The park on the hill is Brooklyn's first and the streets around it are Italianate rowhouses from the 1850s. Spike Lee has been shooting here since 1985.
What Fort Greene looks like
A park sits at the top of a hill in Brooklyn, and rowhouse streets run down from it. The houses on those streets went up in the 1850s and 1860s, Italianate brick and brownstone with high stoops. More than a thousand of those fronts are still standing. The Fort Greene Historic District was designated a city landmark in 1978 and listed on the National Register in 1983.
The park at the top of the hill is Brooklyn's first, established in 1847 on land that runs to about 30 acres. Olmsted and Vaux redesigned it in the 1860s. The stands at the summit, a granite column with a bronze lantern over a crypt. It was dedicated in 1908 for roughly 11,500 people who died aboard British prison ships in the East River. The street along the park's east side is still called , the park's own name until 1897.
runs along the north side of the park. Past it the ground turns industrial at Flushing Avenue, where the Brooklyn Navy Yard is still working.
At the west end, the rowhouses give way to larger institutional buildings. The opened on Lafayette Avenue in 1908. The went up beside it in 1929 and was Brooklyn's tallest for over eighty years. has stood on Fort Greene Place since 1933, filling most of a block.
Shot in Fort Greene
Spike Lee shot She's Gotta Have It over twelve days in the summer of 1985, across Fort Greene and a few other Brooklyn neighborhoods. The Netflix series came back to the same streets in 2016.
She's Gotta Have It, 1986
Fort Greene Park
Much of the film is set in the park. Lee shot it with a non-union crew and no permits or insurance, on a budget of 175,000 dollars. The Netflix remake filmed at Monument Plaza in the park's southeast corner on the morning of October 28, 2016. Washington Park, the street along the east side, doubled for Nola's block on several dates that same fall. The production returned on November 10.
The South End's bowfront brick and brownstone rowhouses went up between 1850 and 1873, Italianate with high stoops and iron railings close to Fort Greene's own blocks. Both neighborhoods keep small parks worked into the rowhouse grid. Boston's bay windows curve out further than Fort Greene's flat brownstone fronts, and the mansard roofs on some blocks belong to a later period. Try searching bowfront brownstone rowhouses now.
Mount Vernon's brownstone and brick townhouses date mostly from the 1860s through the 1890s, in the same Italianate and Second Empire mix as Fort Greene, with a monument on high ground at the center of the district. The houses run a floor taller in places. The Washington Monument itself and the formal garden squares around it are distinctive enough to need cropping out of a wide shot. Try searching brownstone townhouses at the monument now.
Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
Capitol Hill's rowhouses are Italianate and Second Empire brick from the same decades as Fort Greene's own blocks, with Lincoln Park giving the district a similar park anchor. The brick here runs plainer than Fort Greene's brownstone fronts and the houses are generally smaller. The Capitol dome on the skyline and the city's low building height limit both give the location away in a wide or aerial shot. Try searching brick rowhouses Lincoln Park now.
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