By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The area between Erie Basin and Columbia Street was home to a makeshift shantytown community known as Tin City, made up largely of unemployed and under-employed maritime workers in the 1920s and 30s. In the winter of 1932, the Brooklyn Eagle...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Cowhey Marine Hardware operated in Red Hook for about 150 years. The rump remains of the business was at 440 Van Brunt Street, the northwest corner of Van Brunt and Beard Street, and closed in 2005. Cowhey donated their final inventory to...
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
A Cruise in the Erie Basin , an article by Don C. Seitz, and published in Frank Leslie's magazines in 1892, relates the story of Red Hook's Erie Basin. It grew from a scene with “hardly a building to be seen south of Atlantic Street, and not...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Tugboats were developed in the 1810s, soon after the invention of steam powered ships. They have been, and continue to be, an important part in the workings and successes of Red Hook's working waterfront. Beginning in the 1840s, and most...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Frances D’Angelo grew up in in Red Hook and remembers when was a “big ship town.” She was 91 when, in 2014, she was interviewed by Amanda Decker of the Red Hook Star Review . She has been going to Visitation Church, as did her parents...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Molly Ivins of the New York Times in her November 1981 piece, RED HOOK SURVIVES HARD TIMES INTO NEW ERA provides a historical overview of the place. Today, Red Hook is usually defined as the Brooklyn peninsula near Governor's Island,...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Construction of The Atlantic Dock - a massive, man-made harbor for all manor of cargo ships, from deep water vessels to canal boats, began on June 3, 1841. Less than four years later, in their November 25, 1845 edition, the New Y...
