Brooklyn Paper published a self-guided 10-stop walking tour this week tracing the sites of the 1776 Battle of Brooklyn, part of a 10-video series called “Step into Brooklyn” timed to the U.S. 250th anniversary. The piece was reported by Brooklyn Paper writer Kirstyn Brendlen.
The route starts at the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Fort Greene Park and moves south through Park Slope, Gowanus, Bay Ridge, and Bensonhurst, ending at Denyse Wharf and Gravesend Bay, where thousands of British troops landed on Aug. 22, 1776, to begin what Brooklyn Paper describes as the largest battle of the Revolutionary War. Walkers will mix stretches of walking with subway hops and should set aside a full day or plan to split it into two, according to Brooklyn Paper.
The battle that followed that landing was a military loss for the American side. British forces pushed north across the borough and American defensive lines collapsed at key positions in what is now Prospect Park and Park Slope. But General George Washington managed to evacuate 9,000 troops across the East River to Manhattan before the British could capture Brooklyn Heights, keeping the Continental Army intact, according to Brooklyn Paper.
The first stop is the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Fort Greene Park, a 149-foot Doric column designed by McKim, Mead & White and dedicated in 1908. According to Brooklyn Paper, Major General Nathanael Greene built Fort Putnam on that same high ground during the battle in 1776. After the Continental Army retreated, British prison ships anchored in nearby Wallabout Bay held American captives under brutal conditions. Overcrowding, disease, and starvation killed more than 11,500 people, whose remains were eventually reinterred in a crypt beneath the monument plaza.
The second stop is the Old Stone House in Park Slope, built in 1699, at Fifth Avenue and Third Street. On Aug. 27, 1776, a Maryland regiment made a last stand there that bought Washington’s army time to retreat north through the marshes. Kim Maier, the house’s executive director, told Brooklyn Paper: “This is where the Marylanders held the line to allow the rest of the American army to escape.” About 400 Maryland soldiers went into that fight; fewer than a dozen returned. Washington, watching from what is now Cobble Hill, reportedly said, “Good God, what brave fellows I must this day lose.” Maier also told Brooklyn Paper the site is not finished history: “We have been having many of the same arguments for 250 years.”
In Prospect Park, the terrain of the 1776 battle is still visible. Dylan Yeats, Director of Museum Programs and Operations at the park, told Brooklyn Paper that American troops at Battle Pass, a narrow corridor through the hills then known as Flatbush Pass, chopped down a large oak tree and burned nearby homes to slow the British advance. “The idea being they would prevent the British from going through the hills from Flatbush into Brooklyn,” he said. Once surrounded, American soldiers fled across what is now Long Meadow and past what is now Third Street toward the Old Stone House. Local accounts long held that Flatbush residents avoided the area for decades after the battle because “they thought it was haunted,” Yeats told Brooklyn Paper. The British had left American soldiers unburied in the woods as a warning against rebellion.
A plaque at 193 9th Street in Gowanus, outside American Legion Post 1636, marks where the same Maryland regiment is believed to have been buried along the marshy former edges of the Gowanus Canal. No archaeological investigation of the area has confirmed human remains, according to Brooklyn Paper. Revolutionary War burials were often improvised and unmarked, and 19th-century industrial development buried much of old Gowanus under factories and infrastructure.
Green-Wood Cemetery’s Battle Hill, the highest natural point in Brooklyn, is where American soldiers briefly reclaimed high ground during the battle before being overwhelmed and captured. According to Brooklyn Paper, the cemetery, designed in 1838, also counts Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leonard Bernstein, Boss Tweed, and Louis Comfort Tiffany among its more recent permanent residents.
The Old New Utrecht Cemetery in Bensonhurst, established around 1653 and predating the church beside it, holds roughly 1,300 people interred over three centuries, including Revolutionary War soldiers buried in a shared unmarked grave and members of the local community of African descent, both enslaved and free, buried without names or markers, according to Brooklyn Paper. The Friends of Historic New Utrecht host public tours, including an annual Liberty Weekend in early summer. The cemetery is not open for daily walk-ins.
At Fort Hamilton in Bay Ridge, the tour shifts from ruins to an active military installation. The fort, completed in 1831 and named for Alexander Hamilton, sits at the Narrows where hundreds of British ships massed in the summer of 1776. Brooklyn borough historian Asad Dandia told Brooklyn Paper: “This is the largest naval advance in the history of the world until World War II. It’s just huge. One patriot wrote that he thought that all of London was afloat on the water.” Fort Hamilton is today the fourth oldest active U.S. Army installation in the country and still supports Army active duty, Reserve, and National Guard units, according to Brooklyn Paper.
A short walk north of Fort Hamilton is John Paul Jones Park, which holds a Civil War-era Rodman cannon that Brooklyn Paper describes as the largest smoothbore, muzzle-loading coastal defense cannon ever produced in the United States, alongside a Dover Patrol memorial gifted by England after World War I. The park is named for the Revolutionary War naval commander who, during a 1779 battle with British warships, refused to surrender and told the British: “I have not yet begun to fight.”
The tour ends at Denyse Wharf and Gravesend Bay. The wharf is now largely a concrete jetty sitting below the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, mostly blocked from public access. Community groups organize occasional cleanup efforts there, according to Brooklyn Paper. The shoreline offers harbor views from the Shore Road greenway.
After the Battle of Brooklyn, the British held New York City for the rest of the war. As the occupation wore on, Dandia told Brooklyn Paper, Brooklynites who had initially been largely indifferent grew frustrated with skyrocketing food prices and economic disruption. “As the war drags on, Brooklynites start to become much more sympathetic, not necessarily to the Patriot cause, but to the war coming to an end,” he said. “And if that means telling the Red Coats to get out, then that’s what we’re going to do. In a very New York way, it’s like, get the hell out of my way, I got work to do.” Washington returned to New York City on Nov. 25, 1783, riding through the city as British soldiers departed, officially ending seven years of occupation.
Featured image: Photo by Gabriele Holtermann
