Welcome to 400+ years of Red Hook! Inclusion is a theme in this e-museum that memorializes forgotten, overlooked and erased histories. It’s a resource for locals, tourists, history buffs, urban-planners, educators, students, flaneurs. It tells NYC’s maritime story in microcosm. Explore:
- our waterfront past & present
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contemporary Red Hook retail, arts, non-profits, schools, recreation, transit
- flood prep & resiliency info
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Featured Item
Red Hook Flats has Hermit on Mystery Ship, 1931
Month after month a three-mastered schooner was seen anchored off-shore in the Red Hook Flats. On board was just one man who never went ashore. How he got by was a mystery to the few folk who knew…Full transcript from the Brooklyn Eagle, May 29, 1931
Red Hook Flats has Hermit on Mystery Ship--Jack-of-All-Trades is Aboard Old Schooner Waits for It to Be Sold--By O. R. Pilat
She has been called…
Title Fight: Louis Heineman vs. William Beard
No man ever, perhaps, got so much the best of old Beard as did Louis Heineman, the housemover of the Twelfth ward”
(The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 19, 1891)When Louis Heineman died in 1904, he was reportedly 104 years old, and likely the oldest man in Red Hook if not all of Brooklyn. According to accounts written around the time of his death he came to…
A Quarantine War
The concept of quarantine has been around for a long time. As early as A.D. 549, the Byzantine emperor Justinian ordered the isolation of people traveling from places ridden with the bubonic plague.…Full text of the article from theNew York Herald, June 12, 1870
QUARANTINE WARDr. Cochrane Defending the Brooklyn Merchants --- Who Rules the Roost? --- Exciting Scenes Along the…
Random Items
Red Hook Building Company, 1838
The Red Hook Building Company was the brainchild of Col. Daniel Richards, a man who grew up in upstate New York. When the Erie Canal opened in 1825 and had a powerful economic effect, Richards was…Select text from the Proposal. (A pdf of the full original is linked below)
"The advantages of Brooklyn as a place of residence, as well as for commercial purposes - in view of its proximity to the…
Tug boat recipes, 1953
In 1953, Thomas Thompson, cook aboard Dalzell Towing's tugboat Datzellera, wrote a guest column for the Brooklyn Eagle's feature Harbor Lights. “I am allocated $10.05 per day to feed six men, three…●
Text of Article:
BROOKLYN EAGLE, WED JUNE 3, 1953
Harbor Lights By JEANNE TOOMEY (Miss Toomey is on vacation. Her guest columnist today is Thomas Thompson, cook aboard the Datzellera, sensational…
S. W. Bowne Grain Storehouse, 1886 to 2019
Updates on the building and the efforts to save it or raze it:
June 14, 2018, a fire occurred in historic S. W. Bowne warehouse.FDNY concluded that the fire was arson and "the investigation is…Report on the History of the S. W. Bowne Grain Storehouse for the Army Corp of Engineers, 2004
This imposing structure at the mouth of the Gowanus Canal was, until 2019, one of the few surviving…
How the Hamilton Avenue Ferry ended, 1942
In 1846 when Hamilton Avenue Ferry service to Manhattan started it was the only mass transit option to and from Red Hook, Brooklyn. This was no longer the case in 1914, street cars and elevated subway…Decline in Buttermilk ChannelPassenger Traffic by the numbers:
1934 – 594,6201935 – 576,4631936 – 515,0141937 – 420,9491938 – 431,4881939 – 368,6541940 – 447,7381941 – 482,0291942 – 261,2631943 – 675…