By The Red Hook WaterStories team
One August day in 1896, on a steamship just arrived from Lisbon and docked in Erie Basin, custom officials found stashed in the cabin of a stewardess, four boxes of Spanish thread lace, one box of lace and lace embroidery as well as children's...
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 New York Sun ...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Living on a canal boat traveling down the Erie Canal, to the Hudson River, to Red Hook, Brooklyn's Erie Basin was a job and a way of life for some people, but for three women from Brooklyn, in the summer of 1891, it was a great restful vacation. The...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
In 1950, Mrs. Callahan looked back at nearly 100 years of living in Red Hook. She remembers farm animals, the 'Meadows', streams, flooding and ice skating on a pond that formed where Coffey Park is now. ● … I was born in the old sixth ward...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
When the Steamer Uranium, from Rotterdam, via Halifax docked at Atlantic Basin's Pier 38 in Red Hook, all the talk was about love. Love was what people were talking about when the Steamer Uranium docked at Pier 38, Atlantic Basin, Red Hook, in...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
In the summer of 1850, a free 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...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Near Christmas time, 1915, a female reporter and an illustrator for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, visited a few of the many canal boats and barges moored for the winter in Erie Basin “in search of a story about holiday preparations and winter life.”...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Brooklyn Life reporter Addison Steele, describes in 1897 the harvesting and pickling of mussles growing on the ramains of ship in Erie basin: A large part of the bull of the sunken Ailsa has been removed from the spot where she went...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Newly married and recently widowed in 1890 , Jennie Chandler Young began working as a photojournalist to support herself and her two-month old son. Using the moniker "Brooklyn Girl," she worked until 1915 for the New York Herald as a...
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...
