No Place Like Hanson Place!!
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Our Community - Fort Greene
Perhaps about 800 A.D. a gradual movement of Native Americans advanced from the Delaware area into lower New York, ultimately settling as part of the Canarsie tribe among 13 tribes of the Algonquin Nation. While it is believed that in 1524 the explorer, Giovanni da Verrazzano, entered New York Harbor, the English navigator, Henry Hudson, aboard the Half Moon, did sail farther into the North River (now Hudson) in 1609. In the employ of the Dutch East India Company, he sought an imagined Northwest Passage to the Far East. The Dutch sent out merchants the following year to trade for furs with the Indians, and soon claimed this outpost as New Amsterdam. In Brooklyn, the first of several Dutch purchases of land from the Indians began in 1636, followed in a year by the sale of land to Joris Janssen de Rapelje, a Walloon (now called a Belgian), who secured 335 acres around Wallabout Bay, or Waalbogt. That bay is now the Navy Yard.Breuckelen
By 1646, five early Dutch towns on western Long Island united as one, called Breuckelen for its namesake near Amsterdam, Holland. The town’s first Italian was Peter Caesar Alberti who started a tobacco plantation near the bay in Fort Greene in 1649, but was killed six years later by the native people. Other plots of land became farms for such families as the Jacksons, Ryersons and van Couwenhovens. The Dutch yielded New Netherlands to British sovereignty in 1664, under the Duke of York, but growth of Brooklyn’s population was very slow—by 1698 there were 509 people, including 65 slaves, and at the start of the War of Independence in 1775, there were only 3,500.
When British forces anchored in the Narrows near Gravesend in 1776, the American Patriots had already created a redoubt, Fort Putnam, on the hillock that is now Fort Greene Park—renamed later in honor of Gen. Nathaniel Greene, one of Washington’s top aides. But vastly outnumbered by the British and Hessian troops, the Patriots had to retreat from the southern reaches of Brooklyn toward Fort Greene, and on the night of August 29, 1776, under a cover of rain and fog, Gen. Washington ordered all his men evacuated by small boats to Manhattan. It was a defeat, yet a victory by saving the army for another day—and ultimate triumph.
Meantime, the British commanded all New York citizens to swear allegiance to the Crown, or face imprisonment aboard derelict old boats moored in Wallabout Bay. Some 11,500 of those prisoners, primarily sailors including African Americans and a few nationals of other countries, and at least one woman who bore a son on board, died of starvation or pestilence. Their bodies were heaved overboard, either for shallow burial in the sands, or simply to wash up on shore. By 1806 the citizens of Fort Greene began collecting those remains for interment in a small crypt near the western edge of the Navy Yard.
Robert Fulton’s steamboat of 1814, the Nassau, gave a new boost to Fort Greene, and, later on, horse-drawn cars to Fulton Ferry made daily commutes to Manhattan quite feasible. By 1846 the poet Walt Whitman called for a public park to include the hill where Fort Putnam had been, and to give it the new name of Washington Park. More than a quarter of a century afterward, the Prison Ship Martyrs’ remains were moved into a permanent crypt in this hilly area that had been designed by the famous park planners, William Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Twenty slate coffins are within the crypt, a few of them purposely left empty should more bones ever be found. Surmounting the chamber under the park’s broad granite stairway is an arched ceiling composed of Guastavino tiles. To add to their honor, a 145-foot tall Doric column Martyrs Monument, designed by Stanford White, was erected and dedicated by President-elect Wm. Howard Taft in 1908.
Fort Greene Grows Up
Only a few farmhouses had been built in the area in the 1840s, but the 1850s saw a real estate boom that required new streets to be laid out. Developers seized on the idea of spiffy London names to add cachet, with Fort Greene streets dubbed as Portland, Oxford, and Cumberland. Gas lighting lit homes, water lines as well as flush toilets and sewers eliminated privies, and hammers pounded incessantly into the 1860s. Baby buggies also abounded. Grand Italianate row houses sprang up on South Portland Avenue, bearing a flourish of ornamental doorway pediments and bracketed cornices, all in high relief, and inspired by old palaces in Italy. These houses were followed in the next decade by the stylized geometric order of the English architect, Charles Eastlake. Their ornamentation is simplified and incised in the stone, with angularly framed doorways and windows. A few examples of the Eastlake style are in South Oxford Street.Civil War
Lincoln’s election in 1860 was soon followed by South Carolina’s secession from the Union, and the Civil War began. Although they had not given their full vote to Lincoln, the people of Fort Greene were strongly pro-Union and in favor of abolition. New York State had outlawed slavery in 1827. Brooklyn’s first “Coloured” school, where the Walt Whitman Houses are today, opened 20 years later. Perhaps half of Brooklyn’s African Americans of that period lived in the Fort Greene-to-Brooklyn City Hall section. Labor competition for jobs at the Navy Yard, however, grew fierce during the Civil War and the Draft Riots by hooligans, often pitted against skilled black workers, grew ugly.
Yet black accomplishment could not be denied. The principal of P.S. 67 in 1863 was African American, and by 1882 Dr. Phillip A. White became the first black member of Brooklyn’s Board of Education. The village of Weeksville near Schenectady Avenue, where some Fort Greene blacks relocated, also produced the first female African American physician and the first black police officer in New York.
During the Civil War itself, the 14th Infantry Regiment of Fort Greene distinguished itself heroically. Notably at Gettysburg under the command of a Fulton Street office manager, Gen. Edward B. Fowler, the 14th virtually turned the tide of the Civil War to the Union’s favor. Men of this regiment wore red flannel trousers, and they fought so fiercely that the Confederates referred to them as Red Legged Devils. Gen. Fowler’s statue now stands at the apex of Fulton Street and Lafayette Avenue.The 20th Century
Most construction in Fort Greene was completed by the end of the 1890s. Only five superb buildings from the first third of the 20th Century were added: the HSBC (Williamsburg) Bank, Hanson Place Central Methodist Church, Queen of All Saints RC Church, the Masonic Temple and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar opened the Academy in 1908 in a performance of Charles Gounod’s Faust.In the 1920s-40s Fort Greene was a brightly lit Hollywood showcase with numerous cinemas, including the Paramount from 1928 which had a great Wurlitzer organ, still in place. On the side of Paramount along DeKalb Avenue (now the Long Island University gymnasium) there remains a palimpsest of a sign advertising the Paramount Theatre. Marianne Moore, the poet, lived in Cumberland Street during this period, and she was a big fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. She once wrote that “Baseball is like writing, and writing is exciting.” Richard Wright’s celebrated novel, Native Son, was also written in Fort Greene when the author lived in Carlton Avenue.
By the mid-1950s Fort Greene was in serious decline, a product of the earlier Depression and the chopping up of grand homes into rooming house for Navy Yard workers during World War II. Many homes became derelict or abandoned, their windows and roofs totally gone; dirty mattresses and trash in the yards. A growing surge of newcomers began reclaiming these grand houses in the 1960s and a desire for Historic District designation took root. The movement was led by the late Mr. Herbert Scott Gibson, an African American who lived in the street called Washington Park. He organized the Fort Greene Landmarks Preservation Committee whose efforts led to success. In 1978 the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission designated both the Fort Greene and BAM Historic Districts. In order to incorporate as a non-profit, the earlier committee obtained IRS approval in 1994 as the Fort Greene Association, Inc.
A Bright Future
In the 21st Century Fort Greene embraces high hope as a vital part of downtown Brooklyn. A rising crest of talented young artists and professionals has taken residence here. Creative shops and restaurants now line the avenues. Better still, innovation and culture is more assured with the arrival of the Mark Morris Dance Group, a new High School of the Arts that includes courses in preservation, a revitalized Brooklyn Music School, 651 Arts that advances African American performing arts, the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York, and of course the Brooklyn Academy of Music—all these are enviable assets for Fort Greene’s future. More promises are still unfolding with the Brooklyn Academy of Music Local Development Corporation that seeks to build a new Visual and Performing Arts Library and other new vehicles of culture.Historical Landmarks
The Fort Greene Park District, the area around Myrtle Avenue and Cumberland Street, was a silk stocking district in the 1890's. Clinton Avenue was then a fashionable address. Most of the old residences are still standing, but have been converted in recent years into rooming houses and furnished apartments. At the southern end of the neighborhood are several apartment hotels, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Long Island Railroad station. Close at hand along Atlantic Avenue are several central freight depots and large reshipping warehouses.
The Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument in Fort Greene Park, Myrtle Avenue and Cumberland Street, designed by Stanford White and dedicated in 1908, rises high above the surrounding plateau and is reached from the street level by a 100-foot-wide stone stairway broken into three flights. The 145-foot fluted granite shaft, supporting a large bronze urn, commemorates the 11,000 patriots who died aboard British prison ships in Wallabout Bay on the site of the Navy Yard during the Revolutionary War. The maltreatment of these prisoners on such infamous hulks as the Jersey and the Whitby, commanded by the notorious Provost Marshal Cunningham, is recognized as a black mark in British colonial history. Prisoners died from starvation and disease, flogging and other forms of violence, and were buried, usually by their fellow prisoners, in the sands of the bay. Remains of these bodies, found from time to time, were placed in the monument's crypt.
During the Revolution the park site was occupied by Fort Putnam, one of the chain of forts used by Washington in the Battle of Long Island A garrison was stationed there from 1812 to 1815 and the fort renamed for General Greene. The name was changed to Washington Park in 1847 and some time later to Fort Greene Park.
The Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lafayette Avenue and Ashland Place, is the borough's equivalent of Carnegie Hall. Concerts, recitals, operas, and other musical programs are presented here by the most eminent artists; and lectures are given by noted authors and other personages.
The building was completed in 1908 from plans by Herts and Tallant. Facilities include an opera house seating 2,200, a music hall seating 1,400, a lecture hall with a capacity of 500, and a ballroom accommodating 1,000. Large arched windows in the main facade admirably illuminate the great lounge on the second story.
The Williamsburg Savings Bank Building, 1 Hanson Place opposite the Long Island Railroad station, is the tallest structure Brooklyn, 512 feet in height, surmounted by a slim gold-domed tower, which is illuminated at night. The tower clock with its four faces each twenty-seven feet in diameter, is a familiar skymark. The building each completed m 1929 from plans by Halsey, McCormick, and Helmer. The banking room is about sixty-three feet high.
The Long Island Railroad Station, Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, is used by more than twenty million passengers annually. An average of 133 trains daily enter the station, a low red-brick building which also provides commuters with direct access to the Atlantic Avenue stations of the BMT and IRT subways. The Long Island Railroad, begun in 1834 when it took over the Brooklyn and Jamaica Railroad (1832), is a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
The African-American Contribution to Fort Greene
Among the important physical, cultural and historical assets of Fort Greene are its importance as:- Brooklyn's earliest Black community, predating the establishment of Weeksville which later became Bedford Stuyvesant,
- The place where many important historical institutions were founded and this includes Brooklyn's oldest Black churches, and active abolition movement, and the Lincoln Settlement, one of the first settlement houses for African Americans,
- The location of one of New York's most extensive underground railroad networks,
- The location of one of the first and oldest business districts in the borough including many successful Black businesses at the turn of the century, and
- Home to a number of outstanding African American professional men and women such as Dr. Susan Smith McKinney, the first Black woman medical school graduate in the state who founded a number of important community institutions such as the first Homeopathic Hospital for Women and Children and the Brooklyn Home for the Aged (Colored).