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...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
American competition with China goes back centuries. To compete with China’s silk industry, white mulberries were imported into the American colonies because silkworms only eat white mulberry leaves. It is possible, however, that, to protect...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
A shipment of animals destined to zoos arrived in Red Hook's Atlantic Basin in 1922, too good a story for the Evening Telegraph to pass up. The early 1920s saw the continued progression of an increasingly globalized world that was emerging in the...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
From the late 1800s to the early 1900s, the cereal market started to emerge. Invented in western New York, before long it became popular. With the creation of brands like Kellogg, Quaker Oats, cereal would secure its position as a national...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The Brooklyn Biscuit Company "The Brooklyn Biscuit Company is a woman-owned business that began as a pop-up fundraiser in Brooklyn, where every Sunday, I would sell our sweet and savory biscuits to help raise funds for 6/15 Green community...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
"The Bridge, Erie Basin, N.Y.," is an etching Henry B. Shope (1862 - 1929). Tall masted ships, barges, horses and telegraph poles would have been a common site in Broolyn's Erie Basin from its construction in 1864 through the begining of...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Pencil sketch of Atlantic Basin by George Reynolds, 1869 The tall building depicted at the left is a grain elevator used in the moving of grain on and off ships and as a storage silo. The other buildings along the dock, such as "Bailey's Stores" and...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
By the end of the 19th century, New York Harbor continued to retain its status as the busiest port in the US, and had become one of the busiest in the whole world. The port was lined with shippers and boats, manufacturers who vied to be close to...