Fort Greene and neighboring Clinton Hill are near the top of every Brooklyn home buyer’s list. Rich with Brownstones and pre-Civil War brick townhouses, these have long been enviable neighborhoods.
With easy access to Manhattan and Long Island via Brooklyn’s best transportation hub at Atlantic Avenue. The area’s central feature is the beautiful 30-acre Fort Greene Park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1867, who also designed Manhattan’s Central Park. Brooklyn Tech, one of the city’s specialized high schools sits on the park’s south border. The neighborhood is considered part of the Brooklyn Cultural District which includes many Arts and cultural institutions including: the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA), The Center for Fiction, Bric Arts, Mark Morris Dance Center, and the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts (MoCADA). The Barclay Center on the neighborhood’s south west corner is the home court of the Brooklyn Nets basketball team. It is a central destination for many visitors, sports fans, concert goers, and area residents alike. I reside in Fort Greene myself, and would love to show you all of the amenities and homes of this great Brooklyn neighborhood.
Fort Greene takes its name from a Revolutionary War era fort that played a part in the Battle of Long Island. General George Washington famously withdrew his troops from here under cover of darkness saving them from a badly outnumbered defeat by the British and Hessian mercenaries. In 1801, the Federal Government established the Brooklyn Navy yard stimulating growth in the area; but it was the addition of Ferry service to Manhattan in 1814 that started an explosion in Brooklyn’s population. Fort Greene at the time was primarily farmland, which it’s owners began to subdivide and sell-off by the 1840s. Residential homes began to appear, and one was home to American poet and editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Walt Whitman. By the 1850s development of hundreds of Italianate, Second Empire, Greek Revival, neo-Grec, Romanesque Revival and Renaissance Revival townhouses had started, and most remain intact today.
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Fort Greene is bounded by the Brooklyn Navy Yard to the north, Flatbush Avenue Extension to the west, Atlantic Avenue to the south, and Vanderbilt Avenue to the east.
Clinton Hill lies just to the east of Fort Greene and shares a similar history of its development. Its namesake street was considered Brooklyn’s ‘Gold Coast’ at the turn of the 20th Century, with huge freestanding mansions replacing more modest homes along grand Clinton Avenue. Charles Pratt, who was a pioneer in the American petroleum industry, established his fortune by selling his business to John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. He built built several still standing landmarked mansions for himself and his children on Clinton Avenue, between DeKalb and Willoughby Avenues in the mid-19th Century. He also endowed the Pratt Institute, which is to this day a private university of the arts, and an anchor of the Clinton Hill community. The Clinton Hill Landmark Historic District was first designated in 1981. It consists of 1,063 largely residential buildings built between the 1840s and 1930. It includes row-houses and apartment buildings in the Italianate, Gothic, and Beaux-Arts style. Clinton Hill It is bordered on thee north by the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Williamsburg and Bedford–Stuyvesant to the east, Prospect Heights to the south, and Fort Greene to the west.
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