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

A Cruise in the Erie Basin, by Don C. Seitz, 1892
A Cruise in the Erie Basin, an article by Don C. Seitz, and published in Frank Leslie's magazinesin 1892, relates the story of Red Hook's Erie Basin.
It grew from a scene with “hardly a building to…

The MARY A. WHALEN
A PDF guide to MARY A. WHALEN inEnglish,French,German,Spanish,Italian
The oil tankerMARY A. WHALENwas launched May 21, 1938.The ship is PortSide NewYork's ambassador to theBLUEspaceand site of our…

PS GENERAL SLOCUM - Disaster and Memory
The GENERAL SLOCUM ended service as a sinking fireball June 15, 1904, killing over 1,000, most of them women and children. 1,300 were aboard.
That made the SLOCUM famous. Her fame was then forgotten…
Random Items
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…
A Cruise in the Erie Basin, by Don C. Seitz, 1892
A Cruise in the Erie Basin, an article by Don C. Seitz, and published in Frank Leslie's magazinesin 1892, relates the story of Red Hook's Erie Basin.
It grew from a scene with “hardly a building to…
Winter Life on Canal Boats, 1915
Near Christmas time, 1915, a female reporter and an illustrator for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, visited a few of the many canal boats and barges moored for the winter in Erie Basin “in search of a story…Full article text:
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 26, 1915
WINTER LIFE ON CANAL BOATSResidents of Erie Basin Celebrate the Holidays in Much the Same Fashion as Folk Ashore.
GUESSING the right house…