By The Red Hook WaterStories team
In November of 1872, a tall wooden grain elevator and several warehouse buildings of the Atlantic Docks burnt to the ground in a great fire which was seen for miles. Six hundred thousand bushels of wheat, oats and barley burned. New York Herald,...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
In 1881, the Excelsior Stores grain warehouse and grain elevator in Atlantic Basin burned in a massive fire. Here is an article from The New York Herald , Monday, June 13, 1881, describing the conflagration: THE EXCELSIOR STORES BURNED. -- A...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
September 1873. Sailors between stints on ships frequently stayed in boarding houses near the waterfront. The writer of an 1873 article in the Brooklyn Eagle describes how the manager of certain boarding houses, for a fee, provisioned sailors for...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Jesus Colon, a Brooklyn Puerto Rican activist, traveled to New York from Puerto Rico on the S.S. Carolina in 1917. At 16 years old, he convinced his friends who worked on the crew to hide him in the linen closet in an effort to escape to New York...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Wheat shipments from Atlantic Docks for Rotterdam, Cork, Dublin, Amsterdam, Queenstown, Naples, Belfast, Bangor. Petroleum shipments from Atlantic Docks for Marseilles, Rostock, Stettin, Danzig, Trieste, Antwerp. [Only Red Hooks Docks listed, for...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Epidemics, New York in the mid-1800s knew them too well. Cholera was one of the city's biggest killers. The ports of New York Harbor were the economic engines of the region, but the all important shipping was also how outbreaks spread across the...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
"Flambeau is owned by Mr. FORBES, of Boston, and is intended for the China Seas. The dimensions of the hull, which was built by LAWRENCE & FOULKS, are one hundred and sixty-five feet keel; one hundred and eighty feet on deck; breadth,...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Richards Street was named after Col. Daniel Richards . Richards was a visionary developer who set Red Hook on the path to becoming one of the world's major commercial ports. He moved to Brooklyn from upstate New York after seeing the powerful...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The Atlantic Basin was the home to hundreds of Erie Canal boats during the winter months. Families, including children, lived on the the boats, tending their floating homes, until the ice melted and they could begin shipping produce again.
