Fort Greene is named for a fort. Nathanael Greene's men built Fort Putnam on the hill in 1776, and the Continental Army withdrew after the Battle of Long Island.
Brooklyn made the hill its first park instead. Walt Whitman argued for one in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the legislature secured the land in 1847. Olmsted and Vaux redesigned in 1867. The at the top went up in 1908, a granite column over a crypt for some of the 11,500 people who died on British prison ships in the East River.
The street along the east side is still called , which was the park's name until 1897.
The houses on it and behind it went up in the 1850s and 1860s, Italianate brick and brownstone with high stoops. Building was over by the 1870s and hundreds of those fronts have never been replaced. The Fort Greene and BAM Historic Districts were landmarked in 1978.
runs along the north side of the park, and the elevated railway above it closed in 1969. Past it the ground turns industrial at Flushing Avenue, where the Brooklyn Navy Yard is still working.
At the west end the buildings get bigger. The opened on Lafayette Avenue in 1908, after the first one in Brooklyn Heights burned. The went up beside it in 1929 and was Brooklyn's tallest for over eighty years. began on Fort Greene Place in 1930 and fills most of a block.
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