[nygirl1]

We move west now back towards downtown Brooklyn into the neighborhood of Fort Greene


Fort Greene is a cozy neighborhood just outside out Brooklyn’s downtown. The area has a superb housing stock, a neighborhood in the Brooklyn Brooklyn brownstone belt it features Italianate and Eastlake styles surrounding a small and shady park. The neighborhood is next door to the Atlantic Yards terminal and houses the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Paul Robeson theater, the MoCADA, Brooklyn Technical Highschool and in neighboring Clinton Hill the Pratt Institute. Fort Greene has become the sophisticated, modern cultural center Brooklyn needed near downtown. Fort Greene is home to Walt Whitman, one of America’s best known literary figures. African Americans arrived here early on in the 19th century and were a major contribution to the success of the neighborhood, historically significant to New York’s African American community as it was the site of the first African American school. The neighborhood also boasts the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church built by Abolitionists and hosted often by Harriet Tubman and Fredrick Douglass. Stage coach lines were built through the area mid century and any remaining land was soon built up as brownstone row house residential blocks. This section of Brooklyn was always popular first by the Black community and then the Irish poor from Manhattan who transformed it into a “young Dublin” due to its proximity to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The neighborhood peaked in the roaring 20’s and featured the Paramount and Brooklyn Fox theaters. Fort Greene declines during the 1960’s-80’s. Throughout the 90’s Black professionals began to resettle and restore the area and then gentrification made its way. Today this middle-upper class neighborhood is among Brooklyn’s trendiest, both economically and racially diverse.