A project by PortSide NewYork

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
  • contemporary Red Hook retail, arts, non-profits, schools, recreation, transit

  • flood prep & resiliency info

Explore via menus...

Click empty spot on map to activate it

Random Items

A fair portion of today’s Red Hook was once water. An 1887 article in the Brookyn Eagle marvels that Henry and neighboring streets have been extended nearly half a mile in ten years. Marshes with…Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sunday July 3 1887Transcription. HENRY STREET’S CHANGES--A Walk at the Lower End Well Worth Taking.--The Growth of a Year and a Half – Squatter Sovereigns – Side Thoroughfares…

Alf Dyrland was Captain of the MARY A. WHALEN from her rechristening in 1962 until 1978 when he retired. He was her first captain; she was his last boat. Alf loved the MARY deeply. As he lay dying in…Index of Items Telegram, February 12, 1946 to Alf Dyrland declaring the Government takeover of the marine transportation and towing companies in the New York Harbor area and directing strikers to…

In 1921, the Brooklyn Spar Company advertised in The Marine Journal that it sold wooden masts and posts for derricks and flag poles, which the company made at its waterfront facility at the foot of…

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…