PICS: Cool New Park Opens in Brooklyn Navy Yard, Atop Abandoned Cemetery

• Photos courtesy of the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative

BROOKLYN NAVY YARD, NY — After nearly a century of neglect, the 1.7-acre cemetery turned ballpark turned dirt plot on the eastern edge of the Brooklyn Navy Yard's long-abandoned (but still tour-able) Naval Hospital has been re-introduced to the public as a lush, green park encircled by wooden pathways and dotted with creative seating options. Hoorah!

The Naval Cemetery Landscape, as the new park has been named, is located along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway between Kent and Flushing avenues.

"The new open space reimagines the site as a public place for passive recreation and an immersive experience in native ecology that provides visitors with an escape from the urban environment," the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative said in a press release issued Friday.

One of the park's designers called it "an experience of landscape and planted form that offers retreat, remembrance, and engaged observation while honoring the layered, 200 year history."

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Aesthetically, the park is similar to parts of Brooklyn Bridge Park a couple neighborhoods over. But in terms of history, the Brooklyn Navy Yard's new green space is superior with ease.

Why? It's totally haunted.

That's right: Beneath these wooden pathways and creative seating options is soil that formerly hosted the graves of some 2,000 members of the U.S. Navy, according to park officials.

Their bodies have since been relocated way out east to the Cypress Hills National Cemetery.

However, along the new park's western edge, a mecca of ruin porn still beckons, in the form of Brooklyn's abandoned, 19th century Naval Hospital — home to buildings with names like Surgeon's Residence and Nurses Quarters, now sewn together by a thicket of branches and vines.

Here are a bunch of rad photos of the site, and here's how you can tour it yourself. Or you could just take a peek over the new park fence, we suppose.

Or — if you're really feeling dark — head further west beyond the vines to an (alleged) sweatshop run by the B&H Photo electronics company, as we once did, and try to sneak past the Orthodox gatekeepers and stand witness to the (alleged) horrors within. If only as a reminder that no matter how hip the Brooklyn Navy Yard becomes, not everything here is cool and green and fun.