From the Archives
Meredith Wisner
1 week, 2 days ago
Howard Zinn (top right), posing with his fellow Apprentice Association teammates
Through a serendipitous perusal of the Navy Yard's Shipworker, I found the above image of a dashing Howard Zinn posing after his basketball team’s victory in a Navy Yard tournament. What’s particularly profound about this discovery is that Zinn shared a story about this very team in an oral history he gave on December 8th, 2008. We’re always excited to find visual evidence of the stories our narrators tell, and given the significance of Howard Zinn’s life and his vivid account of the formation of this team, this discovery is all the more poignant. Here’s the full article for your reading enjoyment:
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From the Archives
Meredith Wisner
2 months ago
Manatus Map (detail), Library of Congress, Geography and Maps Division, 1639
The archive and exhibition staff are just now putting the final touches on our next BLDG 92 talk, Mapping History: 400 Years in 5 Minutes, which will be held at BLDG 92 tonight (March 15th) at 6:30. In this panel discussion we will cover how technology and archival materials merged to create our most popular museum feature, the 5 foot round interactive map table that lives in our timeline gallery. If you're interested in attending there are still some seats left. Book a spot on our events page, here.
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From the Archives
Meredith Wisner
3 months, 4 weeks ago
Walloon Church, Site of the Wedding of Joris Jansen Rapelje and Catalyntje Trico
As the story goes, on January 21, 1624 Joris Jansen Rapelje and his bride-to-be Catalyntje Trico married hastily in the Walloon Church of Amsterdam. Four days later they would board a ship departing for the New World. After a brief stay in Fort Orange (now Albany, New York), where Joris found work with the Dutch West India Company, and another move to Fort Amsterdam on the Island of Manhattan, the Rapeljes became the first settlers of this area; a small oyster bed called Rinnegackonck that was later renamed Wallabout bay.
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From the Archives
Meredith Wisner
4 months, 3 weeks ago
Navy Yard tenant, Thomas Witte, installed for us yesterday an amazing group of paintings that reinterpret archival photographs from the Brooklyn Navy Yard's collection onto salvaged glass found around our 300 acres (adaptive reuse was never so inspiring!). We really love how he's taken these utilitarian photographs--once used to document advancements at the Yard during the post WWI, WPA and WWII period--and made them evoke more palpably the human experience of life on the Yard. Yesterday we posted the source photos on our Facebook page, and through that post The L Magazine responded with an amusing piece on Brooklyn's first hipster.
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From the Archives
Meredith Wisner
5 months ago
Shipworker, December 23, 1960
51 Years ago today a forklift accident aboard the USS Constellation caused 502 gallons of fuel to spill and become ignited by welders working in her decks below. 50 men to lose their lives and at least 330 were injured. The resulting fire was so intense that support was required from neighboring fire departments--who were already exhausted from the Park Slope plane crash that occured just three days earlier. It took 17 hours to put out the blaze. The fire remains one of the most tragic events in Brooklyn history.
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