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22-507: The nearby neighborhood of Wallabout , dating back to the 17th century, is adjacent to the bay. The neighborhood is a mixed use area with an array of old wood-frame buildings, public housing, brick townhouses, and warehouses; it contains the historic Lefferts-Laidlaw House , which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. The name of this curved bay on the western end of "Lang Eylandt" (Long Island) comes from

44-581: A Brooklyn magistrate as well as a member of the Council of Twelve Men . Rapelje's son-in-law Hans Hansen Bergen owned a large tract adjoining Rapelje's. Nearby were tobacco plantations belonging to Jan and Pieter Monfort, Peter Caesar Alberto, and other farmers. Starting in 1637, the Wallabout served as the landing site of the first ferry across the East River from lower Manhattan. Cornelis Dircksen,

66-706: A 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. Gabriel Furman, in his Notes Geographical and Historical, relating to

88-549: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . River Waal The Waal ( Dutch name, pronounced [ʋaːl] ) is the main distributary branch of the river Rhine flowing approximately 80 km (50 mi) through the Netherlands . It is the major waterway connecting the port of Rotterdam to Germany . Before it reaches Rotterdam, it joins with the Afgedamde Maas near Woudrichem to form

110-626: The Boven Merwede . Along its length, Nijmegen , Tiel , Zaltbommel and Gorinchem are towns of importance with direct access to the river. The river, which is the main channel in the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta system, carries 65% of the total flow of the Rhine. The name Waal, in Roman times called Vacalis, Vahalis or Valis , later Vahal , is of Germanic origin and is named after

132-585: The Canarsee Indians for some 335 acres (1.36 km) of land at Wallabout Bay, but Rapelje, like other early Wallabout settlers, waited at least a decade before relocating full-time to the area, until conflicts with the tribes had been resolved. Most historical accounts put Rapelje's house as the first house built at Wallabout Bay. His daughter Sarah was the first child born of European parentage in New Netherland , and Rapelje later served as

154-454: The Noord were also called Waal. Near Hendrik-Ido-Ambacht , the mainstream continued west until it flowed into Oude Maas near Heerjansdam . This last stretch past Hendrik-Ido-Ambacht, which separated the river islands of IJsselmonde and Zwijndrechtse Waard , is still called Waal, but is more commonly known as Waaltje (Dutch for Little Waal ). It has been dammed off at both ends, making

176-576: The Taylor Map of New York , and later fill joined it to the mainland. The bay was nicknamed "Potter's Field" among sailors in the 19th and 20th centuries because so many dead bodies would float into the bay during slack tide. In 1951, writer Joseph Mitchell wrote about it in "The Bottom of the Harbor" published in The New Yorker : This backwater is called Wallabout Bay on charts; the men on

198-681: The Walt Whitman Houses and the Farragut Houses . The neighborhood's name is rarely used anymore, being split into Fort Greene , Clinton Hill , and Bedford Stuyvesant . Wallabout was originally inhabited by the Brooklyn Navy Yard workers. Many of the historic row houses were built by the navy yard workers as well. 40°41′37″N 73°58′10″W  /  40.69361°N 73.96944°W  / 40.69361; -73.96944 This New York City –related article

220-486: The 17th century, when a group of Walloons, French-speaking Protestants from what is now Belgium, settled along the nearby bay. They called it “Waal-bogt,” or “bend in the harbor.” It is a mixed use area with an array of old wood-frame buildings, public housing, brick townhouses and warehouses. It is bounded by Navy Street to the west, the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Flushing Avenue to the north, Myrtle Avenue to

242-510: The 18th and 20th centuries to improve the river as an economically important shipping route. Some of the cut-off bends are still visible near the main river and are sometimes reconnected to it in times of high water levels. In the Middle Ages , the name "Waal" continued after the confluence with the Meuse . The delta parts now known as Boven Merwede, Beneden Merwede and the upper section of

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264-572: The Dutch "Waal bocht", which means " Walloons ' Bend", named for its first European settlers: the Walloons, from what is today Wallonia . The Wallabout was first settled by Europeans when several families of French-speaking Walloons opted to purchase land there in the early 1630s, having arrived in New Netherland in the previous decade from Holland . Settlement of the area began in the mid-1630s when Joris Jansen Rapelje exchanged trade goods with

286-638: The Town of Brooklyn, in Kings County on Long-Island (1824), traces the name from the Dutch "Waal bocht" or "bay (or bight) of the Walloons", referring to the original French-speaking settlers of the local area. Another theory ascribes it to the River Waal , an arm of the Rhine , an important inland waterway in the Netherlands , long referred to as "inner harbor" which would speak to the geographic position of

308-601: The Wallabout to become the city of Brooklyn . Wallabout Bay was the site of one of the earliest murder trials in Brooklyn's history. On June 5, 1665, Barent Jansen Blom, an immigrant from Sweden and progenitor of the Blom/Bloom family of Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, was stabbed to death by Albert Cornelis Wantenaer, allegedly in self-defense. Wantenaer was tried for murder in the Court of Assize on October 2, 1665. He

330-518: The bay. 40°42′18″N 73°58′30″W  /  40.70500°N 73.97500°W  / 40.70500; -73.97500 Wallabout, Brooklyn Wallabout is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn that dates back to the 17th century. It is one of the oldest areas of Brooklyn, in the area that was once Wallabout Bay but has largely been filled in and is now the Brooklyn Navy Yard . The name Wallabout comes from

352-509: The borders shrank, and Wallabout was fitted just outside the Brooklyn Navy Yard . The Lefferts-Laidlaw House was built about 1840 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. The Wallabout Historic District was added in 2011 and the Wallabout Industrial Historic District in 2012. Wallabout includes four public housing projects: The Marcy Houses , The Raymond V. Ingersoll Houses,

374-521: The dredges call it Potter's Field. The eddy sweeps driftwood into the backwater. Also, it sweeps drownded 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

396-401: The eroding shore in shallow graves, or often simply thrown overboard. The Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument in nearby Fort Greene , which houses some of the prisoners' remains, was built to honor these casualties. The bay eventually became the site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard . Parts of the bay were filled in to expand the yard. In the late 19th century, fill created a small island, as depicted in

418-564: The lone ferryman, farmed plots on both sides—near to where the Brooklyn Bridge now spans—to best employ his time on either bank of the river. A feudal system of land tenure was suspended in 1638, and the small settlement became a colony of freeholders : after a ten-year period of paying the Dutch East India Company a tenth of their yield, colonists would own their farmland. The humble colony expanded out from

440-606: The many meanders in the river ( West Germanic languages : wôh , lit.   'crooked'). It is, in turn, thought to have inspired early Dutch settlers of the Hudson Valley region in New York to name the Wallkill River after it ( Waalkil "Waal Creek "). The current river shows little signs of these great bends, since it has been the subject of numerous normalisation projects carried out between

462-432: The south and Marcy Avenue to the east. In the early 1800s, however, Wallabout was just a village inside of the town of Brooklyn. The Brooklyn we know today was divided up into six towns: Brooklyn, Gravesend, Flatlands, Flatbush, New Utrect, and Bushwick. Wallabout was one of the villages in the town of Brooklyn, bordering other villages in Brooklyn, like Bedford and Gowanus. But over time as Brooklyn became more industrialized,

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484-562: Was convicted of a lesser charge of manslaughter, suffering the punishment of loss of his property and a year's imprisonment. The area was the site where British prison ships moored during the American Revolutionary War from 1776 to 1783, were thousands of American prisoners of war were kept. Around 12,000 American prisoners of war were said to have died in captivity by 1783, when all the remaining prisoners were freed. The majority died due to disease; some were buried on

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