By The Red Hook WaterStories team
From the mid-1800s, lots of kinds of cargo were carried by canal boats from the U.S. inland to Red Hook to be shipped out around the world or to be used in local manufacturing. Grain was one of the largest imports, but some canal boats regularly...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
From the late 1800s to the early 1900s, the cereal market started to emerge. Invented in western New York, before long it became popular. With the creation of brands like Kellogg, Quaker Oats, cereal would secure its position as a national...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Grain was king in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the latter half of the 1800s, . Boats loaded with grain would float down the Erie Canal, then down the Hudson River to the grain storehouses of Atlantic Basin, and later, in an even bigger way, Erie...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
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 meals apiece, or a total of 18 meals...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
An article about the cocoa trade in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 24, 1928 reported that “Half of the cocoa of the world is consumed in the United States, Half of the cocoa used in the United States came into Brooklyn piers up to a few months...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Red Hook was feasting on mackerel, late October of 1901. A school of the fish reportedly chased by bluefish and porpoises had found their way into Atlantic Basin. Fishermen lined the piers, catching the mackerel with makeshift poles and any kind of...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The Seaman's Branch of the YMCA, originally established as the Scandinavian Seamen's Mission, hosted 263 unsettled sailors, deckhands, and other maritime men from sixteen nations for Christmas dinner near the piers of Erie Basin in 1938. According...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Brooklyn Life reporter Addison Steele, describes in 1897 the harvesting and pickling of mussles growing on the ramains of ship in Erie basin: A large part of the bull of the sunken Ailsa has been removed from the spot where she went...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
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...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The Ybarra Line began shipping olives, olive oil and other products from Spain to the United States at the beginning of the World War One. They became the preferred line for the shipping of olives by establishing a facility in Erie Basin “for...
