Society of Old Brooklynites is one of the borough's oldest civic organizations. [1] It was formed in 1880. It was founded to celebrate and remember when Brooklyn was its own city. [2] It had an additional purpose of connecting the business community of Brooklyn. [3]
The society was founded by John W. Hunter, the former Mayor of Brooklyn. It holds meetings at the Brooklyn Surrogate's Courtroom. Membership requires individuals to have lived in Brooklyn for at least 25 years. [4] The group rose to prominence combatting the merging of New York City with Brooklyn. [1] It termed this "The Great Mistake of 1898."
the Society of Old Brooklynites has hosted an annual memorial for Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument every year since President Taft dedicated the monument in 1908. [5] The society also has an annual event honoring the battle of brooklyn. [6] A Bust of Edward Snowden was placed in the park and sparked outage by the society. [7]
Wilhelmena Rhodes Kelly [2]
John W. Hunter
Daniel D. Whitney
Marjorie Parker Smith
John Oakey (politician)
Myrtle Whitmore
Michael E. Finnigan
Charles J. Dodd
Samuel Booth [8]
Brooklyn is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, behind New York County (Manhattan). Brooklyn is also New York City's most populous borough, with 2,736,074 residents in 2020.
Daniel Chester French was an American sculptor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, best known for his 1874 sculpture The Minute Man in Concord, Massachusetts, and his 1920 monumental statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The Battle of Long Island, also known as the Battle of Brooklyn and the Battle of Brooklyn Heights, was an action of the American Revolutionary War fought on August 27, 1776, at the western edge of Long Island in present-day Brooklyn, New York. The British defeated the Americans and gained access to the strategically important Port of New York, which they held for the rest of the war. It was the first major battle to take place after the United States declared its independence on July 4, and in troop deployment and combat, it was the largest battle of the war.
Fort Greene is a neighborhood in the northwestern part of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. The neighborhood is bounded by Flushing Avenue and the Brooklyn Navy Yard to the north, Flatbush Avenue Extension and Downtown Brooklyn to the west, Atlantic Avenue and Prospect Heights to the south, and Vanderbilt Avenue and Clinton Hill to the east. The Fort Greene Historic District is listed on the New York State Registry and on the National Register of Historic Places, and is a New York City designated historic district.
Fort Greene Park is a city-owned and -operated park in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York City. The 30.2-acre (12.2 ha) park was originally named after the fort formerly located there, Fort Putnam, which itself was named for Rufus Putnam, George Washington's Chief of Engineers in the Revolutionary War. Renamed in 1812 for Nathanael Greene, a hero of the American Revolutionary War, it was redesigned by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who also designed Central Park and Prospect Park, in 1867. The park contains the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument, which includes a crypt designed by Olmsted and Vaux.
Adolph Alexander Weinman was a German-born American sculptor and architectural sculptor.
Evacuation Day on November 25 marks the day in 1783 when the British Army departed from New York City on Manhattan Island, after the end of the American Revolutionary War. In their wake, General George Washington triumphantly led the Continental Army from his headquarters north of the city across the Harlem River, and south through Manhattan to the Battery at its southern tip.
Fort Lee Historic Park is located atop a bluff of the Hudson Palisades overlooking Burdett's Landing, known as Mount Constitution, in Fort Lee, New Jersey, United States. Native Americans appear to have lived in the area for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. The bluff was the site of George Washington's 1776 encampment opposite Fort Washington at the northern end of Manhattan. Fort Lee is named for General Charles Lee. The site is a reconstruction of the encampment including the blockhouse, battery, quarters as well as a visitors center. It is part of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission.
Wallabout Bay is a small body of water in Upper New York Bay along the northwest shore of the New York City borough of Brooklyn, between the present Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges. It is located opposite Corlear's Hook in Manhattan, across the East River to the west. Wallabout Bay is now the site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
The Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument is a war memorial at Fort Greene Park, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. It commemorates more than 11,500 American prisoners of war who died in captivity aboard sixteen British prison ships during the American Revolutionary War. The remains of a small fraction of those who died on the ships are interred in a crypt beneath its base. The ships included HMS Jersey, Scorpion, Hope, Falmouth, Stromboli, Hunter, and others.
Hakeem Sekou Jeffries is an American politician and attorney who has been House Minority Leader and leader of the House Democratic Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2023. Jeffries is in his sixth House term, having represented New York's 8th congressional district, anchored in southern and eastern Brooklyn, since 2013.
Henry Baerer (1837-1908) was an American sculptor born in Munich, Germany.
Pietro Montana was a 20th-century Italian-American sculptor, painter and teacher, noted for his war memorials and religious works.
The bust of Edward Snowden, called Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument 2.0 by its creators, was an ephemeral, illegally installed public sculpture of Edward Snowden, an American whistleblower who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) and was charged with federal crimes as a result. The bronze-like bust was placed in Fort Greene Park in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York City, on April 6, 2015. This sparked outrage by the Society of Old Brooklynites It was attached to a Doric column on the perimeter of the park's Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument, a memorial and crypt which honors and inters the more than 11,500 American prisoners of war who died in the American Revolution while housed on British prison ships.
Thomas Walsh (1875–1928) was a poet, literary critic, translator, and scholar of Latin American and Spanish literature.
Edward Snowden in popular culture is part of the reactions to global surveillance disclosures made by Edward Snowden. His impact as a public figure has been felt in cinema, advertising, video games, literature, music, statuary, and social media.
The Concert Grove is a section of Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York City, that historically functioned as an outdoor music venue. It still serves as a sculpture garden lined with busts of musical figures, largely put up by German American Sängerfest participants and other cultural groups. The Concert Grove also includes the Concert Grove Pavilion, formerly known as the Oriental Pavilion, and adjoins a Lincoln sculpture facing the lake.
Wilhelmena Rhodes Kelly was an African-American genealogist who traced her American lineage to the April 5, 1614 union of Pocahontas and John Rolfe. She was also a member of the Jamestowne Society. In 2019 she became the New York State Regent and a member of the National Board of Management, highest ranking woman of color in the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR), since its founding in 1890. She was a pioneer of African-American genealogy. Born and raised in Brooklyn, she was a local Brooklyn historian and member of the Society of Old Brooklynites (SOB), one of the borough's oldest civic organizations. She was the author of books on Bedford-Stuyvesant as well as the Crown Heights and Weeksville sections of Brooklyn, and family genealogy books tracing her family's American roots.