By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Grain elevators once towered in Atlantic Basin, as can be seen in the etching published in Harper's Magazine in 1871. They transfered grain from ship to warehouse or ship to ship, and stored grain withing themselves. Canal boats traveled down...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Construction on Pier 11 began in 1956. According to this newspaper article the three berth pier was estimated to cost nearly 7 million dollars. The project resulted in the demolition of thirteen Civil War era warehouses in the area. Text of...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Merchant Stores had a large hydraulic press that it used to compress cotton bales. In 1891, people complained that when "exhaust steam was blown off it made a noise that sounded like a cross between the bellow of a bull and the scream of a tiger...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Cotton was king in Red Hook from the 1870s to 1910. In 1901 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle more than once used the headline "Much Cotton in Red Hook" to describe how "the cotton docks and warehouses at Red Hook and the German-American stores at the foot...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
A drawing of the Atlantic Basin's warehouse and docks by Wade, for Gleason's Pictorial , 1851. The tall structures shown by the water's edge at right are grain elevators, used to move loose grain from the ship to the warehouse.
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Ownership and Control of Brooklyn Waterfront In 1708, Governor Cornbury granted New York City control of the lands on the Brooklyn shore from the low to the high water marks, even though Brooklyn at this time was an independent village. The grant...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
An aerial view of Erie Basin taken in 1920 by Perry Loomis Sperr. In the crook of the breakwater that protects the basin's piers is Thos. A. Crane's Sons' dry dock. The white building at the center rear of the view is the New York State Barge Canal...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Crane’s Shipyard and Dry Docks, established in 1867, was located in Erie Basin. A history of the company is provided in George Weiss’s America’s Maritime Progress , published in 1920, and in the 1922 Pilot Lore . According to Weiss, Theo. A....
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Three Brooklyn sailors of Norwegian descent planned to sail around the world in a modified wooden lifeboat in 1921. Captain Mimer Tonning, Otthar Petterson, and Helge Westerling, members of the Norwegian Masters and Mates Association, planned the...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The Atlantic Lifeboat Company, located at Richards and Delevan Streets, was founded in 1914. In addition to making lifeboats—important safety equipment on ships—the company made speedy powerboats.
