Our Buildings: Admiral's Row

Once the home of naval officers, Admiral’s Row is now an abandoned reminder of the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s history. (Illustration by Daniel Lewis)

What makes a neighborhood? People, pets and the stories that make up our days. But we also have our buildings, the places where we work, play, eat, sleep, learn and live. Throughout Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, you will find everything from colonial brownstones to housing projects to luxury apartments: buildings that have been here since the earliest days of this country. Have a building you think we should highlight? Let us know in the comments or email us at TheNabe@TheNabe.me (NOW editor@bklyner.com).

If you walk along Flushing Avenue past the Brooklyn Navy Yard, you’ll notice a row of abandoned houses, just behind the fence. Several buildings stand in a row, covered in ivy, some with their roofs collapsed and windows gone. This is Admiral’s Row.

Composed of a series of buildings that housed naval officers from the Civil War through the mid-1970s, Admiral’s Row was once a gated community for the navy’s elites while they were stationed in Brooklyn. But when the naval base was decommissioned in the late 1960s, the townhouses were abandoned and left to the elements. Since then, the old mansions have withered away as the rest of the navy yard continues to develop into an industrial and manufacturing center.

Building H of Admiral’s Row in it’s prime, circa 1855. (Illustration by Lucy Sikes, via Brooklyn’s Other Museum of Brooklyn).

The Brooklyn Navy Yard is currently looking for developers to build a supermarket and retail space where Admiral’s Row stands at the corner of Flushing Avenue and Navy Street (Update as of May 2015: Wegmans has been tapped as the supermarket to come to the site, possibly by 2017). The proposed plan would demolish most of the remaining buildings, while leaving two for historic preservation, one of which once stored ships’ masts during their construction. It’s the last one of its kind in the United States.