By The Red Hook WaterStories team
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...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Excursion barges “bedecked with flags, bunting and streamers” are boarded by crowds, often numbering in the thousands, on that portion of the outside north pier at Atlantic Basin which is closest to Hamilton Ferry “The sight is a most pleasing...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Street Flooding Report Street flooding to NYC by calling 311 or by going to their 311 website . There is a detailed questionaire to report flooding on the the website, that allows you to submit images and other attachments. Sewer Backups...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Fireboats from the water and fire engines on land battled for over 8 hours to extinguisher four warehouses ablaze along Atlantic Basin’s Commercial Wharf, January 16, 1954. Twenty-one fighters and two policemen were injured. Fifteen of those...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Our ship MARY A. WHALEN is famous in maritime law. That’s because American admiralty law is a lot fairer thanks to a case involving the MARY A. WHALEN, the 1975 Supreme Court decision U.S. vs Reliable Transfer. As a nation, we can be thankful that...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The door at 349 Van Brunt is a different sort of portal. Since 2006, it has celebrated a vision of Red Hook in mosaics. Anne Griepenberg explained its origin story on Facebook: "My friend Max Airborne was creating mosaics & since...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Here's a story about a color that involves our oil tanker, high fashion, interior design and Egypt. Yes, we said that. The MARY A WHALEN, originally the S.T. KIDDOO, was launched in 1938. In the many years since, her walls (bulkheads in ship...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Down the Gowanus is a modern folk song by Steve Suffet. The Gowanus Canal is a man-made industrial water way built and streightened in the 1860s from an existing creek. The Gowanus has played a valuable role in Brooklyn's...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
“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...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
This is not the origin story for the comic strip Little Orphan Annie, created by Harold Gray and first published in 1924, but it is the story of a little orphan girl named Annie who was adopted by a wealthy family. In 1908, the Annie of our story...
