By The Red Hook WaterStories team
A pivotal event in the ending of slavery occurred on December 5, 1860, in Atlantic Basin, Red Hook when the slave ship ERIE was sold at government auction. Its captain and owner, Nathaniel Gordon, was then executed for engaging in the slave...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
In the summer of 1850, an African-American woman was abducted and brought to Red Hook Point - just below the Atlantic Dock - to be taken by schooner to the South. Suspicious workers in the area were told by the captors that the woman was a...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Women welders on the way to their job at the Todd Shipyard dry dock in Erie Basin. During the WWII, while men were overseas fighting, women of Brooklyn were contributing to the war effort, and their own financial needs, by making and repairing Navy...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Mortgage lenders mapped areas based on what they considered to be risky investment areas. In the past, the practice of doing this in a discriminatory way (preventing lending where blacks, immigrants and the poor lived) is called redlining due to...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
“The race question is extending itself upon the seas." At the beginning of the 19th Century, one out of five American sailors were black; at the start of the 20th Century, Black sailors in Brooklyn were facing severe job discrimination. The...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Philip Kasinitz and Jan Rosenberg in their paper, Missing the Connection: Social Isolation and Employment on the Brooklyn Waterfront (1996) conclude that: "few local residents hold local jobs in the private sector. A survey of local employers...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Blacks were one of the first groups to arrive in Brooklyn during the Dutch colonial period, usually as slaves, though there were also freemen. To provide an overview of some early Black history, PortSide commissioned this article by Charles Foy...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The New York City Draft Riots took place between July 13 and July 16 of 1863. The violent insurrection was a reaction to conscription into military service during the Civil War. African Americans became the target of the rioters' anger and an...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The landscape of Red Hook has been dramatically changed by people at least twice in its history. Starting in a major way around 1830, marshland was filled in to make solid land, and the coast line was modified to better suit boats. Nearly...
