When a vehicle moves around in an automotive manufacturing plant shipment yard, the RFID system keeps track of the vehicle's location in near real-time until it is shipped to a dealer.
In a city that has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs, the Navy Yard has been an industrial bulwark resisting the evolution to a service and retail economy.
Designers could do only part of the process - but connecting designers to manufacturing in their back yard was a business worth building, bringing manufacturing home.
It is one of several projects that developers and others are weighing for the manufacturing district and rail yards on Manhattan's far west side.
These yards have produced state-of-the-art work in the HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales aircraft carriers and the manufacturing in their cavernous yards is an impressive site to behold.
The proposal by Cablevision Systems, owner of the two New York teams, is only the latest example of how real estate developers and team owners are hungrily making plans for the manufacturing district and rail yards on the far West Side of Manhattan, as they have done for nearly 80 years, ever since Col. Jacob Ruppert sought unsuccessfully to build a stadium for the Yankees there.
That's up from 3,600 in 2001, but it is a far cry from the 70,000 men who once built ships during the Navy Yard's muscular manufacturing heyday.
Uchitelle notes that "all of the Tums antacid tablets sold in the Western hemisphere" are still made in a single block of downtown St . Louis today, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a subsidized manufacturing district in New York City which has received about a quarter of a billion dollars in public money, is home to dozens of urban factories.
Manufacturing plants and the US Navy Yard employed tens of thousands of industrial workers along the rivers, and the city was also a center of finance and publishing, with major universities.
It is equally evident that there is room for quality development around rail yards, in old manufacturing areas and in underused waterfront districts.
