Visitation Place in Red Hook, Brooklyn, was co-named Nancy Kearse Gooding Way on December 10, 2023. Red Hook in the 1970s was going through tough times. Longshoremen strikes idled many, and industries that depended on shipping then laid off...
Pete Panto (1910 - 1939)
Pietro "Pete" Panto was an Italian American longshoreman and union activist who was murdered by the mob for speaking out and organizing against currupt union leadership. The Red Hook WaterStories team has not written an entry about him yet but...
Captain Maude Jensen, first female licensed pilot of steam vessels in New York Harbor, 1905
"You don't know what I mean about that job out there do you? I thought not. Well, it's this way. Down here in the towing, and ice and water supply business we have a great deal of competition. No, it is not friendly competition, I might almost say...
Books for Brooklyn Boats: Captain Benn's Library Service for Sailors, 1900s
All day and into the night Captain Benn made his rounds of Brooklyn's piers supplying newly arrived vessels with something that he said could keep sailors sane and captains ethical: reading material. Benn had been spreading words for 11 years by...
The Signal Success of Martha Coston, 1826-1904
“So little opportunity have women had hitherto for demonstrating their capability for business, that it can only be indicated by the success of some particular woman in some unusual and exceptional pursuit; and I know of no better illustration...
William Yorke - the Erie Basin Artist
William Yorke was an artist who lived on a boat in the Erie Basin with his wife, son, and two dogs in 1882. After his boat was destroyed in a steamboat accident and Yorke was found living in a hut by the waterfront with his family, his story was...
Leonard Thomas, aka "The Chicken Man"
Red Hook’s east side is bounded by the Gowanus Bay which funnels into the Gowanus Canal at the Hamilton Avenue Bridge. PortSide’s flagship the tanker MARY A. WHALEN frequently delivered home heating oil to the two Bayside fuel terminals on...
Larry the Bugler, 1889
In 1889, several newspapers reported on Lawrence Grob, a citizen of Red Hook who earned the nickname “Larry the Bugler'' from his neighbors. Every morning, from his residence on Conover Street, near the Atlantic Docks, Grob used his bugle to wake...
Fugitive Slave Case – Red Hook Point, December 4, 1857
Four years before the American Civil War, a legal battle emerged from a situation that occurred aboard a steamship from Savannah to New York. One of the passengers, Thomas Steele, a light skinned man, was accused of being a fugitive slave by another...
Christopher Nicolson Red Hook winemaker and Alaskan red salmon fisherman.
Christopher Nicolson is the managing winemaker for the Red Hook Winery but that by itself does not provide enough for him and his family to live in Brooklyn. His main income is earned as a fisherman for the Iliamna Fish Company , a business he owns...