Fort Greene Park

Fort Greene Park is a 30-acre public park in the Fort Greene neighbourhood of Brooklyn, bounded roughly by Myrtle Avenue, DeKalb Avenue, Washington Park and St. Edwards Street. The hill at the centre of the park has a much older military history: during the American Revolutionary War, Major General Nathanael Greene supervised the construction of Fort Putnam here in 1776, with the fort later rebuilt and renamed Fort Greene during preparations for the War of 1812. By the 1840s, Brooklyn was expanding rapidly and poet and Brooklyn Daily Eagle editor Walt Whitman became one of the leading advocates for preserving the elevated ground as public open space. The site was secured for a park in 1847, and in 1867 Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were commissioned to redesign the landscape with winding paths, open lawns and a formal approach to the summit. The park’s dominant landmark is the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument, designed by Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White and dedicated in 1908. Its 148-foot Doric column and bronze urn stand above a crypt containing remains associated with American prisoners who died aboard British prison ships in Wallabout Bay during the Revolutionary War. The broad granite stairways, monument plaza, wooded slopes and surrounding Brooklyn brownstones have also made Fort Greene Park a recurring film and television location.

Fort Greene Park has appeared in The Education of Sonny Carson (1974), She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Crooklyn (1994), Bored to Death (2009–2011), Gotham (2014–2019), Billions (2016–2023) and She’s Gotta Have It (2017–2019). The Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument and its monumental staircase are particularly prominent, appearing in the violent gang initiation in The Education of Sonny Carson (1974), the colourful birthday sequence in She’s Gotta Have It (1986), the aftermath of Carolyn Carmichael’s death in Crooklyn (1994) and Carmine Falcone’s meeting with Liza in Gotham (2014–2019). Spike Lee returned to the park more than thirty years after his original She’s Gotta Have It when he expanded the story into the Netflix television series, again using Fort Greene itself as an important part of Nola Darling’s Brooklyn.

In The Education of Sonny Carson (1974), Fort Greene Park is used for one of the film’s most brutal early sequences, when the teenage Sonny Carson is initiated into the Lords street gang. Near the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument, members of the gang form two lines and force Sonny to run between them while they strike him with belts, pipes, chains and other objects. He continues through the gauntlet despite the beating and eventually collapses bloodied on the ground, proving himself sufficiently tough to be accepted into the group. Director Michael Campus filmed the initiation from both an outside perspective and from Sonny’s point of view, with the camera protected inside a metal cage for the latter shots. The bleak open space beneath the monument gives the scene an unusually stark setting and places one of the film’s defining moments directly within the Brooklyn neighbourhood whose street culture it depicts.

In She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Fort Greene Park is most memorably used during Nola Darling’s birthday celebration with Jamie Overstreet. Jamie tells Nola to close her eyes, click her heels three times and repeat the familiar line from The Wizard of Oz, after which Spike Lee abruptly shifts his otherwise black-and-white film into vivid colour. At the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument, Jamie has arranged an elaborate romantic surprise in which Nola watches two dancers perform a lovers’ picnic to music written especially for her by Bill Lee. The monument and surrounding plaza provide the background for the extended musical sequence, one of the few moments in the film in which Lee abandons its stripped-down visual style for something resembling a classic Hollywood musical. Fort Greene Park also appears elsewhere in the film as part of Nola’s everyday Brooklyn environment, making the real neighbourhood an essential part of the story rather than simply a generic New York backdrop.

In Crooklyn (1994), Fort Greene Park appears at one of the film’s most painful emotional turning points. After Troy Carmichael returns from spending part of the summer with relatives in Virginia, she discovers that her mother Carolyn is seriously ill with cancer. Carolyn subsequently dies, leaving Troy and her four brothers struggling to comprehend the loss. Troy, Nate and Joseph are shown slowly climbing the enormous staircase leading towards the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument, filmed in an extended crane shot that emphasises how small the children appear against the monumental architecture. Troy sings a Christian song she learned while staying in Virginia as they climb, before Joseph quietly wonders whether they will have to dress up for their mother’s funeral. The location gives the scene a scale and stillness completely different from the crowded stoops and lively streets that dominate most of the film, underlining the sudden absence at the centre of the Carmichael family.

In Bored to Death (2009–2011), Fort Greene Park forms part of the Brooklyn world inhabited by writer and amateur private detective Jonathan Ames. One of its clearest appearances comes in the first-season episode «The Case of the Lonely White Dove» (2009), when Jonathan meets a Russian parolee near the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument. The man hires him to find Irina, a singer he knew before going to prison and still refers to as his «Lonely White Dove». The meeting sends Jonathan to Brighton Beach, where he tracks her down at a Russian restaurant and becomes entangled in another of his improvised detective cases. The series filmed extensively around Fort Greene, with the park functioning repeatedly as a place where Jonathan meets clients and moves between his ordinary life as a Brooklyn writer and his self-appointed career as a private investigator.

In Gotham (2014–2019), the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument appears in the first-season episode «Viper» (2014). Crime boss Carmine Falcone encounters Liza in the park while she is listening to and humming the aria «O mio babbino caro». What Falcone does not know is that Liza has been deliberately prepared and planted in his path by Fish Mooney, who has discovered that she resembles Falcone’s late mother and intends to exploit his emotional vulnerability. Falcone is immediately struck by both Liza and the music, and their apparently chance meeting begins the relationship that allows her to become close to him while secretly reporting back to Mooney. The scene was filmed directly in front of the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument, with its broad staircase and column transformed into part of Gotham City.

In Billions (2016–2023), Fort Greene Park appears early in the first season during a scene involving U.S. Attorney Chuck Rhoades and his children. Chuck stops at a doughnut truck near the park and recognises another father as a man he successfully prosecuted for mail fraud who is about to begin serving a prison sentence. Feeling a moment of sympathy, Chuck leaves extra money with the vendor to pay for the man’s doughnuts. The gesture is not received as he expects. The man follows Chuck into Fort Greene Park, throws a doughnut at him and explains that he is spending his final day of freedom with his children before going to prison. He confronts Chuck over what the prosecution has done to his family, forcing Rhoades to defend the decisions made by his office. The sequence uses the park’s paths and the rows of brownstones visible beyond its boundaries, making Fort Greene recognisable even without the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument dominating the shot.

In She’s Gotta Have It (2017–2019), Spike Lee returned to Fort Greene Park when he reworked his 1986 film into a television series with DeWanda Wise as Nola Darling. The park again functions as part of Nola’s everyday neighbourhood, but its role also reflects how dramatically Fort Greene has changed since Lee made the original film. Production records show filming both at Monument Plaza and in the south-eastern part of the park, while the series repeatedly uses the surrounding streets and park landscape during conversations and transitions through the neighbourhood. The second episode even calls attention to a «New Fort Greene» sign in the park as part of the series’ recurring discussion of gentrification, something Lee contrasted directly with the Fort Greene he had filmed in 1985. The park therefore creates a deliberate link between the two versions of She’s Gotta Have It: the same public space that served as a celebration of Nola and Black Brooklyn in the original film becomes, three decades later, a place through which the series examines who still belongs in the neighbourhood and how its identity has changed.

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