Description
Fort Greene is a Brooklyn neighborhood of tree-lined streets and elegant 19th-century brownstones, between Downtown Brooklyn and the Navy Yard. It is worth the trip for its hilltop park, its houses and the stages of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Fort Greene Park, laid out by Olmsted and Vaux, the designers of Central Park, climbs to the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument: a 45-meter granite column from 1908 above a crypt for the 11,500 Americans who died on British prison ships during the Revolutionary War.
Down the hill stand the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in its 1908 building, and the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, for over 80 years the tallest building in Brooklyn.
The hill was fortified in the Revolution, and the park exists partly thanks to Walt Whitman, who campaigned for it as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Later, Richard Wright wrote Native Son on Carlton Avenue.
Fort Greene Park, laid out by Olmsted and Vaux, the designers of Central Park, climbs to the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument: a 45-meter granite column from 1908 above a crypt for the 11,500 Americans who died on British prison ships during the Revolutionary War.
Down the hill stand the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in its 1908 building, and the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, for over 80 years the tallest building in Brooklyn.
The hill was fortified in the Revolution, and the park exists partly thanks to Walt Whitman, who campaigned for it as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Later, Richard Wright wrote Native Son on Carlton Avenue.