By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Pietro "Pete" Panto was an Italian American longshoreman and union activist who was murdered by the mob for speaking out and organizing against currupt union leadership. The Red Hook WaterStories team has not written an entry about him yet but...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
"You don't know what I mean about that job out there do you? I thought not. Well, it's this way. Down here in the towing, and ice and water supply business we have a great deal of competition. No, it is not friendly competition, I might almost say...
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
“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
William Yorke was an artist who lived on a boat in the Erie Basin with his wife, son, and two dogs in 1882. After his boat was destroyed in a steamboat accident and Yorke was found living in a hut by the waterfront with his family, his story was...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
In the 1990’s New York’s waterways was less grandiose, than it had been in years prior, but it still had its gems here and there. One such gem, Leonard Thomas, affectionately known as the “Chicken Man'', worked a career that spanned several...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
In 1889, several newspapers reported on Lawrence Grob, a citizen of Red Hook who earned the nickname “Larry the Bugler'' from his neighbors. Every morning, from his residence on Conover Street, near the Atlantic Docks, Grob used his bugle to wake...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Four years before the American Civil War, a legal battle emerged from a situation that occurred aboard a steamship from Savannah to New York. One of the passengers, Thomas Steele, a light skinned man, was accused of being a fugitive slave by another...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Christopher Nicolson is the managing winemaker for the Red Hook Winery but that by itself does not provide enough for him and his family to live in Brooklyn. His main income is earned as a fisherman for the Iliamna Fish Company , a business he owns...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Daniel Lewis was a fisherman in Red Hook in 1842. He is one of five people in The Brooklyn Directory for that year whose address is given as the area of Red Hook rather than a street name.. There were more people living in Red Hook. These five were...
