The park includes part of the high ground where the Continental Army built fortifications prior to the Battle of Long Island, during the early days of the American Revolutionary War. The site was chosen and construction supervised by General Nathanael Greene; it was named Fort Putnam. During the War of 1812, when the possibility of a British invasion led to the re-use of the site for defense, the newly rebuilt fortification was named Fort Greene in his honor. After the fort's military use had waned, poet Walt Whitman, then the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, was a strong advocate of reclaiming the space for use as a public park. The City of Brooklyn had, by 1842, bought property around the fort from the Cowenhoven family, and in 1847 created what was then called Washington Park, Brooklyn's second park, after Commodore Barry Park. In 1867, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who also designed Central Park and Prospect Park, prepared a plan for the redesign of the park, the name of which name was changed to Fort Greene Park. In February 2017, Parks Without Borders, the design unit of NYC Parks proposed renovating the park. Public opposition gave rise to the advocacy group, Friends of Fort Greene Park. The Landmarks Preservation Commission took no vote, with one commissioner observing that the plan was "against every historic moment in the design of the park". The LPC later approved the plan after NYC Parks eliminated a proposed work by the late landscape architect Arthur Edwin Bye. Further controversy arose in early 2018 when NYC Parks announced plans to cut down some trees in the park, and a group of residents successfully sued NYC Parks to force the release of an internal report about the trees, a decision upheld upon appeal. the renovation was in the procurement process.
One of the park's distinctive features is the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument. During the Revolutionary War, the British kept American prisoners on ships in Wallabout Bay under terrible conditions. Around 11,500 prisoners died from disease and malnutrition. Olmsted and Vaux envisioned a crypt to hold their remains, with an appropriate monument. The crypt was built, and the remains of the prisoners were re-interred there in 1873. There was also a small monument. Eventually, funds were raised for a larger monument. The architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White won a design competition, and the monument was unveiled in 1908 by President-elect William Howard Taft. It is a high graniteDoric column over the crypt. At the top is an eight-ton bronze urn. At night the monument is illuminated by four electric lights set in four granite shafts. Bronze eagles grace each shaft, and two cannons guard the plaza and the Martyrs' crypt below.
In 2015, a statue of the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden was illicitly erected in the park and taken down by park officials the same day. The next day, it was replaced by a projected hologram.
Events
Fort Greene Park is host to the annual Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival, an event featuring young writers aged 7–18 reading alongside established writers, such as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gloria Naylor, and Jennifer Egan. The Fort Greene Park Conservancy operates a summer concert series. The Greene Glass Project was started in 2010 to address the thousands of shards of broken glass in the park. The organization hosts annual cleanups in the summer.
