QUESTION: When is a park not a park, but a street? Answer: When it’s Washington Park in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the street at the east end of Fort Greene Park. How did this unusual circumstance come about? Fort Greene Park forms a 30-acre rhomboid of green between Dekalb and Myrtle Avenues on the north and south, St. Edward Street and Brooklyn Hospital on the west, and Washington Park on the east. It is named for a fort built in 1776 at what is now the park’s central summit by General Nathaniel Greene (1742-1786). The fort, originally named Ft. Putnam, aided in George Washington’s retreat after his defeat in the battle of Brooklyn in 1776, and was reactivated during 1812 when a British attack was anticipated. The fort was named for Greene after the War of 1812 ended.
Walt Whitman, editing the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 1846 to 1848, pressed for a public park in the area, and in 1847, Washington Park, named for George, began development. Whitman lived nearby, at 99 Ryerson Street in a building that still standing, and it’s not surprising he wanted a park near his home. Though his influence was in great part responsible for the new park, it’s surprising that it was not eventually named for him, though a nearby housing project is named for the great editor and poet.
Washington Park was designed by the architects who went on to develop Central and Prospect Parks, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux . It was officially opened in 1850 and redesigned in 1867. It wasn’t until 1897 that the park took on the name Fort Greene, and by then it wasn’t primarily to honor the Revolutionary War general, but for the fact that the neighborhood, by then lined with stately brownstones, was by then known as Fort Greene. It was decidedby a name lost to history, that the two-block stretch of Cumberland Street lining Fort Greene Park’s eastern side kept the Washington Park.
There are other circumstances like this in NYC. Central Park North, South and West are streets named for the park they border, as are Prospect Park West and Southwest. However, Prospect Park West is unusual, as it extends a few blocks south between 15th and 20th Streets in Park Slope, breaking the borders of the park itself. It stands in for where 9th Avenue would ordinarily be. Crotona Park and Van Cortlandt Park, as well as other parks, give their names to streets that border them.
Only Washington Park, though, honors a former name of a park.
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10/10/24