From January 1944 to March 1946, about 2500 prisoners of war, mostly German naval personnel, were confined in an isolated complex of barracks and barbed-wire compounds north of here along both sides of 64th Street. On December 23 and 24, 1944, twenty-five prisoners of war escaped through a hand-dug tunnel that emerged on the canal bank east of the Sheridan Avenue and 66th Street intersection. Although all were eventually recaptured, it was the largest escape by Axis prisoners from a U.S. compound during World War II.