Visitation Place in Red Hook, Brooklyn, was co-named Nancy Kearse Gooding Way on December 10, 2023. Red Hook in the 1970s was going through tough times. Longshoremen strikes idled many, and industries that depended on shipping then laid off...
@Work. An pandemic-era art project presenting essential workers thoughts about their work. 2022
The 2022 public art project, @Work was by Zoe Beloff and Eric Muzzy. Portraits were made of essential workers in acrylic paint. These were then put on banners with QR codes linked to documentary films they made were essential workers describe...
Twenty Years of Moving Cargo: Local 1814 20th Anniversary Publication 1954 - 1974
Local 1814, International Longshoremen's Association, AFL-CIO commemorated their 20 th anniversary in 1974 with a publication celebrating their accomplishments and with a positive outlook for the future. Higher wages, job security, health...
Pete Panto (1910 - 1939)
Pietro "Pete" Panto was an Italian American longshoreman and union activist who was murdered by the mob for speaking out and organizing against corrupt union leadership. The Red Hook WaterStories team has not written an entry about him yet but...
Japanese Trade and the Erie Basin:
Osaka Chosen Kaisha Line (1930-1940)
In the 1930s, most of the passenger and cargo trade with Japan coming into the port of New York was handled by Brooklyn piers; and one of the biggest players was the Osaka Chosen Kaisha Line that departed from Pier 3 in the Erie Basin. ...
Winter storm batters, buries and freezes ships and shore, February 1895
Huge waves crashing down on the deck as hail, steamers burning through their coal just to stay in place against the wind, ships being thrashed by the storm and everything, and everyone, frozen and encrusted in ice. These are the stories that the...
Musak on the Pier, 1934
In 1934 the workers on Isbrandtsen-Moller ‘s Pier 30 near the Hamilton Avenue ferry house were part of an experiment. The Musak Corporation of Manhattan, dispenser of music for, cocktail and dinner patrons, cigar workers, chocolate dippers,...
Shaft Alley Saloon
" We have mostly men here - very few women. No unattached women permitted at the bar. That’s a simple way of preventing trouble." One of the best known watering holes in Red Hook was the Shaft Alley saloon. Fortune magazine, in a 1937 essay...
Italian Laborers at Pier 30, 1918
Photo of three mustachioed Italian dock workers reported to be taken at Pier 30, Red Hook, Brooklyn on November 6, 1918. (photographer unknow to us)
Red Hook 'Whisky' Kills Four More, 1922
Four Red Hook residents died from poisoned whisky and three were arrested for selling bad liquor. Michael Keenan, 41, a truckman living at 135 Dykeman Street, became blind and is at the Long Island College Hospital. Last night the police arrested...