By The Red Hook WaterStories team
No man ever, perhaps, got so much the best of old Beard as did Louis Heineman, the housemover of the Twelfth ward” (The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 19, 1891) When Louis Heineman died in 1904, he was reportedly 104 years old, and likely the oldest...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
A fair portion of today’s Red Hook was once water. An 1887 article in the Brook Eagle marvels that Henry and neighboring streets have been extended nearly half a mile in ten years. Marshes with knee-high water, or deeper, were being...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
A selection of historic nautical charts, from the NOAA Office of Coast Survey. They provide interesting details on the evolution of Red Hook. Today's Office of Coast Survey traces its charting efforts back to 1807, when...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The “Brooklyn Basin” is another one of those big plans for Red Hook that did not happen . The plan appeared on maps as if it was built - with no indication of its aspirational status - leading people in the 21 st century to think...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
A collection of historic maps and images of Red Hook, Brooklyn
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
2016 draft map created by Eymund Diegel, based on his research describing Red Hook streams, ponds, tide mills up to around 1850. The base map is the Bernard Ratzer's 1766 survey. Captions are derived from Stile's comprehensive...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Cargo ships are designed to carry heavy weights, and without it they ride too high in the water and are unstable. Ships not laden with enough goods would take on ballast, often in the form of sand or gravel to allow them to safely sail. ...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
In 1868, engineer G. B. Brainerd, reported in The American Naturalist on the sedimentary layers under the Erie Basin. He found beneath 10 feet of water at low tide: 1. Two feet of mud, the ordinary sediment of the bay 2. One foot of yellow sand 3....
You can see Red Hook and Gowanus shoreline changes in this illustration of two maps overlaid, the 1766 Ratzer map and one by Eymund Deigel using a 2004 NYC map. Bernard Ratzer was a military surveyor who mapped the Gowanus marshes...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
1844 Coastal Survey. Red Hook's watery past has a bearing on how this place floods in current times. This map shows the topography at the end of Red Hook's tide mill pond era, meaning that much of what is today called Red Hook is still water. Note...
