By The Red Hook WaterStories team
On Saturday March 14, 1885, workers at Finlay's Stores were told that they hourly rate would be cut to 20 cents an hour, down from twenty-five. They refused to work for less pay and the company replaced them with about fifty Swedes and Norwegians....
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
See the feature article on Norwegians which covers their story in Brooklyn's Red Hook from the 1600s to the modern day Topics include, the mid-nineteenth century church ship BETHELSHIP and the missions established to help Norwegian and other...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Seaman's handbook for Shore Leave , by United States Merchant Marine’s Social Service Bureau. Custom House, published in 1920 listed sailor’s homes – places were sailors could get a bed and sometimes a meal for a night - from...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
On June 6th, 1896 George Harbo and Frank Samuelsen departed from New York's Battery in an 18 foot rowboat destination Europe. Their vessel The FOX, was an 18 foot surf boat was built on the New Jersey Shore, only powered by oars. It took the two men...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Published on Dec 17, 2015 "Mange nordmenn dro til Amerika for å skaffe seg et bedre liv. For noen endte drømmen på en søppelfylling i New York." (Many Norwegians went to America to acquire a better life. A few ended the dream in a...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
[Links to the video below] Ørkenen Sur. A Norwegian documentary made in 2015 about the shanty town that existed int Red Hook from the early 1920s to the mid 1930s. Known by names including Ørkenen Sur (the bitter desert), and Tin City. It was home...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
In the early 1920s, the international freight trade collapsed leaving as many as 1,000 Norwegian seamen unemployed and unable to get back home. With little to no income many of them made shelters on a large area of landfill and rubble just north of...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Alf Dyrland was Captain of the MARY A. WHALEN from her rechristening in 1962 until 1978 when he retired. He was her first captain; she was his last boat. Alf loved the MARY deeply. As he lay dying in 1996, what he said out loud...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Three Brooklyn sailors of Norwegian descent planned to sail around the world in a modified wooden lifeboat in 1921. Captain Mimer Tonning, Otthar Petterson, and Helge Westerling, members of the Norwegian Masters and Mates Association, planned the...
