Buffleheads In Atlantic Basin
Buoyant, monogamous, punctual, small! Meet the bufflehead, our winter duck friends in Atlantic Basin, Red Hook, and Brooklyn
Fishing for Mackerel, Atlantic Dock, 1901
Red Hook was feasting on mackerel, late October of 1901. A school of the fish reportedly chased by bluefish and porpoises had found their way into Atlantic Basin. Fishermen lined the piers, catching the mackerel with makeshift poles and any kind of...
Wrecks in Storm's Wake, 1896
Wrecks in Storm's Wake Great Damage Wrought All Along the Coast .... Tremendous damage was wrought all along the coast from Cape May to Boston by the northeast gale, which continued yesterday with unabated fury. .... Cellars and Sewers Flooded. .......
Night Heron
Night herons live around the Red Hook shoreline. PortSide staff have seen them in Erie Basin (this photo is in the O'Connell's marina), Atlantic Basin, and the Red Hook Container Terminal. As their name implies, they usually fish at night, and are...
Title Fight: Louis Heineman vs. William Beard
No man ever, perhaps, got so much the best of old Beard as did Louis Heineman, the housemover of the Twelfth ward” (The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 19, 1891) When Louis Heineman died in 1904, he was reportedly 104 years old, and likely the oldest...
Ballast from overseas becomes Red Hook landfill & introduces foreign seeds, 1879-1880
Cargo ships are designed to carry heavy weights, and without it they ride too high in the water and are unstable. Ships not laden with enough goods would take on ballast, often in the form of sand or gravel to allow them to safely sail. ...
The sediments of Erie Basin, 1868
In 1868, engineer G. B. Brainerd, reported in The American Naturalist on the sedimentary layers under the Erie Basin. He found beneath 10 feet of water at low tide: 1. Two feet of mud, the ordinary sediment of the bay 2. One foot of yellow sand 3....
"The Small Boy Goes 'Crabbing," 1892
" All day naked youngsters are perched on these logs, watching their bait, chasing each other over the slippery lumber or diving and paddling in the water." A story about naked boys in the late 1800s who fish for crabs among the millions of...
Barnacle Library
R. J. Eckard, vice president and research director of C. A. Woolsley Paint and Color Co., had a large library of barnacles. The collection, started in the 1940s, was used to develop barnacle resistant paint that would ward off the many species...