By The Red Hook WaterStories team
PortSide NewYork acknowledges that we are on land and waterways that is Lenape territory, Lenapehoking. This is an intro to the people story of Red Hook, to the changing ethnic groups that lived and/or worked here roughly in the order of their...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
How Red Hook's topography evolves from Native American summer camp to Dutch mill ponds with oyster beds, then ports, warehouses and finally a street grid. Did you know that the 1840s development of Atlantic Dock jumpstarts a 100-year development...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Whoa! Some historic maps and illustrations show aspirations not reality; media then and now can make mistakes, planners and real estate developers can misrepresent Red Hook. This is the start of a feature article. To see the full essay click here:...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Soccer off the boats in Redhook... circa late '50s? See that orange arrow? See that field across the street from the pool? Anyone remember foreign crews coming off ships moored nearby (end of Columbia Street?) and them playing SOCCER in that field?...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
A pivotal event in the ending of slavery occurred on December 5, 1860, in Atlantic Basin, Red Hook when the slave ship ERIE was sold at government auction. Its captain and owner, Nathaniel Gordon, was then executed for engaging in the slave...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Daniel Lewis was a fisherman in Red Hook in 1842. He is one of five people in The Brooklyn Directory for that year whose address is given as the area of Red Hook rather than a street name.. There were more people living in Red Hook. These five were...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
PortSide was engaged to work with the 2020 Spring semester of Columbia University's graduate Historic Preservation studio which used Red Hook as a study area. At the bottom of this page, is an audio tour PortSide gave along this...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Three photographs of Erie Basin by George Bradford Brainerd (1845-1887). Brainerd was a civil engineer who worked for the city of Brooklyn as Deputy Water Purveyor from 1869 to 1886. His book The Water Works of Brooklyn: A Historical and Descriptive...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
On Saturday March 14, 1885, workers at Finlay's Stores were told that they hourly rate would be cut to 20 cents an hour, down from twenty-five. They refused to work for less pay and the company replaced them with about fifty Swedes and Norwegians....
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Finlay's Stores were described in 1889 as consisting "of thirty-two lots of land and sixteen large double storehouses, eight of which lie on either side of the entrance to the basin... Four of the storehouses are five stories in height and...
