By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Shantytowns are a feature of 19th century Brooklyn and New York City. They were the low-income housing of the day, often for newly arrived immigrants. In Red Hook, the presence of shantytowns is directly related to the waterfront (eg, low-lying,...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
This is an intro to the people story of Red Hook, to the parade of ethnic groups that lived and/or worked here roughly in the order of their arrival. Native American Lenape people enjoy Red Hook as a summer place from the 16th century. Dutch...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
How Red Hook's topography evolves from Native American summer camp to Dutch mill ponds with oyster beds, then ports, warehouses and finally a street grid. Did you know that the 1840s development of Atlantic Dock jumpstarts a 100-year development...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Complete text of article The Brooklyn Daily Eagle , Sunday March 4, 1900. Beautiful Yachts Which Will Soon Awaken From Their Winter Sleep In The Erie Basin . Pleasure Craft, All Swathed in Canvass, Dormant in Gowanus Bay—Set Apart from the Humble...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
In 1950, Mrs. Callahan, born in 1853 looked back at nearly 100 years of living in Red Hook. She remembered farm animals, the 'Meadows', streams, flooding and ice skating on a pond that formed where Coffey Park is now. ● … I was born in the old...
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
This is an article about Canopis, the dog. Born in Red Hook, he was owned by a local fish dealer who fed him a steady diet of fish. According the the article, this diet led to him develop webbed feet and other sea-creature-like deformities. One day,...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
On June 11, 1852 a prize fight was waged between Michael Welsh and James Cramer on Red Hook Point. It was attended by a crowd of approximately 600-700 people. The one police officer on the scene realized that he could not stop the event by himself...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Remembrances of life on Coffey and other streets in Red Hook. "Hello all you Red Hookers!!! My good friend… still lives on Coffey St. I live at Dikeman St. Graduated Visitation school June of 1949. We done most of our dancing in Sam's Bar on Beard...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Red Hookers' memories of swimming off the docks as kids. "I remember swimming at the pool and at the docks, and the row boat over to White Rock and sugar from Sucrest, hanging out in Coffey Park and Barshow's junk yard, Christ chapel had father Fox...
