Originally the site of a fort built for the Revolutionary War and reoccupied during the War of 1812, the community surrounding the land that would become the park started using it as public space shortly after the threat of the War of 1812 passed. By 1847, it was designated Washington Park, and twenty years later, famed landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux began designing its new layout. In 1897, the new Olmsted and Vaux’s landscape was renamed Fort Greene Park.

The Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument is a memorial to the more than 11,500 American prisoners of war who died while detained aboard sixteen British prison ships during the American Revolutionary War. In 1908, President Taft travelled to the park to dedicate the memorial in front of a crowd of 15,000.

Opened in 1888, El service operated along Myrtle Avenue until 1969. Out of frame is the entrance to the Navy Street Station. At left, lots have been cleared for the construction of the Fort Greene Houses, later renamed the Ingersoll Houses after Brooklyn Borough President Raymond Ingersoll.

This street is named for the original original name for Fort Greene Park.

Richard Wright, an acclaimed American author, wrote his novel "Native Son" while living in Fort Greene. In fact, he wrote much of the novel in the park, where a bench is named after him.

Built in 1862, Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church was known for its abolitionist pastor, Theodore L. Cuyler, and its distinguished congregation of prominent Reconstruction-era political figures, including President Benjamin Harrison and British Prime Minister William E. Gladstone.

Founded in 1861 in Brooklyn Heights as the Philharmonic Society of Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s original building was destroyed in a 1903 fire. The present building was designed by Herts & Tallant and opened in the fall of 1908 with a Metropolitan Opera performance of Faust.

The Greeks likes to use female figures (caryatids) as structural architectural features on their buildings. See the caryatids of Brooklyn, which support the colonnade of the mansion at 229 Clinton Avenue.

The brick mansion at center right belonged to John Thomas Underwood, the founder of the Underwood Typewriter Company. In the early 1950s, Underwood’s surviving family (he died in 1937) donated the mansion and its outbuildings to the city’s Parks Department to create a new public space. The new Underwood Park was opened to the public in 1956.

The Pratt Institute was founded by the industrialist Charles Pratt, one of Brooklyn's richest men. Pratt started the school as a way to provide education and training to working men and women as a means to improve their economic circumstances. Today the school is one of the top art and design colleges in the country.

The poet Walt Whitman lived at 99 Ryerson Street in 1855, the year he published Leaves of Grass. Whitman lived in several buildings in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill for over 28 years, but this is the only home of his still standing.

The Modernist poet Marianne Moore moved to 260 Cumberland Street with her mother in 1918. Moore worked at the New York Public Library and published her first volume of poetry "Poems" in 1921. Moore was highly regarded as a poet during her lifetime and even became somewhat of a celebrity, famous for her tricorn hat and cape and featured in magazines such as Life, the New York Times, and The New Yorker. Moore lived in Fort Greene for 36 years.