Today:
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I want to post a short (non-) answer after going down a minor rabbit hole thanks to this archived question from /u/fishlope- about early maps of Brooklyn showing a square structure cryptically named "The Block" in Wallabout Bay.
Hoping there'd be a straightforward answer I ended up spending a couple days haplessly digging through newspaper archives and histories of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Even several 19th-century histories of Brooklyn (like this and this) that concern themselves with minutia like dates of property transfers and building construction say nothing about it. Wallabout Bay, as OP mentions, figures prominently into Brooklyn's history thanks to it being the site of the infamous British prison ships and later the Navy Yard, yet The Block goes unmentioned.
A few things we do know. Looking at an early map of the bay, we see a wide mud flat in its center. "The Block" is clearly placed at the northern end of this shallow area. It would have appeared sometime after the Navy purchased land along the bay in 1801, and before being incorporated into a bigger artificial island by 1844 (note the island's clearly square-shaped northern tip).
That artificial island was called the "Cob Dock" by the navy:
According to navy yard lore, the Cob Dock was built up from discharged cobblestones that had been used as ballast by sailing ships in the yard’s early days. Over time, this infill provided a good berthing space for ships... At its northern end, the small island provided ordnance storage. Several buildings (demolished), such as a shell house, a gunner’s house and gun skids, occupied the tip of the island.
The Block probably represented an early step in the process of filling this land. Its remnants can be seen in this 1859 print showing the square-shaped northern portion of the Cob Dock where the ordinance houses were located.
Its exact use, and why cartographers felt the need to so clearly label it, remains a bit of a mystery. Maybe it was a place for ships to moor while they awaited berth at the Navy Yard, or across the East River in Manhattan. (One of the maps linked by OP does label other "mooring blocks" in the bay.) The first four decades of the 19th Century saw a significant increase in shipping activity in New York which led to a buildup of facilities on both sides of the river. Some ships were also occasionally banned from docking in Manhattan during yellow fever scares, thus forcing them to find a place to wait in Brooklyn.
Maybe it dates from the War of 1812 when various fortifications around New York's waterways were built and improved, although if it were a serious wartime fortification I think more mention of it would appear in the record. But the increase of activity at the Navy Yard alone may have necessitated a sturdy structure in the bay.
Maybe it simply served as a marker of the northern end of the unnavigable mud flats. Maybe it was all of these things. Happy for someone with some maritime expertise to weigh in/suggest sources!
Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap
Friday, July 15 - Thursday, July 21
###Top 10 Posts
| score | comments | title & link |
|---|---|---|
| 3,634 | 47 comments | Muhammad died in 632 AD. The Green Dome in which he is supposedly entombed was built in 1279 AD, almost 650 years after his death. Is there any reason to believe his body is actually in there? |
| 3,359 | 101 comments | Did medieval european cities have some kind of „nightlife“? Were there taverns or other places open through the night? Would you encounter medieval party people stumbling through the streets at ungodly hours? Or would the cities have been deserted after nightfall? |
| 2,914 | 184 comments | If slavery was explicitly protected within the Confederate Constitution, what defense do pro-Confederate people have against that? |
| 2,433 | 78 comments | Singapore was founded after it was involuntarily expelled from Malaysia. It was poor and had limited natural resources. How did it rise to become one of the wealthiest countries in the world? |
| 2,199 | 77 comments | what's up with the sickly child trope? |
| 1,988 | 5 comments | These days, even billionaires drink the same soft drinks as everyone else, and spend much of their lives on phones even the median citizen can afford with a little saving. Are such standardized consumer goods a product exclusive to the past century, or are there historical antecedents? |
| 1,737 | 46 comments | At the end of WWII the US famously dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, both cities are still major population cities in Japan today. What was the reason the nuclear fallout didn't turn them into ghost areas like we see with present day Pripyat after Chernobyl? |
| 1,719 | 46 comments | Between 1975 and 2010 the number of healthcare administrators grew by 3200%, with this growth really beginning in earnest in the early 1990's. What changed in the early 90's to account for this vast increase in hospital administrators? |
| 1,651 | 24 comments | People joke about how realistically Captain America ought to have repellent views, but how would an average working class Irish-American man from Brooklyn have viewed racial segregation? |
| 1,602 | 18 comments | Following the French Revolution, the other nations of Europe were shocked and outraged by death of Louis XVI, resulting in military intervention. 150 years prior, Charles I of England was similarly executed by his own people, but no foreign intervention occurred. Why were the reactions so different? |
###Top 10 Comments
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Can you recommend me a book that covers the whole history of China if such a book exists? I know that's thousands of years to cover, I'm not looking for anything that's too in depth, I don't know almost anything about the history of China and I'd like a starting point
Why didn’t the pre-civil war US government buy all the slaves using Eminent Domain and set them free? Slaves were illegal to important after 1807 and the Fifth Amendment says that “property” can be taken, which is what slaves were considered to be. Would it have cost too much, was there no political will, would the Supreme Court have struck it down, would this idea have been considered crazy? I’m sure there were multiple good reasons, just looking for what the answer is.
I am going for my masters degree in Medieval History. I got accepted to the University of Glasgow and Trinity College Dublin (yay!) I do plan on pursuing my doctorate in the same feild at a different school (hopefully in the UK or Norway) but for the moment my concern is picking the best program.
Upon looking online, everything is of course pointing to Cambridge, Oxford, and the University of Oslo, but I cannot easily determine which of the two I got accepted to is better respected in the academic and professional feild. I have gathered from some blog posts that Glasgow is more respected in Europe but Trinity is more recognizable globally.
Does anyone in the Medieval realm know about these university's and how they are viewed in the academic/professional world? Granted, there are a multitude of factors that will go into me picking my school, but I know how much a name on a diploma or resume can matter so I do want to take it into some consideration as well as trying to get the best education possible. Any input would be greatly appreciated! Thanks medievalists!