The photos and interviews you see are part of an ongoing project documenting the lives of the inhabitants of Vinegar Hill, Dumbo and Farragut, the three neighborhoods that once made up the Navy Yard District in Brooklyn, New York.

For nearly a century--until the mid-1950's--this neighborhood was at once boisterous and productive, a thriving community of row houses, factories, churches and bars wedged into a corner formed by the East River's Wallabout Channel and the Navy Yard's west wall.

Fifty years ago, visitors leaving the Navy Yard's west gate stepped into an Italian (primarily Neapolitan) community dating back to the 1860s. Old photos show tenements, crowded sidewalks and rows of storefronts running off into the distance along Navy Street. The churches of St. Ann's and St. George and "The Gold," a movie theater, dominated the neighborhood.

But this area (Sands, Navy, and Gold Streets in particular) was also known by merchant marines around the world for its bars, brothels, and tattoo parlors. The local YMCA dispensed with bunk beds, hanging hammocks for the visiting sailors. Drunken brawls involving Marines, U.S. Navy men and the Sand Street Boys, a local gang, spilled out into the streets on weekends.

The community was also famous as the birthplace of Al Capone, who attended P.S. 7 on York Street. La Cosa Nostra functioned as a surrogate government. From a series of social clubs scattered throughout the district's east end, they essentially ran the Navy Yard District, finding jobs for immigrants, paying off the police and settling local disputes. Several prominent gangland assassinations took place in the neighborhood; the bodies of mob soldiers were occasionally found in the trunks of cars parked under the Manhattan Bridge.

But the vast majority of the neighborhood's inhabitants were working people, many employed in the Navy Yard. At its peak during World War II, a quarter-million men and women built ships in the Yard's three-hundred-foot dry docks.

As one crossed Bridge Street heading west, the row houses gave way to five- and six-story concrete factories sprawled under the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. Many locals worked as laborers in these heavily industrial blocks, or as longshoremen on the docks that lined this part of the East River like the teeth of a comb. Sheep unloaded here were herded through the neighborhood to a slaughterhouse on Hudson Avenue.

Many of the neighborhood factories had huge sliding doors, allowing trains to run directly through the interiors, picking up goods to be loaded onto ships tied up only yards away along the East River, then shipped all over the world. Products as diverse as textiles, licorice, pharmaceuticals, Styrofoam cups, Eskimo Pies (ice cream) and soap were produced here. The economy was such that former workers describe being laid-off in the morning and finding new work in the afternoon. The District denizens certainly weren't rich, but they wanted for little and they had the luxury of steady work within walking distance of their homes.

The northeastern corner of the District was formally known as Vinegar Hill, so-named by the Sands brothers, two 19th Century real estate developers who, in an effort to attract the Irish flooding New York after the potato famine, named the neighborhood after a legendary Irish battle. Later, large numbers of Polish immigrants settled there as well; Italians and Irish who inhabited the District in the forties and fifties draw a blank when asked about "Vinegar Hill." Describe the area and their eyes light up, "Oh, you mean Pollocktown," they say with no apparent malice. A small number of merchant marines, mostly Filipinos, settled throughout this area as well.

The Navy Yard District also figures in the history of gay New York. The area was known in gay circles for a waterfront bar on John Street, where gay men (W.H. Auden being one prominent example) from Brooklyn Heights and Manhattan could congregate or mingle with the neighborhood's "rough trade." The lucrative bar was Mafia-owned, ensuring that the patrons weren't harassed, this in an era before political correctness and in a heavily Catholic community known for a propensity towards violence.

Like much of New York City--and for many of the same reasons--the Navy Yard District entered a period of decline in the 1950's. The District's manufacturing jobs began to dry up as operations shifted to Asia, the Caribbean and to non-union southern states. New Jersey emerged as a better deep-water port than Brooklyn and for the first time cargo moved in and out of the city largely by truck (pot-holing the roads, causing congestion and creating long-term pollution problems in the city). The docks soon fell idle.

Nearly simultaneously, Robert Moses approved construction of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway which cut through the heart of the neighborhood, and the New York City Housing Authority began construction of the Farragut projects, tearing down the Italian neighborhood near Navy, Gold, Prospect, and York Streets. Former residents describe moving from block to block every few months--one step ahead of the wrecking crews.

The projects were completed in the mid-1950s. Memories differ as to whether the city honored their promise to house the displaced Italians in the new NYCHA projects. Certainly some Italians found homes there, but in any case they didn't stay long. The city expected the Italians to share their former neighborhood with Hispanics and a large number of African-Americans from the southern states. The whites promptly fled. As one former white resident said recently, "Especially if you had daughters, you didn�t want them around those people. We all moved out." Most ended up in Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, New Jersey or--after the Verrazano was completed in 1964--Staten Island.

In the mid-1970s a group of artists from the Studio School discovered the manufacturing area near the Manhattan Bridge--by that time partially vacant. They quickly established homes and studios in the vacant lofts and renamed the area Dumbo, for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. This formally spelled the end of Navy Yard District. The projects had by this time emerged as a self-contained Latino and African-American community known simply as Farragut. Vinegar Hill's remaining row houses were home to a few remaining Polish and Irish inhabitants. And Dumbo became a quiet, mixed-use community of small factories and (mostly white) artist's lofts. Three architecturally, racially and economically distinct communities had emerged.

Farragut and Vinegar Hill have stayed largely off the city's radar screen. Dumbo is a different story; Manhattan real estate developer David Walentas noted the area's stunning river views, artist community and proximity to lower Manhattan. "I always follow the artists," the New York Times quotes him as saying. After the stock market crash in 1987, Walentas bought a huge portion of the neighborhood from Harry Helmsley for 12 million dollars and embarked on a plan to turn the area into Brooklyn's SoHo, replete with hotels, shopping malls and a huge multiplex cinema. "It's the first time I owned an entire neighborhood," he explained.

As his plan gathered steam in the mid-1990s, real estate values skyrocketed. Artists began to feel the squeeze--harassed and priced out of lofts that were now valuable property. April Tyler, a Brooklyn real estate agent, remembers getting a call from a client whom inquired about Dumbo, "I can't find anything for a million dollars in Manhattan," he told her. "Do you have anything available in Dumbo?"

Walentas' master plan has been scuttled by the city's planning agencies but he continues to upscale the neighborhood at a steady pace, turning factories into quarter-million dollar condos at a rapid clip. Yet Dumbo has not lost its energy and diversity. The factory buildings not owned by Walentas house an eclectic mix of small factories and artists studios.

Artists and factory workers, project and condo dwellers, Jehovah's Witnesses and Buddhist monks all pour off the F train at York Street on any given morning. And the former Navy Yard District continues to evolve.

Michael Kamber, June, 2000

For more on the Navy Yard District, See Mike McCabe's book, New York City Tattoo: the Oral History of an Urban Art.