The Hill Named for a Lost Battle

The small cluster of row houses tucked beneath the elevated roadways here takes its name from a battle fought across the ocean, in Ireland, chosen on purpose to lure immigrant workers to a shipyard next door. On June twenty first, seventeen ninety eight, British government forces crushed an Irish uprising at the Battle of Vinegar Hill, near the town of Enniscorthy, in a lopsided fight that ended the rebels' hold on the surrounding countryside. Estimates of the rebel dead vary widely, but by any count the losses were far heavier on the Irish side.

Decades later, a Brooklyn developer named John Jackson borrowed that name on purpose. Jackson named this patch of waterfront Vinegar Hill specifically to attract Irish immigrants, betting that the name of a famous Irish rebellion would draw settlers the way a familiar word from home often does. It worked well enough that in the early eighteen hundreds, Jackson sold forty acres of his land to the United States government for a new shipyard next door, the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He then built housing nearby for the shipyard's workers, many of them the same Irish immigrants he had set out to attract.

For a while, Vinegar Hill was a real neighborhood with real size, stretching south as far as Tillary Street. Then the twentieth century took most of it away. Construction of the Manhattan Bridge in the early nineteen hundreds destroyed a large section of the area outright. Decades later, the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, built through here in the nineteen fifties, sliced off even more, leaving the small historic core you're passing now isolated beneath the highway and the bridge approach, a handful of nineteenth century row houses surrounded on nearly every side by elevated concrete.