By The Red Hook WaterStories team
In 1951 the Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran a human interest story about Thomas Dunne, an Irish sailor on a comercial vessel who traveled the world but when docked in Red Hook, Brooklyn would not get off the boat for fear of getting lost in the city. Text...
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
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...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Ground was broken for the Erie Canal in 1817. When it was completed in 1825 it connected Lake Erie with the Hudson River allowing grain and other produce to travel in barges across New York and the Midwest to grain terminals in Red Hook - to...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
617 refugees fleeing German-occupied European countries arrived at the foot of Columbia Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn in 1941. Crammed aboard the VILLA MADRID, a Spanish liner with accommodation for only 225, they complained about the conditions and...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
1932 map of the piers and port businesses from Baltic Street (now called Cobble Hill) moving south through Atlantic Basin around past the Erie Basin, for the War Department / U.S. Army Corps of Engineers The map indicates the businesses that...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The Spanish Freighter NAVEMAR left from Seville. Spain, with 1,120 passengers, in 1941. Most were Jewish refugees fleeing genocide in German-occupied countries. The conditions on the NAVEMAR, a ship designed with only 28 accommodations, were...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Bonded warehouse are places were foreign imports can be stored or manipulated without the payment of duty or taxes. The government only gets a piece of the action (duty) if and when the goods are sold domestically. Under the watchful eyes...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Erie Basin, at one time dubbed “The busiest place in the Port of New York” is a large man-made protected harbor near the southern point of Red Hook. Its U-shaped breakwater, well over one-half mile long, encloses a large area of water. The basin...
