HERE’S Willoughby Street in the fall of 2017 on an impassably busy weekday afternoon. I don’t look back on my unemployed days in the 2010s with much fondness with the exception that it gave me plenty of time to gather Forgotten NY material. In the 2010s I averaged over 6000 photos per year! I have retained every photo I have taken via digital camera since 2009, and I have a closet full of hard copies from the years before that, when I used a film camera.
Willoughby Street runs east from the junction of Fulton and Adams Streets east to Fort Greene Park. East of the park, it continues, with a name change, as Willoughby Avenue through Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant, and then northeast into Bushwick and then Ridgewood, finishing in Queens at Linden Hill Cemetery. It was named in the 1800s for Samuel Willoughby, prominent landowner and bank founder.
I was always fascinated looking east on Willoughby Street because the shaft of the Fort Greene Prison Ship Martyr’s monument looms into view. During the Revolutionary War, the British anchored eleven prison ships in Wallabout Bay (the body of water west of Williamsburg) and subjected American prisoners of war to deprivations and torture during the years 1776-1783. More than 11,000 died in the ships.
There were early monuments to those who became known as the “prison ship martyrs”: some of the remains were buried in the vicinity of the Navy Yard in 1808 and interred in Washington Park in 1873.
The current monument, a 148-ft. Doric column (one of the world’s largest), was designed by McKim, Mead and White (the firm that would later design Pennsylvania Station) and dedicated by William Howard Taft, then President Teddy Roosevelt’s Secretary of War, in 1908. The monument originally featured a staircase and elevator to its summit, where there was a lighted brasier and observation deck. The elevator was broken by the 1930s and was finally removed in the 1970s. The Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, however, remains one of Brooklyn’s more striking landmarks, visible from any part of the neighborhood especially in winter. The remains of the prison ship martyrs are interred under the monument.
Check out the ForgottenBook, take a look at the gift shop. As always, “comment…as you see fit.” I earn a small payment when you click on any ad on the site.
4/4/25