Fort Greene Park is a relatively small park, situated on a hilltop near downtown Brooklyn.
During the Revolutionary War, Fort Putnam used the summit for its view over the growing city. During the War of 1812, Fort Greene was built to protect the harbor. At 30-acres, the park is roughly the size of two large city blocks. Today, tree-lined paths separate several large lawns, and at the top of a magnificent stairway is a plaza where a towering monument looms over the park. In the middle of those steps is the doorway to a crypt buried deep in the hill.
Washington Park existed on the site before Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux presented a substantial redesign in 1868. It was among their first commissions after the Civil War, and one of the first subsequent parks completed after Central Park’s inception. The locally preferred name for the park was adopted in 1897.
Today, unlike Central or Prospect Park, where it’s clear that many of the visitors are from out-of-town (like myself!), spending time in Fort Greene Park feels as if your submerging yourself in Brooklyn culture. The park doesn’t have a lake or stream, and there aren’t quite enough trees to say there’s a forest, but the whole effect works like the bigger Olmsted and Vaux designs. Its current stewards, Fort Greene Park Conservancy, host cultural activities that reflect the historically creative spirit of the neighborhood.
Every inch of the park is well loved and used by the diverse community that lives nearby. The east side is lined by distinguished brownstones. The blocks to the south are filled with bakeries, restaurants, apartments and schools. The kind of place Bert and Ernie might share an apartment. To the west is Brooklyn’s oldest hospital and a brand new high-rise. To the north are the Walt Whitman Houses, one of the largest housing projects in the city. All residents treat the park as their own. Though small, Fort Greene Park accommodates everyone handsomely.
A basketball court and two playgrounds are tucked in. One lawn has been surrendered to tennis courts so that another can be used for passive leisure activities. On the gentle slopes around the park, I’ve seen multiple multi-generation cookouts, children’s birthday parties, and groups of kids sledding. Beneath the monument, I’ve seen skateboarders use the platform to do tricks, and I’ve watched a group practice Tai Chi in the shade nearby.
I visited Fort Greene Park in all seasons between 2021-2024. Even during the coldest days of winter, I never found myself completely alone, but I also was never treated with anything but friendliness from the strangers I encountered. I happened to be there on September 11, 2021, two decades after the Twin Towers fell, but the post-Labor Day mood was jubilant. Festivities blended together, and although the park was crowded, everyone was relaxed and laughing. Only later did I reflect on the somber anniversary, how resilient the city was, and what the park’s role in the recovery might have been.
Prospect Park, across town, was Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s first commission after the Civil War, but it would take decades for them to complete that landscape. When Olmsted returned from California to resume his collaboration with Vaux, both men were uncertain they could make a living as “Landscape Architects” and were hungry for work. So, they took on projects of all sizes. Cities in neighboring states wanted parks (Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Pennsylvania all came knocking), but along with Prospect, the Brooklyn Parks Commissioners had a host of other smaller parks across their city that needed to be designed.
Fort Greene Park, which the partners agreed to take on in 1867, was the first of these additional parks, and it was finished (1870) before the larger ones. As such, it offers a snapshot of the newly revitalized partnership that had fallen apart between the two men during the war. In some ways, similar design details make it feel like a mini-Central Park, but having less space to work with, Olmsted and Vaux made interesting choices to balance competing needs.
The awkward hill in this Brooklyn neighborhood was already used as a public open space before Olmsted and Vaux took the job on. In 1848, it was opened as Washington Park and was well loved. Chief among the advocates for the original park was Walt Whitman, editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. But with only one other park in Brooklyn at the time (City Park, now called Commodore Barry Park), it became overrun. The hillsides had few trees, the paths were poorly lit, and after neglect took hold, it hosted more pickpockets than picnickers. When it rained, it was a mud pile.
Olmsted and Vaux’s redesign introduced their familiar curving paths framing wide lawns, tall stone walls surrounding the park, and wide-open welcoming gates that were available from every direction. But there were substantial differences in Fort Greene from what they were recommending for their bigger parks.
Prior to being involved, there was already a movement to create a proper memorial for Brooklyn’s Revolutionary War casualties. Olmsted and Vaux made the proposed memorial central to their design, adding a wide staircase leading up to its position at the top of the hill. In the middle of the stairs, they designed a crypt for the remains. The plaza at the bottom of the stairs was meant to be used for public meetings and military drills—functions Olmsted later would suggest were in appropriate in a public park.
And, to be clear, in their initial report to the Brooklyn Commission on the Fort Greene project, Olmsted and Vaux made it clear that its small size would effect the final result.
“Owing to the advantages it thus offers of fine prospect and pure air, combined with extended and varied character of surface,” they wrote, “the ground suggests a more complete and interesting arrangement of accommodations for popular recreation than can often be attempted in the public squares of large towns; and yet is is altogether too restricted to be properly laid out as a park.”
Over the course of his career designing parks, Olmsted would develop his definition of a public park in great detail, and it was not unusual for him to refuse a project because he felt the proposed site not suitable to the purpose he felt a park was meant to serve. It’s interesting to me that after only his third park design, Olmsted was already making such distinctions.
(I wonder if he might reconsider its eligibility if he saw Fort Greene now. A key requirement of a suitable space for a proper Olmsted park was whether the landscape architects would be able to create and sustain a sense of wilderness—a world free of buildings. All around Fort Greene, Brooklyn’s built environment looms, but the park itself is so enticing, the city fades into the background once you pass through a gate. Full-grown trees mask the views of the distant harbor and keep visitors present and grounded.)
Olmsted and Vaux’s plan for the Crypt was the only part of the proposed monument complex completed. The financial collapse of 1873 meant that the project was delayed indefinitely, and the accompanying monument would not be built to the next century. Architects McKim, Mead & White won a competition in 1904 for the design. Their plan included the building now used as the visitors center and a dramatic transformation to the plaza and stairs leading to the 149-foot Doric column with a 20-foot tall bronze lantern on top. When first opened, the memorial column had an elevator inside that could bring visitors to a viewing platform at the top. Later, a wooden staircase replaced it. Since the 1930s, the viewing platform has been off-limits to the public, and it’s only accessible via a rusty ladder that climbs up the inside.
The current Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument was erected in 1908. It honors the many who died while imprisoned by the British during the Revolution.
When New York was taken by the British after the Battle of Brooklyn, many of the captured American soldiers were kept on ships in the harbor. Later, civilians, slaves, captured seamen, and anyone the British suspected of a crime were sent to these floating prisons to join what remained of the prisoners of war. One ship that was designed to hold 400 prisoners had over 1,000 crammed on board. There were over 22 such ships in the harbor. Reports were that there were as many as a dozen deaths a day on board. Bodies were buried in shallow graves along the sandy shoreline throughout the war. Decades after the war, skeletons began washing ashore in Brooklyn. Instead of seashells, the beach of Wallabout Bay became covered in human skulls “as thick as pumpkins in an autumn cornfield.”
The crypt holds the remains collected, and it’s estimated what’s entombed could represent as many as 11,000 people. By comparison, between 6 and 8,000 soldiers died on the Revolutionary battlefields.
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