Wallabout Channel

More Brooklyn Navy Yard drawings. These two from the Wallabout Channel. I don't know what they are. The mysterious tower looks like some sort of lookout post, perhaps, but how would one access it? The other machine I have no idea. A pump of some kind, I guess, but so long abandoned, teetering on a dilapidated, collapsing pier, its purpose can only be guessed at. In the background of the first drawing, you can see the Williamsburg Bridge, the Empire State Building in the far distance, and to the left edge of the page, the Railroad Transfer Bridge.

These two structures sit in Wallabout Channel, a small inlet from Wallabout Bay, forming the north-western boundary of the Navy Yard. To the north of it is the Satmar Hasidic section of Willliamsburg. Wallabout Bay is the section of the East River where the Navy Yard sits. The whole area is sometimes called Wallabout. The bay is most infamous for being where the British kept prisoners of war in prison ships during the Revolution. More than 12,000 prisoners died in terrible conditions on these ships. The name "Wallabout" is an English corruption of "de Waal Boght," the Walloon Bay, so-named after the Walloons, French-speaking Protestant settlers from Netherlands, who settled area in 1637.

In 1951, Joseph Mitchell, described Wallabout Bay in the New Yorker:

"This backwater is called Wallabout Bay on charts; the men on the dredges call it Potter's Field. The eddy sweeps driftwood into the backwater. Also, it sweeps drowned bodies into there. As a rule, people that drown in the harbor in winter stay down until spring. When the water begins to get warm, gas forms in them and that makes them buoyant and they rise to the surface. Every year, without fail, on or about the fifteenth of April, bodies start showing up, and more of them show up in Potter's Field than any other place. In couple of weeks or so, the Harbor Police always finds ten to two dozen over there - suicides, bastard babies, old barge captains that lost their balance out on a sleety night attending to towropes, now and then some gangster or other. The police launch that runs out of Pier A on the Battery - Launch One - goes over and takes them out of the water with a kind of dip-net contraption that the Police Department blacksmith made out of tire chains."

I didn't see them pull any bodies out of the water while I was working at the Navy Yard.

The channel is all that remains of Wallabout Creek, which originated around Marcy Ave. in Bed-Stuy and entered the bay near Washington Ave. In the later part of the 19th century, the area became home to a variety of food and grocery industries, and a large-scale marketplace began to grow. The creek, as well as the wide streets, numerous trolleys, and Myrtle Ave El made transportation and shipping easy. The original market was a slapdash affair that grew organically and haphazardly, but between 1894 and 1896, the city of Brooklyn (it was still its own city, independent of New York at the time) engaged architect William B. Tubby to design a permanent market. He constructed an entire village of brick buildings whose architecture referenced the area's Dutch origins, arranged around a central plaza with a prominent clock tower.

With the advent of World War II, the Navy Yard needed the land for expansion, and there was also fear that the Wallabout Market would be a hotbed of spies and saboteurs. In 1941, the tenants were relocated to the new Brooklyn Terminal Market in Canarsie, and the Wallabout Market was razed. Over the years, parts of the bay and the entirety of the creek had been filled in for expansion. The site of the Wallabout Market is now occupied by Steiner Studios. This small inlet is all that remains of Wallabout Creek. It is essentially unused, except for a few small craft moored in it, and a non-descript ferry stop by the river.


Source: Hidden Waters Blog

             Brownstoner: The Great Wallabout Market