A Shuttered Army Base that Hosted an EOD Unit Will Soon Be a Netflix Studio

Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, had a long and respected history as a U.S. Army base before the Pentagon closed the facility in 2005. Now it's getting a new life after Netflix bought the site and plans to build an $850 million production hub just an hour outside of New York City.

Netflix purchased the 293-acre parcel for $55 million and plans to build 12 soundstages, ancillary production facilities and a backlot.

The base was opened as an officer training facility called Camp Alfred Vail in 1917 during World War I and became home to the Army Signal Corps School in 1919. In 1925, the base was renamed Fort Monmouth in honor of the soldiers who died at the Battle of Monmouth during the Revolutionary War.

Fort Monmouth gained notoriety after World War II during the trial of Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Julius had worked as a radar inspector at the base during 1942 and 1943, and it was then he was believed to have stolen the atomic plans that he passed along to the USSR. The Rosenbergs were convicted on federal espionage charges and executed in 1953.

The Signal Corps moved to Fort Gordon, Georgia, in the 1970s, and the base became home to development for the C4ISR program.The acronym stands for Command, Control, Communications, Computers (C4) Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR).

Before the 2005 closure, Fort Monmouth was also home to the 754th Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit, which gave support to state and federal authorities in New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine and Pennsylvania.

After nearly two decades of wrangling about the site's future, Netflix has stepped in with an investment that will bring the base back to life as a working facility.

While the new studio will greatly expand the production footprint in the metropolitan New York area, the new Netflix facility will be roughly the same size as Tyler Perry Studios in metro Atlanta and half the size of Georgia's Trilith Studios, which hosts many Marvel movie and television series productions. And that's just two of the dozens of facilities built in the area to take advantage of production tax credits. Netflix is giving New York a boost, but the region has a long way to go to catch up to the competition.

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