By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The area between Erie Basin and Columbia Street was home to a makeshift shantytown community known as Tin City, made up largely of unemployed and under-employed maritime workers in the 1920s and 30s. In the winter of 1932, the Brooklyn Eagle...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The area between Erie Basin and Columbia Street was home to a makeshift shantytown community known as Tin City, made up largely of unemployed and under-employed maritime workers in the 1920s and 30s. In the winter of 1932, The New York Sun ...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
This article from The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sunday, March 12, 1911, recounts the winter-time lives of Erie Canal barge families who winter in Erie Basin. Colonies of Cozy Canal Boats Cluster for Winter City of Inland Navigators Prepares for Annual...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
A fair portion of today’s Red Hook was once water. An 1887 article in the Brook Eagle marvels that Henry and neighboring streets have been extended nearly half a mile in ten years. Marshes with knee-high water, or deeper, were being...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
In the early 1920s, the international freight trade collapsed leaving as many as 1,000 Norwegian seamen unemployed and unable to get back home. With little to no income many of them made shelters on a large area of landfill and rubble just north of...
Images of squatters shacks near Otsego, Columbia, Beard and Van Dyke Streets, taken October 1934 and May 1935 by photographer P. L. Sperr.
Street address: Van Dyke Street & Otsego Street, Brooklyn, N.Y.
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Newspaper photo of the shacks of Red Hooks "Tin City" or shanty towm (It went by several other names, such as Hoover City, and Orkenen Sur). The large building on the right is the Sapolin Paint Company factory (now Treasure Island) on...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Red Hook Point in the mid-1800s was just beginning to be developed. In an irregular way, shanties dotted the shoreline. Some of the residents of these homes would sit under their awnings scanning the waters for loose timbers and other prizes...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
A fire destroyed the property of five families living in shanties by the water at Red Hook Point, June 23, 1873. "The locality in question is a low section of made ground lying between King, Columbia and Richard streets, and is built upon by...
