A Story of Sands Street

Today's photo of the week takes us to the corner of Sands and Navy Streets in Vinegar Hill, a section of Downtown Brooklyn adjacent to the Navy Yard. While the neighborhood was named for the final battle of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, reflecting the large Irish population who settled here in the early to mid-1800s, people of all backgrounds resided in Vinegar Hill's densely-built streets. The Downtown Brooklyn area had been home to a vibrant free Black community from the early 1800s—evidenced by the African Church indicated on this block in 1855—and its proximity to the Navy Yard and waterfront job opportunities attracted a diverse and continuously evolving community of new immigrants over the following century. By the early 1900s, the block pictured above was primarily home to immigrants from Italy (the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported in 1907 on a performance of opera pieces staged at this corner to entertain the large Italian community), but also to immigrants from Ireland and Japan.

From artists and writers like Walt Whitman to Navy Yard laborers and sailors, the area also provided a place of freedom for the LGBTQ community, as Hugh Ryan explored in the exhibition, "On the Queer Waterfront," staged at Brooklyn Historical Society in 2019.

In addition to sheltering these residents, Sands Street was a main commercial thoroughfare leading directly to the western gate of the Navy Yard. It housed tattoo parlors, bars, gambling houses, and brothels, which vexed both city planners and authorities at the Navy Yard, prompting a variety of responses over the next decades. In the 1920s, the Brooklyn Navy Yard Commandant ordered the closure of the Sands Street entrance in an attempt to discourage sailors from visiting these establishments. In the 1940s, much of the area was demolished, and in 1952, the Farragut Houses opened on three city blocks, including those at the intersection of Navy and Sands streets, displacing an estimated two hundred businesses and eighteen hundred residences.

For more information on the LGBTQ history of Sands Street and the neighborhood bordering the Navy Yard, see Hugh Ryan's book, When Brooklyn Was Queer.

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