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The
Fall of Myrtle Avenue
 lot has changed
since the 1960s, when the Walt Whitman Houses and the Raymond V.
Ingersoll Houses two blocks away flanked Myrtle Avenue, then the
main street in Fort Greene. Both buildings were built to house the
wartime work force employed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World
War II.
In 1966, when the Navy Yard closed, Myrtle Avenue began a slow decline,
that intensified during the recession between 1970 and 1990, says
Curry.
The situation worsened when the developers of Metro Tech, the sprawling
commercial enclave to the west of Myrtle Avenue, failed to deliver
on the jobs promised residents of the area during construction,
says Eric Blackwell, an assistant professor of sociology at Long
Island University.
Most
of the jobs ended up going to people from other boroughs and as
far as New Jersey, he says. This helped push Myrtle Avenue and the
adjacent housing projects closer to the brink.
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Fort
Greene Factoids
Named after Nathanael Greene, a colonial general and Revolutionary
War hero.
Poet and then editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, Walt Whitman
proposed the renaming of Washington Park to Fort Greene Park,
from which the neighborhood takes its name.
The
neighborhood is home to the famous Brooklyn Academy of Music,
the oldest performing arts center in America, opened in 1859.
Fort Greene was the location of Colored School No. 1 which
opened in 1847.
Filmaker
Spike Lee, writer Richard Wright, and musicians Wynton and
Brandon Marsalis are but a few of the notable cultural figures
who have called Fort Greene home.
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