New York City Sets Up Production Line for Gowns at Brooklyn Navy Yard
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New York City has set up a production line at the Brooklyn Navy Yard to make surgical gowns for health-care workers. Crye Precision, a design and manufacturing firm with its headquarters in the Navy Yard, is partnering with Lafayette 148 and other sewing shops on the initiative.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who visited the facility on Monday morning, projected that over 300,000 gowns will be produced by the end of April by factories across the city. Public hospitals have at least a week’s worth of gowns to protect workers, but private hospitals and nursing homes are running low, de Blasio said.
“New Yorkers band together in a crisis — and this production line is exactly the kind of solidarity that will get us through this. Day by day, we are assessing what we need to keep our frontline workers safe — and the ability to produce protective equipment here in New York City is critical,” he said.
Overall, the city has received more than 2,000 responses from New York City-based companies to its call for local production.
Last week, Adafruit, a Manhattan-based company that makes machine components; Makerspace NYC, a community workspace for industrial manufacturing at Brooklyn Army Terminal; Bednark Studio, a custom fabrication company at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; and Duggal Digital Solutions, a custom printing company, produced and distributed 127,000 face shields to the Department of Health. Over the next three months, local industrial firms will manufacture up to 1.5 million face shields.
Deirdre Quinn, cofounder and chief executive officer of Lafayette 148, said her company developed patterns over the weekend, digitized them and set out to create the gowns. “It’s not exactly fashion, but it’s definitely needed. And it’s what we want to do,” she said.
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