, who enjoyed that kind of idea of the freedom I suppose …

Diane Esses What was it freedom from?

Lucille Kolkin Well, freedom from being considered completely feminine, and wearing dresses and things like that. 

Diane Esses What does it mean to be completely feminine?

Lucille Kolkin I’m not sure.

Diane Esses In that time.

Lucille Kolkin In that time? Well, doing the things that women were supposed to do, like working in an office, being a nurse …

[Music]

Krissa Corbett Cavouras That was tape from oral histories collected by the Center for Brooklyn History at Brooklyn Public Library. The voices you just heard were Ida Pollack, and Sylvia Everitt, Helen Gagliardi, Lucille Kolkin, and Betty Chase. From their descriptions, you can imagine what it was like to journey in the early hours of the morning to your eight to twelve-hour shift, as a welder, a messenger, a typist, or even a seamstress, all in the war effort to build and repair Naval ships. 

Adowa Adusei You’d arrive by subway, bus, or bicycle to the waters edge, your modest dress whipping against the wind, heels hurriedly clipping against the pavement before being stopped and searched at the Sands Street entrance and then onwards to change into your work pants and steel-toed boots. The handful of years captured in these oral histories depict a unique and significant time for women, a brief flicker in the story of women at work.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras So today on Borrowed: a window into that unique time, with help from Jennifer Egan, the acclaimed writer who helped start this collection of oral histories at the library and who relied on the stories you’ll hear today to write her novel, Manhattan Beach.

Adwoa Adusei This is the second of five episodes in “Building Brooklyn,” a mini-series brought to you by Brooklyn Public Library. I’m Adwoa Adusei.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And I’m Krissa Corbett Cavouras. You’re listening to Borrowed: Stories that start at the library.

[Sound of old subway]

Krissa Corbett Cavouras We’ll begin the way that workers would have started their days — arriving at the Navy Yard, which was then and still is today hard to get to by public transit. Lucille Ford vividly remembers her trips to the Navy Yard. 

Lucille Ford I had never been in Brooklyn before. I got off at High Street subway, and I got the bus, and it took me to the Navy Yard — I don't even remember the address of the Navy Yard.

Bettie Chase I would get on the trolley and I’d ride to Flushing Avenue — and take the Flushing Avenue to Sands Street Gate, Navy Yard —

Adwoa Adusei Bettie Chase was the only woman tack welder when she started in 1941 or 1942. She remembers having to take the trolley to work alone, late at night, for the start of her night shift. Within a year another woman started working at the Navy Yard with her and joined her on the commute. 

Bettie Chase And that was much better. My mother was much — she was happy about that. She didn't like the idea, you know, of me standing in Flushing Avenue waiting for the — you know, something, you know, to come soon.

Sady Sullivan Right, because that was — what time would you be going home from the night shift?

Bettie Chase Well, I'd leave at about six, seven o'clock in the morning.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Once you arrived at the Navy Yard, there were even more complications to navigate. You are, after all, among the first and only women to work at the yard. So, you would probably encounter bathrooms supplied only with urinals. Here’s Bettie Chase again.

Bettie Chase Now, being in the tool room had its disadvantages because this is, after all, a place, a contruction, it's a Navy Yard — men. If I wanted to go to the bathroom, where are you going? Set up strictly for me. Urinals, that's all! This would be two or three o'clock in the morning, see, because I come in about eleven o'clock at night — And to walk with me, you know, part of the way there because, you know, urinals have no doors.

Lucille Kolkin I guess those of us who worked in the Navy Yard must have had something a little bit different to begin with. I mean, in many cases probably. I mean, you wouldn't have taken the most feminine girl —

Adwoa Adusei That’s Lucille Kolkin. She worked at the Navy Yard in the Department of Welfare before training to become a welder in 1942.

Lucy Kolkin She wouldn't have gone there. It was too dirty. You know. It would have bothered her, And it didn’t bother me, so long as I could clean up. I guess you come from a sort of somewhat different background to be able to go in there and do it, you know. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Lucille Kolkin recorded her oral history in 1989, but her handwritten letters to her husband Al, who also worked at the Navy Yard as a machinist before his deployment in 1944, were donated to the Center for Brooklyn History after her death in 1997. It was those letters that were a big part of the inspiration for writer Jennifer Egan’s novel Manhattan Beach. She came across them while on a library fellowship, and fell in love with Lucille’s story.

Adwoa Adusei Manhattan Beach takes place in 1942 and follows three protagonists — Anna Kerrigan, who worked at Navy Yard first as a welder and then diver, a gangster named Dexter Stiles, and Eddie, Anna’s father, a small time racketeer who disappears halfway into the book. 

Jennifer Egan So when I began trying to imagine working on a book set during World War II, I found that I felt kind of frozen.

Adwoa Adusei This is the author, Jennifer Egan. We interviewed her a few months ago, and she talked to us about how she started writing Manhattan Beach. 

Jennifer Egan … and I realized it was because I had no context to draw on. If you think about how much is included in the memory of time and place, it also involves people. It involves a context. It involves sights and smells and details of the physical world. And all of that leads into story. So, what the oral histories initially provided was almost like an alternate memory bank: a feeling, a sense of a time and a place and details and voices that would normally be my own, but I couldn't use my own because it didn't reach back that far. So that was what they did first. And in a way that was sort of vague, like it just gave me a way to start. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras It was 2004 when Egan first got the idea for a novel set in the 1940s. She began conducting research … she started talking to women who were alive then and recording their stories. It was very ad-hoc, Egan says. But eventually, she linked up with the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation and the Center for Brooklyn History. Over the next four years or so, they collected 49 interviews with people who worked at the Navy Yard during the war. Egan relied on the details from the oral histories you’re hearing in this episode to write her novel. 

Jennifer Egan One thing that was so striking was that, you know, there were as many points of view here as there were people who converged there. I mean, it was a really eclectic environment in which people were thrown together with other people of different cultures and backgrounds and ethnicities, in many cases for the first time, because this was New York of of neighborhoods that were often very divided ethnically. I mean, sometimes one half of a block would be Irish and the other half Italian. So all Catholic. But, you know, but not really mingling. So there were these real differences still to some degree. And yet at the Navy Yard, people were thrown together. 

Adwoa Adusei The Navy Yard has a long history of ship building in times of war and in times of peace. In the early 1800s, the Brooklyn Navy Yard was among the first five naval yards built in the newly independent United States. But, for the majority of its history, the Navy Yard was predominantly the domain of  white men. It wasn’t until the Fair Employment Practices Act of 1941 that African-Americans were employed at the Navy Yard at all, and only in apprentice or assistant roles, jobs that were lower paid than their white counterparts. 

Jennifer Egan What was the racial mix of women in your shop? Were there many Black women there?

Ida Pollack There were Black women.

Sylvia Everitt There were a good number. I don't know how many, but there were a good number.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras That’s Jennifer Egan, speaking to Ida Pollack and Sylvia Honiman Everitt in 2008. Ida and Sylvia both became welders at the Navy Yard after an intensive six-week training course. 

Jennifer Egan And was the feeling among you — what was it like? Was it comfortable?

Ida Pollack It was comfortable.

Sylvia Everitt Well, this one woman that worked near me, we became very friendly. She was a lovely woman. … and we went out and did things together. So, I'm saying there was — there must have been more of that.

Adwoa Adusei In another oral history, Egan interviewed Lucille Ford, who at the time was Lucille Butler, an African-American woman from the Bronx who worked first as a messenger and then as a clerical typist. She recalls commuting with a white woman who also worked at the Navy Yard. 

Jennifer Egan So, the girl that you went to the Navy Yard with also lived in the Bronx.

Lucille Ford Yes. In the higher part of the Bronx, and that's why she was a -- she was going horseback riding all the time, and then I got interested in horseback riding and I started going with her group.

Jennifer Egan And was that before you worked at the Navy Yard?

Lucille Ford No, it was while —

Jennifer Egan Oh while, okay.

Lucille Ford — because I saw her every day. She was married already.

Jennifer Egan So she got a job also?

Lucille Ford Yes.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Cross cultural exchanges like these might seem trivial today, but as Egan described, for many people at the time this was a huge shift from the status quo before the war. And when you think of the heightened level of xenophobia and war anxiety, it does seem like quite a feat for women of different racial backgrounds to become friends while working.

Adwoa Adusei But, it was not always rosy or riveting at the Navy Yard. The increase in workforce highlighted many social iniquities. Beyond the extremely long hours to meet production demand or the number of female-friendly bathrooms, there was also a pay disparity between men and women, and between whites and non-whites.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Factors such as gender, race, and education all played a role in how much the new workforce was paid in comparison to their white male counterparts. Women and African Americans were called apprentices, and as such could not initially join the union to fight for pay increases. 

Adwoa Adusei And for the first time in the Navy Yard history, the number of minorities and women at work made these disparities visible. Petitioning to join the union became a galvanizing opportunity — a different kind of call to arms, or at the very least, a call to strike and picket, for some of the women at the Navy Yard. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Lucille Kolkin was one such woman who was interested in union activities. Kolkin’s letters were the ones that first enchanted Jennifer Egan, and she recounted one particular story from those letters about Lucille’s insistence on equity at work. 

Jennifer Egan She talks about an African-American woman who is planning to quit because she feels so persecuted. I mean, she's a woman and a woman of color and she just feels like she can't, she's practically hopeless. And Lucy's very upset reporting this to Al, and saying that she and some of the other women really tried to talk to her. I think this woman's name was Minnie. And and then in a later letter, she reports that Minnie decided to stay. And Lucy was really happy about that. So she was focused on issues of equity. And a big issue of equity was that women were paid so much less than men at the Navy Yard, and in fact also had lower rankings. They were called helpers at the beginning. And I learned this from the from the oral history interviews and especially Ida and Sylvia, who were Lucy's friends, were very up in arms about this. 

Sylvia Everitt And they gave us a fraction of what the men got.

Ida Pollack Yeah, about half. Yeah. Sixty something cents an hour, wasn't it?

Sylvia Everitt I thought it was less.

Ida Pollack Oh yeah, maybe.

Sylvia Everitt Yeah, like fifty cents. It was terrible.

Ida Pollack So eventually, we got the same.

Sylvia Everitt After a big fight.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras That was Ida Pollack and Syliva Everett, two of Lucille Kolkin’s friends who worked at the Navy Yard with her. They said that by the end of their time, their wages had increased to a dollar and twenty cents an hour, double what they were making when they started.

Ida Pollack [Singing] "Oh, you can't scare me. I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union. Oh, you can't scare me. I'm sticking to the union. I'm sticking to the union till the day I die.”

Krissa Corbett Cavouras It’s important to remember that women who worked in the Navy Yard entered the workforce literally wearing pants for the first time, and in some cases walking in men’s shoes — because proper welding shoes weren’t even made in women’s shoe sizes. So, camaraderie among these women was crucial, despite these hierarchies. 

Daniella Romano What is it? What are the words?

Sylvia Everitt "Oh, you can't" -- it's nothing. It's one sentence. "Oh, you can't scare me. I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union. Oh, you can't scare me. I'm sticking to 127:00the union. I'm sticking to the union till the day I die."

Adwoa Adusei But even unionizing couldn’t keep the women of the Navy Yard in the workforce once the war ended. According to Sylvia and Ida in their 2008 interview, there was always the knowledge that women wouldn’t be working forever.

Sylvia Everitt I don't think there was any question about it. The women went out, plunk! Like that.

[Laughter]

Penny Lathers Did you feel this was temporary all the time that you worked there?

Ida Pollack Yeah. Just for the War.

Penny Lathers So, in your mind, this was not a plan for a career?

Ida Pollack No.

Sylvia Everitt No. We were helping the War, really.

Ida Pollack But one time when I lived up in Troy for a while, there was an ad in the newspaper for a welder. And just for the hell of it, I called. And there was dead silence on the other end.

[Laughter]

Jennifer Egan They weren't interested?

Ida Pollack Nope. They weren't interested.

[Music]

Krissa Corbett Cavouras After the war, the community of women from different backgrounds that had sprung to life at the Navy Yard disappeared. As men returned from the war, women, for the most part, returned home. 

Adwoa Adusei But, women weren’t the only demographic to slowly disappear from the cultural, economic, and work fabric of the Navy Yard in the early 20th century. And this gets us to our next episode in the series. Before World War II, in the neighborhood just outside the dry docks of the Navy Yard, there was a small but vibrant Japanese community. It had the first Japanese YMCA east of the Mississippi.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras This community began with the immigration of Japanese men in the late 1800s and early 1900s, mainly shipyard workers, domestic servants and cooks. One Japanese man ran a popular restaurant that served workers at the shipyard until the 1930s. 

Adwoa Adusei You can almost imagine Lucy and Al dropping in at the Navy Yard restaurant after a ten-hour shift at the Yard.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And in their archives, the NYPL has a menu from that restaurant … we’ll link to it on our show notes page.

Adwoa Adusei But with declining Japanese immigration, because of racist American policies including the 1924 Immigration Act which banned immigrants from Asia and restricted immigration from almost every country outside of Western Europe, the Brooklyn Japanese community began to leave too.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras We’re mentioning this early Japanese-American community in Brooklyn because it’s important to recognize early settlements of Asian and Asian-American immigrants and migrants — they’ve been here, building community, as long as many other ethnic groups, and the histories of their communities are often lost in the stories of who built this borough.

Adwoa Adusei And next week, we’re going to talk about the birth of another Asian community in Brooklyn — Sunset Park’s historic Chinatown.

Tarry Hum I grew up in the neighborhood. My family moved to Sunset Park in 1974. The neighborhood at that time were where my dad was, you know, it was still largely Scandinavian, Irish, Italian. And and I don't think that those neighbors were particularly happy to see Chinese people moving in. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras That’s next time on “Building Brooklyn.”

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei "Building Brooklyn" is a mini-series from Brooklyn Public Library’s Borrowed podcast. It’s produced by Virginia Marshall, with help from Fritzi Bodenheimer, Jennifer Proffitt, Meryl Friedman, and Robin Lester Kenton. This episode was written by me, Adwoa Adusei. Our beta listener on this episode was LaCresha Neal.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Our music composer is Billy Libby. You also heard music from Blue Dot Sessions.

Adwoa Adusei Borrowed is brought to you by Brooklyn Public Library and is hosted by me, and Krissa Corbett Cavouras. You can find a transcript of this episode at our website.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Oral histories on this episode came from our Center for Brooklyn History’s Brooklyn Navy Yard oral history collection, with a special thanks to Amy Lau for her tireless cataloging that made these oral histories accessible, and to Sarah Quick for helping us pull the tape.

Adwoa Adusei Special thanks also to Jennifer Egan, herself a Brooklynite, without whom we wouldn’t have many of the oral histories in the collection. And, we’ll leave you with a call to action from the author herself.

Jennifer Egan Oral histories are just so valuable and amazing. And I now feel that we should all be conducting them informally whenever we can, because they're just ... when when the buzzer sounds and the person isn't here anymore, that opportunity is gone. And there's something so magical about hearing people in their own voices tell these stories. The number one piece of advice I would give just be quiet. 

Adwoa Adusei Hi everyone! A bit of a bonus here. Since we’re the library, we wanted to round out the episode with books! To help us do that, we’re joined by BPL staff members Emily Heath and Nurys Pimentel. Welcome to Borrowed!

Emily Heath It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having us.

Nurys Pimentel Hi, thank you so much to be here today.

Adwoa Adusei So you both are part of BPL's Literary Prize committee this year, and just a bit of background on what Lit Prize is: each year, Brooklyn Public Library, in collaboration with the Brooklyn Eagles, honors outstanding works of nonfiction, fiction and poetry with a prize given in the Fall. The titles are selected by librarians and library staff, and the prize recognizes writing that captures the spirit of Brooklyn. Did I get that right?

Emily Heath Yeah, I believe so.

Adwoa Adusei So, how do you choose books for the long list? 

Nurys Pimentel We work for Brooklyn Public Library, so we have amazing librarians that just read amazing materials all throughout the year, and we all had a submission form that we pretty much submitted titles that we believe fit all the criteria. And then eventually we whittle that down and then we have a bit old long list.

Adwoa Adusei So Nurys, you mentioned criteria. What are the criteria books have to meet to be nominated even for the Lit Prize?

Nurys Pimentel So this year, they wanted a Brooklyn connection, even if the author was from Brooklyn or the story or the characters traveled there one time. But it had to be something that resonated with Brooklyn readers in some way, had to touch us in some way.

Emily Heath About the nonfiction committee. We also looked at books that had like a strong adherence to what we thought of as kind of like Brooklyn community values, like something that was culturally significant. We're also looking for diverse voices, so we're not looking necessarily for the things that are going to be on all the other awards lists we're looking for maybe voices to elevate that maybe aren't featured as prominently on the end of the year lists by all the big prize committees.\

Adwoa Adusei How many books did each of you read for the prize?

Emily Heath I think I've ended up reading about eight books in total. Everyone was supposed to read at least two books, and hopefully three off of that list of twenty-five. After that, we were definitely asked to read three books off of the list of ten and then getting down to the short list, we're hoping to read all of the books that are on the short list.

Nurys Pimentel I ended up reading all the books! [Laughs]

Adwoa Adusei Oh woah! 

Nurys Pimentel I did. I did. There were, the recommendations that everyone had and just the subject. And I just, you know, librarians really know how to pick amazing books, and I was blown away and to sit in these discussions, I also wanted to have a voice and I wanted to give my opinion. And the only way to do that it was to read these books. And the worst thing that happened is that you read an amazing book that five people or six people recommended and maybe the rest didn't like, but at least I was a part of the discussion.

Adwoa Adusei So listeners can read the full list of Literary Prize nominees this year and from years past on our website. But you both have a few favorites to share with us from the long list today. Emily, can we start with you?

Emily Heath Sure. I'm going to talk about a couple of titles. The first one that I loved is New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time by Craig Taylor, who is a Canadian journalist. He is not a native New Yorker, but he came to New York and kind of embedded himself, lived in New York, for several years and interviewed hundreds of New Yorkers on different aspects of their life in the city: housing in New York; how hard it is to find a job; the wealth inequity; the racism that people have encountered; problems with immigration. What he did was excerpt about seventy-fiive of the people that he interviewed in their own words, and he organized it by topic. So, there's a great section on the pandemic that includes the stories of an ICU nurse and a survivor of COVID-19 who had a very close call and was hospitalized. So, he really gets a good cross-section of people of all races, all backgrounds, all levels of wealth and really just does an amazing job bringing to life the magic of all these lived experiences kind of crammed together in a small space. I love books that make me feel like I'm doing something inspiring just by virtue of where I live.

The second book that I wanted to talk about is How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship and Community. This is by Mia Birdsong, who is an activist based in Oakland. So it's not a book about Brooklyn, but it's a book that really reflects the values of Brooklyn because she's talking about community and family and redefining our concept of the American dream. And maybe we need to move our energies away from aspiring to having a traditional nuclear family unit with two parents and 2.5 kids and a picket fence, and instead shift toward developing stronger relationships with our friends and neighbors and communities, not only to lead to more personal happiness, but to help combat the problems of poverty and racism, mental illness, abuses of power by the police and the government. It really inspired me to try to make more connections of this kind and look in places that maybe I haven't looked before, and I feel like it really incorporated to me the spirit of Brooklyn's values. 

Adwoa Adusei Thank you, Emily. Nurys, how about you?

Nurys Pimentel First up is Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters. Amazing book. It is about trans women and their relationship, and unfortunately, due to some violence and, you know, just a love story, just tragic love, one of the partners decides to detransition. And their partner that they are now with, they get pregnant and it's so many emotions. The way that the author is also a trans women, and it comes from experience. It's raw. The writing is exciting. It's tight, and it also sheds light on this community and the things that they really, really go through physically, mentally, emotionally trying to fit into this world and fit into their own community and have these relationships with each other and still trying to find out who they are. And it's a journey, and I have actually never experienced, read or heard of de-transitioning back. And that was amazing to read and so raw. That sometimes this lifestyle, it's too hard. They can't take it even though deep down inside that is who they believe that they are. They can't live outright because society won't let them. And sometimes you have to find a way to survive.

Libertie is the second book that I read that I fell in love with. So, Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge takes place on Reconstruction-era Brooklyn. It's about a young girl named Libertie, and her mom is the doctor in that area of Brooklyn, and her mom also is part of the Underground Railroad, because they are able to slip slaves out from down South and bring them up here and, they have to give them something to make it seem like they died and they're in a casket. So her mom is also an herbologist, and she's able to bring them back when they arrive and her daughter witnesses all of these things, and her mom really is raising her to be a doctor. Her mom wants to open up a doctor's office. Her daughter is going to be her right, her right hand, and we're going to—but Libertie does not want to be a doctor. She doesn't actually know what she wants to do. And this frustrates her mom because she's giving her all the tools that she can have to succeed and survive. And Libertie wants to love and feel and experience other things. And eventually, Libertie falls in love with an apprentice of her mother, who came to study under her, a Haitian doctor. And his goal is to go back to his country and practice medicine, and Libertie goes with them. That is Libertie. It's based on her story and it's beautiful, and it does take place in Brooklyn, an amazing era. And then it goes to Haiti, which you also learn so much about the land and the people and the culture. And it was an amazing read. 

Adwoa Adusei Listeners can check out these titles and more from the 2021 Lit Prize Long List on our website. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras That’s it for this episode. See you next week.

On this episode, you heard music and sound effects from Blue Dot Sessions and BBC Sound Effects Library.

What does the Navy Yard look like today? We sent out a call for Brooklyn teen photographers to go out and take pictures of the four neighborhoods in our "Building Brooklyn" mini-series. Ona Brandstein-Ruiz's photo won the category for the Navy Yard.

About the photo, from Ona Brandstein-Ruiz, 12: I have lived in Brooklyn my entire life and love it very much. I only two years ago moved to the Navy Yards, and it has made a great home for me and my family! I have taken so many photos of my beautiful view but thought that this would be a good one to share. It really represents my home.