South Portland Avenue, Brooklyn

The Future Has Arrived

Imagine a world where you can stand and talk with a friend in the middle of the street for as long as you want. No horseless buggy is about to careen around the corner, horn blaring, expecting you to scatter like startled chickens.

It's here, on South Portland Avenue. Several blocks running south from Fort Greene Park are now open streets.

Motor vehicles, as you can see, are still allowed on the street. The ones in this picture are all parked. But movement is also allowed. Residents come and go. So do plumbers fixing pipes. Electricians, carpenters, masons, painters. The occasional no-name hatchback that turns out to be an Amazon delivery vehicle.

But there is no threat of death.

Here's a picture of the other end of this block, up by Fort Greene Park. 

If we turn around and look across DeKalb Avenue, we can see the South Portland gate to Fort Greene Park. 

The whole park is one large hill, and this is part of the gentle southern slope. The northern slope is much steeper and is dominated by a wide set of stairs, in the middle of which is a small stone house with a door in it.

Inside the Hill

Inside the door is the home of American soldiers and sailors who, during the Revolution, were captured by the British and held in old ships that had been converted into floating prisons.

The prison ships were located in Wallabout Bay, which later became the home of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. When you're in Fort Greene Park, you're two blocks from the Navy Yard. In the prison ships, the death rate from crowding, malnutrition, and contagious diseases was astronomical. 

The British took a very informal approach to burying the many dead - a short boat ride to shore and a shallow grave on the beach. Needless to say, bones quickly started to pop up through the sand.

The Revolution ended, but the problem of the bones didn't. The authorities didn't seem to know what to do with them, but in 1808 there was a mass interment in a tomb located near the intersection of Hudson and York. 

Then along came Fort Greene Park, designed by the landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who also designed Prospect Park in Brooklyn and Central Park in Manhattan. 

A decision was made to transfer the bones to the new park, a crypt was constructed, and the bones were transferred in 1873. 

The 149-foot Doric memorial column at the top of the hill came along a bit later, in 1908. The architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White made substantial revisions to the Olmsted and Vaux design for this part of the park, giving us, among other things, a new entrance to the crypt and a comfort station (now the visitor center) in addition to the memorial column. 

So Fort Greene is a cemetery as well as a park. Something of a condominium, with the living upstairs and the dead downstairs. Most of the people who died on the prison ships aren't here. Only some of them, but it's enough to make the point.

It is estimated that more than 11,000 died on the prison ships. This is nearly double the 6,824 Americans who died in combat during the Revolution. 

I like to sit on a park bench at the top of the hill and think of the fellows downstairs. There is sadness, of course. But my main feeling is gratitude. I look around at the living, young and old, who flock happily to this park to play, or perhaps to just sit on a bench. We're up here. They're down there. We are together.

Below is a picture of two parrots. Their owner has brought them to the park for a little air, and perhaps so they can be seen and admired. Yes, we are all here, and we are all together.

Mountable Curbs

Enough about the past. Back to the future. Let me start with a bit of traffic geekery.

Below we're at South Portman, looking across Fulton Street at the Greenlight Bookstore. We're also looking at a crosswalk that is interrupting a yellow-and-black mountable curb. The curb resumes after the crosswalk, out of the picture to the right. The purpose of these curbs is to encourage turning motorists not to drive into the oncoming traffic lane on the way to the lane they belong in. 

This particular shortcoming of motorists has been, I understand, rather common in the area around Fulton Street, and I'm thinking after you've driven your horseless buggy over a mountable curb once, you're likely to think twice before you indulge yet again in this particular motoristic failing.  

Here's an attempt to encourage drivers not to cut the corner when turning into South Elliott Place from DeKalb. Elliott is the next block west from Portman, and it is a one-way street headed south. So nobody except a fire engine should need to cross this, and a fire engine won't have a problem.

The Rest of the Tour

South Portman extends the open space of Fort Greene Park to the south. Willoughby Avenue creates a similar corridor of open space on the east. Below is a shot of Willoughby that seems to have almost as many dogs as people in it, and of course a streetery.

On the north side of the park, running next to Myrtle Avenue, we found the largest array of bike-share bikes that I think I have ever seen.

And just in case you forgot where you were, the local laundromat is happy to remind you.

Further Reading

There is a very good book on the prison ship martyrs: Edwin G. Burrows, Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War (2008). See particularly pages 163-168, 178, 197-204, 205, 209-210, 215-217, 233-234, 237-238.

The New York City parks department has a good brief story on the prison ship memorial. To see it, click here. 

The open streets in the Fort Greene neighborhood are managed by the Fort Greene Open Streets Coalition. To learn more, click here.

See also Cutting Corners, Fitting the Solution to the Problem, Flexible Vanderbilt, Transit Memories.