Prehistory
Bleakly during the last great Ice Age some 12,000 years ago, a crunching slurry of massive granite boulders, rocks and gravelly clay bruised down across the whole northern rim of America from Cape Cod to Washington State. One of the last great puddles of this terminal moraine (final downwash) settled as hillocks and sandy valleys across Long Island, ending at a cleft at what is now the East River. Fort Greene is a part of that “imported” land, stretching from Clinton Hill at the east down to the waterfront and Navy Yard at the west, opposite lower Manhattan.
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
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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
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Only a few farm houses 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, 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 the Eastlake style are in South Oxford Street.
-Civil War
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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
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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 (Williamsburgh) 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.
-Fort Greene Today
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Fort Greene includes two New York City landmarked districts: the Fort Greene Historic District and the Brooklyn Academy of Music Historic District. These two adjacent districts are also listed on the National and New York State Registers of Historic Places.
Fort Greene showcases 19th Century building arts in a progression from early frame houses of the 1840s-50s to brick and brownstone from the Civil War era, and on to the 1880s. Here are some of New York’s finest examples of neo-Grec, Italianate and Second Empire styles, as well as a popular style after the 1870s. It is best seen in South Oxford Street between Lafayette and DeKalb Avenues where homes show the geometrically abstracted design derived from the work of the English architect, Sir Charles Eastlake.
Only five notable examples of later architecture, all from the first quarter of the 20th Century, are the HSBC (Williamsburgh) Bank tower, the Hanson Place United Methodist Church. The Masonic Temple, Queen of All Saints RC Church, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. No less than Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar starred at the opening of the Academy in 1908.
-Fort Greene Park and Fowler Square
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The highest point in Fort Greene is a 30-acre park from which the area takes its name. Fort Greene Park was built on the site of the early Fort Putnam in the War of Independence. It was later called Fort Washington, as well as ultimately being renamed after Gen. Nathaniel Greene, one of George Washington’s key aides. The grounds were designed in 1867 by Olmsted and Vaux, who also created Central and Prospect Parks. In 1908 a Doric column Martyrs Monument was dedicated to approximately 11,500 patriots during the Revolution in the 1770s. These Americans died of illness and starvation aboard British prison ships in Wallabout Bay. Many of their remains are in a crypt below the monument.
A statue of Gen. Edward B. Fowler, leader of the New York 14th Regiment during the Civil War, stands at the junction of Lafayette Avenue and Fulton Street. His troops from the Fort Greene area excelled at the Battle of Gettysburg, halting a brigade of Confederates at great cost in lives. Gen. Fowler’s regiment was so fearsome, the enemy referred to the men as the Red Legged Devils because they ware sprightly red britches.
-A Bright Future
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At the turn into 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.