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
Growing land, Squatter Sovereigns and Picking Profit: 1887
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…
What is Affordable Anyhow, May 2025
The issue of affordable housing is always an issue in the greater Red Hook, Brooklyn area, as it is elsewhere, but it is particularly relevant at the time of this writing (Spring 2025) when the NYC…
There are plans (as of this writing in 2025) to rebuild the current federally-subsidized Red Hook Gardens; 31 two-family townhouses, on and around Visitation Place. The new buildings promise that…
Deck work doesn't wait for weather.
Photograph of an able-bodied seaman working in snow flurries at Ira S. Bushey and Sons' old shipyard. The end of the line he is working on has been folded back and braided into itself to form a loop.…
Random Items
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…
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…
What is Affordable Anyhow, May 2025
The issue of affordable housing is always an issue in the greater Red Hook, Brooklyn area, as it is elsewhere, but it is particularly relevant at the time of this writing (Spring 2025) when the NYC…
There are plans (as of this writing in 2025) to rebuild the current federally-subsidized Red Hook Gardens; 31 two-family townhouses, on and around Visitation Place. The new buildings promise that…
PortSide uses of the MARY
PortSide NewYork created this Red Hook WaterStories product.
PortSide is a maritime non-profit founded in Red Hook in 2005.
Our goal is to create a waterfront center with a landing for boats, a home…