page_title: Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn
section_title: 19th century
hierarchical_section_title: Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn / History / 19th century
caption_attribution_description: English: Historic building in Vinegar Hill
context_page_description: Vinegar Hill is a neighborhood in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City on the East River Waterfront between Dumbo and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The neighborhood is locally governed by Brooklyn Community Board 2 and is policed by the New York City Police Department's 84th Precinct. The large Irish-American population in Vinegar Hill made it one of several New York City neighborhoods once known colloquially as Irishtown.
context_section_description: In the first years of the nineteenth century, Jackson sold 40 acres (16 ha) to the United States government for the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and then built additional housing for Navy Yard personnel. Jackson named the area in honor of the Battle of Vinegar Hill, the last battle of an Irish-English conflict, with the hope of attracting Irish immigrants to the area, although Germans, Norwegians and Poles also settled there.
  The Sands family, who had amassed a fortune as merchants and speculators, laid out their land, located west of Jackson's property, into blocks and lots for a community to be called "Olympia” as early as 1787.
  The brothers expected Olympia to become a summer retreat for New Yorkers because of its hilly topography, plentiful water, and refreshing breezes. However, the Sandses' lots that are located within the historic district were not developed residentially until the mid-1830s to the early 1850s.
  In the 1800s and 1810s, the area started developing faster. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, the heirs of John Jackson sold off their estate's remaining lots on Hudson Avenue, which were developed individually or in small groups in the 1840s and 1850s with houses that have Greek Revival and Italianate characteristics because of the associations with Athenian democracy. 
  Classic Greek architectural forms were reinterpreted by the architects and builders of the new Republic in their designs for buildings both large and small, whether State Capitol or small row house. Further residential construction occurred on a few remaining vacant lots on Hudson Avenue, Water Street, and Front Street in the years following the Civil War.
  In the mid-19th century, the area became home to illegal distilleries producing moonshine known as "potheen"  (from Irish poitín, "little pot"). Alcohol was legal but heavily taxed, and the moonshining trade pumped significant cash to the working-class neighborhood. In Vinegar Hill, the potheen business was operated largely by a quartet consisting of John Devlin, John Whiteford, "Ginger" Farrell, and "Ned" Brady. The Bureau of Internal Revenue, created in 1862 and desperate for funds after the costly American Civil War, would send in Army veterans to raid the neighborhood and destroy the stills.
  On one occasion, in 1870, the Army destroyed stills that were capable of churning out 250 barrels of alcohol each day—a volume worth $5,000 in unpaid taxes  (equivalent to $101,092 in 2019). The battles between the government and the neighborhood became known as the "Whisky Wars" and left the residents of Vinegar Hill suspicious of outsiders.
  An 1894 article in The New York Times recalled those days:
  "The extent of the moonshine traffic was never fully known to outsiders. The whole neighborhood was a unit in defense of the stills. While from scores of cellars the smoke of illegal and surreptitious manufacture ascended, access was not easy and proof of guilt was difficult to obtain. The peasantry of the Wickford (sic) Mountains were never firmer in their sympathy with the makers of "potheen" than were these denizens of ancient "Irishtown." The wary intruder who passed that way had good reason to avoid suspicion of being a spy. The least intimation that he was inquisitively included would bring a rabble at his heels and insure him a cracked crown if not more grievous injuries."—New York Times, March 18, 1894
caption: Building on corner of Hudson and Plymouth
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