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, the search window, or interactive map. On the map, click the colored, numbered dots to expand multiple items in that location. Then, click on a pin to explore that item. Anchor icons mean sites of major importance.More about this site
Click empty spot on map to activate it
Featured Item
Insurance maps of the Warehouses, &c. in Brooklyn, 1861
Insurance maps of the Warehouses, &c. in Brooklyn from the Navy Yard to Portition Street, By W M. Perris, C.E. and Surveyor. Perris & Browne, Publishers of Insurance Maps, Corrected to October 1861,…
Flattening Bergen Hill for Red Hook Fill
Bergen Hill once stood tall in Brooklyn, before developers had it carted away for fill to make the Atlantic Docks of Red Hook. Looking at historic maps from 1775, 1837 and 2004 cartographer Eymund…
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…
Random Items
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…
S. W. Bowne Grain Storehouse, 1886
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 is one of the few surviving traces of the…
RMC Canvas and Rope
The staff of RMC Canvas and Rope, posing by their hand-made rope fender. The Red Hook company ended its long run serving the maritime businesses in 2005.
Ad For Atlantic Docks, 1847
Construction of The Atlantic Dock - a massive, man-made harbor for deep water ships, began on June 3, 1841. The erection of stout stone warehouses and towering grain elevators that could handle…●
Text from an Advetisement in Doggets New York City Directory for 1847
Storage for Grain, Flour, Sugar, Molasses, Cotton, ETC.,
AT THE
ATLANTIC DOCK, NEW-YORK.
FORTY ACRES WATER SURFACE WITHIN THE…