By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Gary Shiflett, currently a fleet manager, used to work for Ira S. Bushey and Sons and Eklof Marine. In 2016, while standing in the galley of PortSide NewYork's MARY A. WHALEN - a "Bushey boat" - he told of some of his memories...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Captain Nels Helgesen during his long career which began in 1918, commanded every ship of the New York and Porto Rico Steamship Line. The home port of the steamship line was in Red Hook's Atlantic Basin. Starting in the late 1910s, their ships...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Red Hook's Atlantic Basin was the main port of entry for early Puerto Rican migrants. They traveled on the ships of the NEW YORK & PORTO RICO STEAMSHIP COMPANY" (aka, PORTO RICO LINE). Jose Mendez is quoted in Place Matters , a joint...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
When the Steamer Uranium, from Rotterdam, via Halifax docked at Atlantic Basin's Pier 38 in Red Hook, all the talk was about love. Love was what people were talking about when the Steamer Uranium docked at Pier 38, Atlantic Basin, Red Hook, in...
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
In the summer of 1850, an African-American woman was abducted and brought to Red Hook Point - just below the Atlantic Dock - to be put on a schooner and brought to a Southern slave state. The captors told suspicious workers in the area that the...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
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 about holiday preparations and winter life.”...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
See the feature article on Norwegians which covers their story in Brooklyn's Red Hook from the 1600s to the modern day Topics include, the mid-nineteenth century church ship BETHELSHIP and the missions established to help Norwegian and other...
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
The GENERAL SLOCUM ended service as a sinking fireball June 15, 1904, killing over 1,000, most of them women and children. 1,300 were aboard. That made the SLOCUM famous. Her fame was then forgotten and re-remembered by most of the City over the...
