Fort Greene Park Prison Ship Martyrs Monument

The Prison Ship Martyrs Monument is a 149-foot Doric column atop Fort Greene Park that commemorates the over 11,500 American prisoners of war who died aboard British prison ships anchored in Wallabout Bay during the Revolutionary War.

More Americans died on the British prison ships than were killed in all the battles of the Revolution combined. The prisoners, captured soldiers and sailors, were held in horrific conditions in the holds of decommissioned warships, where disease, starvation, and exposure killed them by the thousands.

The monument, designed by Stanford White and dedicated in 1908, contains a crypt holding the remains of prisoners recovered from the Wallabout Bay shoreline. The bones were originally gathered by local residents who found them washing ashore for decades after the war.

Fort Greene Park itself was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the creators of Central Park and Prospect Park, making it one of three Brooklyn parks designed by the legendary landscape architects.

The Prison Ship Martyrs Monument honors the greatest sacrifice of the American Revolution on a hilltop designed by the greatest landscape architects of the 19th century, a memorial to suffering that is one of the tallest and least-known monuments in New York City.