Vinegar Hill is a quiet, historic pocket of Brooklyn tucked between the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Manhattan Bridge, its Belgian block streets framed by rowhouses and the looming smokestack of a former Con Edison power station. Unlike its heavily trafficked neighbor DUMBO to the west, Vinegar Hill has largely escaped tourist crowds and large-scale development, preserving a rare sense of old New York.
The neighborhood's story began in 1748 when the Sands brothers purchased 160 acres and ambitiously dubbed the area the “City of Olympia.” But it wasn’t until 1800 that the name Vinegar Hill stuck, a marketing move by developer John Jackson to attract Irish shipwrights, evoking the 1798 Battle of Vinegar Hill in Ireland.
By the mid-19th century, waves of Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Hunger transformed the neighborhood into a gritty waterfront enclave nicknamed “Irishtown.” Known for its illicit poitín whiskey stills and gang activity, most famously the White Hand Gang, it was a hard-edged working-class community with deep roots.
Much of old Vinegar Hill was leveled in the 1950s to make way for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Farragut Houses, but the surviving streets still carry the weight of history. Today, as plans move forward to convert the long-dormant power plant into a renewable energy hub, the neighborhood stands at another turning point, balancing preservation and reinvention.
The Commandant's House was built in 1806 as the quarters for the commodore of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Rumor has it that Charles Bulfinch, the Federal-era starchitect responsible for the iconic dome of the U.S. Capitol, was behind the design. There is scant evidence to prove Bulfinch's involvement, save for the dubious claim that the proportions of the dining room are exactly the same as those of the Oval Office.
In 1841, Captain Matthew C. Perry, commander of all U.S. naval vessels in New York Harbor, moved into what was then called Quarters A of the New York Navy Yard. Perry would go on to convince Japan to open their borders to trade with the U.S., a feat he accomplished by sailing several large naval vessels into Tokyo Bay.
The house, which was once painted a "creamy yellow," was home to successive Navy Yard commandants for nearly two centuries.
In 1974, eight years after the Navy Yard was decommissioned, the building was designated as a National Historic Landmark. The property's transformation from military quarters to private residence began in 1996, when Charles Gilbert and Jennifer Jones became its first civilian owners.
It cannot be cheap to maintain a huge old house that, due to its landmark status, cannot be changed. That is probably why the home is frequently used for TV and movie shoots, most famously as the home for Nucky Thompson in Boardwalk Empire.
