A recent study of unemployment data by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal research group, shows that the number of workers in manufacturing who are receiving unemployment benefits grew by 11 percent between October 2007 and October 2008, compared with a 67 percent increase in the finance and insurance industries and 56 percent in the construction industry.

“If they’ve been flourishing, they’ll be able to survive,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University who has tracked the rise of the city’s niche manufacturers. “Their competitive advantage is the quality and design of their production.”

That is not to say that all niche manufacturers will avoid the recession or that their prosperity will boost the economy. At least one woodworking company at the Navy Yard has gone out of business. Some businesses there reported that business is not as strong as before. And many face limited growth because there are only so many customers for products like body armor, $6,000 speakers and $3,000 tables.

“There’s a natural limitation to what they do,” said Cliff Waldman, an economist with the Manufacturers Alliance/M.A.P.I., a research organization in Arlington, Va., that is supported by multinational manufacturers. “They have a few people with specialized skills and they service a few markets.”

But it is also clear that smaller manufacturers have been expanding even as the city’s more traditional industrial base has continued to shrink. In Brooklyn, the number of jobs for niche manufacturers, which are not only small but also tend to have local clients, rose by 17 percent between 2001 and 2007, said James Parrott, the chief economist of the Fiscal Policy Institute, quoting numbers from September’s Brooklyn Labor Market Review from the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. In the same period, the number for manufacturers making products for mass markets declined by 48 percent.

Niche manufacturers currently make up a quarter of the more than 25,000 manufacturing jobs in Brooklyn, Mr. Parrott said. No similar statistics were available for the rest of the city, which has a total of more than 92,000 manufacturing workers, he said.