 New York City, welcome to the Get Stuffed Done cast. Let's get to it. Wow, this is really exciting. This is Mayor Eric Adams, and I'm so excited to welcome you back to the 11th episode of the Get Stuffed Done cast. While I talk to New Yorkers who are getting stuff done in our city, a New York city isn't coming back, I like to say, New York is back. And our hotels are full, Broadway is thriving, and our business centers are booming again. But at the heart of it is really innovation. Innovators and tech entrepreneurs are tearing up their flight ticket to San Francisco. They're saying to heck with Miami, they want to be here in NYC. No small town blues here. You know, we're big thinkers and we have big thoughts as we move forward. I'm really excited today. One of our first hires was an amazing, amazing woman, Lindsay Green. She's now the president and CEO of Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation. And that is what we're going to be talking about here on episode 11. Lindsay, welcome. Thank you, Mayor Adams. Thank you for having me. This is exciting. It's my first podcast. Tell me on the road, how did you get here? Were you both in private and public? I was. How did you get here? How did you get to be the CEO of some place like the Navy Yard? So when I was growing up, I was an observer kid. I was a little bit of a latchkey kid. I was the only child of a single mother. So my mom was busy working in the hospital and I was just observing all the time. And I was growing up in DC and I was always looking around, trying to figure out what did it mean that my neighborhood wasn't as good as some of the other places we visit or neighborhoods where the hospital was or where I ended up going to prep school. And so I had this interest in urban development but I didn't know those words as a kid and didn't really know what it meant. And I just decided, okay, I want to learn as much as I can. I kind of was into math and science and then figured out maybe I should be in business. I didn't know what it meant. I just thought it meant- When did that thought come? That thought came when in high school. Elementary school. Elementary. I just, I don't know. I guess I watched enough TV, just help you with briefcases and navy suits and said, okay, I want to do that. I was like saying, maybe I play with marbles and you talk about maybe you be in business. You know, my, I was fortunate. My mother would always used to tell me that my grandfather was very good with money and she hoped that I would pick that up in a way she hadn't. And so it was kind of always this germ in my head of make money but be smart with it. Right, right. And what did your mom do? She, she started off as a lab technician in hospital labs and then got into information systems in hospitals mostly cause they were always breaking in the 80s. She went to grad school when I was in high school and got her master's. Love it, love it, love it. So I got to go to her graduate from before she went to mine which was fun. And that's what she still does today helping digitize our healthcare system. Your family roots- In DC. In DC. In Washington. In Washington DC. My son went to school in Washington. He went to American university. Yeah. Yeah, that was right near where I went to high school. Every time I called him he was on Howie campus. I said, you don't, you don't go to Howie. Go to American university. Hey, you know, we probably wanted to find the people of color. The food was a little more interesting down by Howard. So. Did you go to college in DC? No, I did not. I actually was fortunate enough to get a scholarship to go to Harvard. Oh, wow. Wow, love it, love it. And your studies there. I was studying economics. I was like, I don't know what business is, but it seems like I got to study economics first. And so that's what I did. And I, from there, figured out that I could get a job on Wall Street. And that would be a good way to get foundational business skills. Again, I didn't know what I wanted to do in business. And I got a really foundational training. And that was when I moved to New York and basically didn't leave. I fell in love with the city. Love it. What year are we talking about? 2003 was when I moved here. And a degree in economics normally takes you on what pathway? That's a very interesting question. It's not as practical a degree as you might think. It's a liberal arts education. Okay, okay. You know what I mean? So it's, if you want to go directly into a high paying job other than Wall Street, you're still just basically going as somebody who's smart and learns fast. It doesn't prepare you for much directly beyond trying to be a professor. I think one of the underestimated degrees, I believe, is liberal arts. I wish I would have been a liberal arts. They give you a well-rounded education. It does. You know? It helps you figure out how to think and pick up things. Without a doubt. How did economics, the degree, help you first in private industry and then your transformation into public? Well, it gave me a comfort in very high performing spaces. And coming as a kid from DC and getting on the floor of an investment bank and seeing not the many people who look like me who weren't executive assistants, it could be really intimidating, but that was the demographics of my department in college. And it was, if I tried to go to the investment club meetings to prepare myself, that was the demographic of what I was walking into. So it gave me a comfort with numbers. It gave me a comfort with spreadsheets and just helped give me the confidence that I could do the subject matter, even if the sort of cultural social elements were a big adjustment. That's part of the game. Part of the game is confidence. It is. A huge part of the game is confidence. And so having that degree and then going into the private sector just prepared me for a lot of, I guess in many ways you can say showed me how the world works in the elite circles. And then when I was there, I started to see, well, it doesn't work the way for everybody. Right, right, right, right. Particularly people that look like me. And so how do I figure out, get back to that connectivity to figure out how I helped change that? I managed to get from investment banking over to real estate. And that was sort of my through line to get me into public service. I left investment banking, went to graduate school, got into food, actually. My favorite topic. I know. And because I got interested in trying to help figure out how people could eat better and do it more affordably. It's a similar journey you went on. When I was working on Wall Street, I was living a really unhealthy life. And I was trying to figure out how to change that. I got a trainer, I got a nutritionist and all this stuff. So I said, okay, why don't I try to work in this industry? There are people that know how to do healthy food. Well, like the whole foods of the world, the fresh directs of the world, but they don't know how to do that in a way that's accessible to everybody. That's still a journey we're on as an industry. Right, right, right. No, so true, so true. But from there, I needed a sort of a break from that crew. And I was like, I'm not getting to the affordability aspect. And I happened to have the chance to come work as a policy advisor and work on small business initiatives after my time in the food world. And that was 2015. And I think that was the service ever since. Policy advisor for who? For Deputy Mayor Lucia Glenn. Okay, okay. Yeah. It's good, good stuff, good stuff, you know? And I got the bug. There's so much that the city of New York does or makes possible for people that you don't appreciate as a regular citizen off the street. Right, right. And it was a real education and it gave me a sense of pride and responsibility, which is why I stick with it. And I'm grateful to you and Deputy Mayor Taurus Springer for giving me the chance to work at the Navy Yard. Yeah, no, Deputy Mayor Taurus Springer loves you. She was like, I got the right person, you know? She was very good to me when she and I were together in the last administration. So I'm proud to serve with her. So when you look at the Navy Yard, you know, a lot of people don't know the history of the Navy Yard. They do not. You know, give us like that 30 second history that people don't know about the Navy Yard. So it dates back to the 1800s, actually. And it was a place where the Navy built several ships. And really it was a home base of repair and innovation for the Navy for a long time. Some of the very first new technology ships were built at the Navy Yard. The Navy's first steam engine was put into service at the Navy Yard. The first diesel engine was put into service at the Navy Yard. Some of the first emergency, like if you have to evacuate a submarine and you need a waterproof mask or breathing device, they invented that and prototype it at the Navy Yard. And so that's a really nice continuity point for what we do now. It's a place where you're in a big setting, you're close to a lot of people and you try stuff out and it goes out and graduates and works in the rest of the world. And that cross-pollination of ideas, you know, really help people to work in like groups and these communities, you know? Is that something that you attempt to foster and encourage people to do? Absolutely. You know, one of the other continuity points from the history with the Navy is that it was, it used its vantage point at the peak of World War II, especially to employ a lot of women and a lot of black Americans working for the Navy at the time. And we did not do a good job of maintaining the diversity of that workforce in the decades since. But that's why the Navy Yard has always been so important as a center of employment because it was that at its peak when 70,000 people worked there when the Navy was running. 17,000? 70,000 people worked at the Navy Yard in the 1940s. It was that busy. So what happened? The war ended or there was a change? The war ended, we were piloting, the Navy was piloting some new wood frame construction and just there was an unfortunate fire and kind of gave the shipbuilding area a bad rap. But really what it was, it was two things. The Navy wanted to fully privatize shipbuilding and go to the shipyards principally around the Gulf which is where it still is today. And it wanted to, the size of the ships got too big to fit under the Brooklyn Bridge. This is a real issue. They built the first antenna that could basically like detach and like lean to the side to go under the bridge. But that just got too difficult to maintain. But even that challenge brought innovation. It did. It did. We have a nice photo of a like a giant radio antenna just like doing a little lean back. I'm trying to go under the Brooklyn Bridge. But so they do commissioned it in the 60s and it didn't really get a lot of purpose until the late 70s when Edgecotch created the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation and it was decades of just at that point a lot of the buildings had been vacant for multiple decades and it's been a very long deliberate journey of putting city money into the buildings to bring it back to life. How many firms you have there now? We have over 550 firms there now. Wow, number of employees? They employ upwards of 11,000 people. Are you seeing a diversity sort of coming back? It is coming back. A lot of the people who work at the Navy Yard that is majority people of color. So we have made good on that commitment to the local community and it's a core part of our purpose and mission to connect our local communities to those jobs. We have an employment center on site we always have to connect people to jobs and we also are trying to train them for what manufacturing jobs of the future look like. And the piece we've started to focus on a lot since I've been there is really trying to recruit businesses owned by people of color and by women and persons with disabilities so that the diversity isn't just in the rank and file but it's in the people in charge as well. Now how do you do that? Because space could be expensive. How do you motivate people coming in, break up the space, creating these smaller space? How is that done? Is that on your radar? It is on our radar and that's part of what we use our city capital that you and the budget director help grant us to make some of those smaller spaces more affordable pre-build them to a degree so that particularly black and brown old firms can come in and basically just bring their equipment and not have to manage a construction project at the same time. And we make the rent more affordable for people that are really on mission. That's like, it's very basic but at the end of the day at our most basic incarnation we're a landlord and if we're gonna do things to support and advance our mission there's a range of what people pay. The greatest prophet of our time said the rent is too damn high. Yes, yes, I miss him. And it is but not at the Navy yard. I love it, love it. I was one of the first believers in some of that technology innovation, like New Lab. Yes. I love New Lab and the whole concept of people coming in and sharing this space, learning new ideas. Are there any new cutting edge innovations that are happening there that are not happening across the country? I think so. That's part of the science of the Navy yard and New Lab has been a great partner for us in helping raise awareness of the possibility of manufacturing and how different it looks now. Interesting. The Steam Center, another one of your great projects. The kids there see robotic arms being built that are going on the Mars rover and at the same time they know how to make a kombucha. That's not that funky. And they see everything in between. They see medical devices. They built their own video games and they're using the same equipment that you see inside places like New Lab. We have a company that has grown out of New Lab as many have that is literally trying to make hydrogen fuel cells accessible for heavy equipment. They're like mayors or some big maritime company says I cannot put this many batteries on a ship, on a container ship. I can't have an electric container ship with a whole bunch of batteries. I have to have room for containers and they're built with fuels. So we don't wanna transport this many thousands of liters of hydrogen. What else can we do? So this company called Amagi, they built a proprietary reactor that takes the hydrogen out of ammonia, which is less explosive and less dangerous and more efficient by volume. And that's who their customer base is. It's truckers. It's heavy farm equipment. We've got a tricked out tractor trailer and a tricked out actual John Deere tractor. And hopefully I'm gonna get them to bring the boat here when they finish converting it, but. And you have a large 3D printer there and I remove farm shelf. I actually, as the board president, we purchased a few of the farm shelves of growing apparatus and we brought it to a school, Democracy Academy. Yeah, Democracy Prep, amazing. We have a lot of that there. We have the rooftop farm, obviously. We have a lot of indoor farming technology companies. Pretty much anybody that makes anything, there's some version of it happening at the Navy Yard. And that's just a wonderful thing to know and capture. You know, the beauty is that I was just reading that we surpassed San Francisco in startups, early stage startups. And I know it has a lot to do with the energy that's over at the Navy Yard because especially Brooklyn, Brooklyn has become the startup capital. And we're seeing a lot of those locations go from a smaller space to a larger space. How are you able to accommodate those who scale up? Well, that's literally always, that's some of the Tetris that we do. We're always, one of the companies that was visiting today helped. They started off in new lab. They grew into one space and halfway through their design phase, they said, I think we need three times as much space. And so our leasing department went to the people who were gonna be next to them and said, how about we move you over here? You know, this space is also ready built out. And we just, we get to know everybody individually and that's part of why we're able to do what we do. And we always have some space vacant and we're gonna be building new eventually. Love it, love it. I'm really excited about the biotech stuff. Yes. With new lab. Can we go into that just a little? Yeah, absolutely. So what's great about the Center for Planetary Health and what will happen there is that it's really taking biotech and moving it out of just dealing with people's health in terms of producing pharmaceuticals and taking that into other spaces like devices and taking it into fashion and taking it into food. We have companies that I think I showed you one of the last times you were here that are making leather out of seashells. That was so cool. That was so cool, right? And somebody else making fabric out of sugar. And we have a dozen companies doing those different things. And a lot of the wearable health items that are coming out. Yes, absolutely. That's gonna be in one of the companies I was with today called 10X Beta where they're taking a device and connecting it to a personal device. Love it, love it. Do you do any events where you bring in VCs to look at some of the innovation with those who want to? We do a bit of, new lab does a bit of that with their membership. And we're gonna start doing that with the Navy Yard as a whole. That's one of the other things we start to do for our tenants is trying to build community among them so that they know who each other are and they know how to do business with each other, how they can help each other. That's a key part of the value we need to add along with our workforce efforts. I've been in the Navy Yards so many times, 300 acres, and every time I go in, I get lost. You see some different. Okay, we're fixing the signs. Later this year, we're gonna be fixing the signs. We have to work on lighting, but we'll get there. I get lost, you know, all the time. But you know that's on purpose because the Navy didn't want the numbers to make sense in case they got found out by other countries, militaries. They wanted you to get lost. We have finally gotten to the point where we know how to renumber the buildings and we're gonna do that this year. You gotta get some type of sequence, you know. And the people at the front gate, they're very kind, but they remind me of my uncle down south. Go there, turn right, look for the blue barn, you know. Turn right at this big tree. Yes, our security guards are very, very well trained in de-escalation and helping people not get lost, but we do not make their job easy. But listen, I am really excited. Some great things are happening. You know, you crashed the glass ceiling. Thank you. And I think that there's, you know, you're gonna bring that energy and that thoughtfulness to make sure that we use the Navy Yard to deal with the battles that we have in front of us around climate, health, innovation. Yes, that's our future. Right, it really is, really is. Trying to help solve the climate crisis. And anybody that's making a device, whether it's a window unit to put inside NYCHA or a bicycle like the one I own, you can come make it at the Navy Yard. We'll make room for you. I was inspired by something you said about with the steam center. We should encourage more and more children to come in and walk through and see the possibilities. Yeah, we do do that. We just started up our school tours again this spring. Nice, okay. The sweet spot is middle school. We're developing a program with a couple of learning tours this year for elementary students just to expose the kids so they can see what the future looks like. Love it, love it, love it. Really excited, you know, the president and CEO of Brooklyn Navy Yards, Sister Green, thank you for coming in. Thank you, sir. Pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. And this is the information I wanted to share today. I hope to see you for another episode of Get Stuffed, Done, Cash.