Wallabout
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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.
Cannonball Gardens
Northeastern view from inside the Navy Yard, Wallabout Bay and Williamsburgh beyond. 1851.
A romantic, picture-postcard view from inside the Navy Yard in 1851. Note the oxen, presumably for hauling, inside the ship-building shed, and the wonderfully sculptural quality of the cannonball pyramids (one is reminded of today’s annual sculpture installations along the Dumbo waterfront in Brooklyn Bridge Park).
The Navy Yard was indeed a romantic destination for most of the nineteenth century. The following excerpt from a New York Times article in the 1890s offers an evocative glimpse of the location’s appeal:
Wallabout from Fort Greene
Navy Yard at left with Manhattan beyond; Whitman’s working-class neighborhood at right.
A rare and fine engraving from 1847 depicting the spectacular view northeast from what was then called Washington Park. The image may indeed have been made to commemorate the establishment of the park, which occurred in that year, as it appears to depict landscape work in the foreground. Whitman was in the second and final year of his editorship of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle at this time, and had been instrumental in generating public support and legislative momentum for the park.