By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Shantytowns are a feature of 19th century Brooklyn and New York City. They were the low-income housing of the day, often for newly arrived immigrants. In Red Hook, the presence of shantytowns is directly related to the waterfront (eg, low-lying,...
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
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
Soon after this photo is taken, the area at the left of the composite photo with just a few scattered houses in an uneven field will become the Red Hook Ball Fields and recreational area. Part of this area had been home to a shanty town, which went...
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...
Southeast corner of Henry & Bush Streets
Street address: Henry Street & Bush Street, Brooklyn, NY
Lorraine Street, north side, east from Henry to Clinton Streets, showing several old shacks. This area later became part of the Red Hook Houses, the government low rental housing development. On the right is the Sapolin warehouse.
Street address: Lorraine Street & Henry Street, Brooklyn, NY
Images of squatters shacks near Otsego, Columbia, Beard and Van Dyke Streets, taken October 1934 and May 1935 by photographer P. L. Sperr.
Street address: Van Dyke Street & Otsego Street, Brooklyn, N.Y.
