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About the Author
Russell Granger is the founder and CEO of Arch Digitals, a branding and marketing agency specializing in strategy and design for engaging customers online. He began focusing his research and archiving efforts on antebellum Brooklyn when family history pursuits led to the discovery of an association with Walt Whitman. Russell currently lives in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, just a few streets from several ancestral addresses from the 1830s.
Navy Yard Hospital
U.S. Navy Yard Hospital, on Wallabout Bay, 1857. Flushing Avenue at right. Modern tinting.
By the time this image was published in 1857, the Naval Hospital already had a twenty year legacy of serving America’s enlisted. As virtually the last moment in history when the familiar Brooklyn landmark could be seen rising majestically above the murky yet bucolic arrangement of crested shoreline and wetlands known as Wallabout Bay, it is a rather important view. Very shortly after this, the bay would be filled in, bit by bit, to accommodate the growing Navy Yard, and the lands and buildings surrounding the hospital – once known as the Annex – would be separated no more.
In just a few years, the hospital complex would serve as the source of a third of the medicines used by Union troops in the Civil War, and the basement of the main hospital building would be used to confine and treat wounded Confederate prisoners.
A map of the Hospital Annex during the Civil War. Source: Kingston Lounge
The hospital building and many of its associated structures are landmarked and stand to this day, although dilapidated and unused. Click over to the Kingston Lounge for a good historical summary of the facility as well as some evocative contemporary photographs.
