Harboring History: Brooklyn's Transforming Waterfront
This is a film about history and forgetting, maritime power and waterfront ruins, and the press of international and national forces on our waterfront in the context of replanning the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, NYC’s largest land acquisition in decades.
This 45-minute documentary interweaves the observations of seven speakers into a thoughtful reflection on the tensions between progress and history, community needs and external actors, who’s heard and not, with an undercurrent of concern about how official public planning is sometimes done.
The premier of this film was on May 29, 2025 with an open discussion afterwards. This occured on the Waterfront Museum Barge in Red Hook, co-hosted by them and PortSide NewYork. More screenings are being planned for June 2025.
This film was created by Jori Johnson, in collaboration with PortSide NewYork, as a Capstone project in NYU's Archives & Public History MA program.
This project began when Jori emailed PortSide on 7/16/24. Here's how Jori Johnson describes the 10 month process leading up to screening the film:
"In designing my Capstone project, I hoped to create a documentary that could connect with an existing organization and their specific audience, ensuring that it would have a life beyond the classroom. I discovered the Red Hook Water Stories project and found it was not only a rich source of historical information about Red Hook, but also a place where New York's maritime history is told in microcosm. As the site is primarily text-based, I wondered if a documentary could help to expand the audience of this maritime history.
I proposed this to Carolina Salguero and Peter Rothenberg, who run the Red Hook Water Stories (RHWS) project; we had a wide-ranging conversation about maritime culture, the peoples of Red Hook, changing waterfront usage over time, and favorite items within the RHWS website. Three concepts from this conversation stood out to me: how public access to waterways has changed over time, the assertion by development companies today that the waterfront has never been accessible, and the Brooklyn Marine Terminal redevelopment that had recently been proposed.
I saw an opportunity to interpret the change over time on Brooklyn's waterfront, making this history even more relevant by connecting the past to the present. From this point, I dove deep into research through the RHWS website, as well as archives, books, films, and newspapers beyond. As soon as this research clarified the direction of the project, I returned to Carolina and Peter for leads on who I might interview for this documentary while also conducting independent research on others who had written or spoken about this history. This led me to an intensive period of filmed interviews, B-roll capture, editing, and supplemental archival research, culminating in the finished film. Throughout this process I was also advised by Ellen Noonan, Clinical Professor of History and Director of the Archives and Public History program at NYU."
"Public history" is what PortSide does with RHWS and many of our digital endeavors. We asked Jori Johnson for her description of public history:
"Public history is a broad term with varying definitions depending on who you ask. I have come to define it, in simple terms, as the way that history is communicated to the public outside of academia. Public history is in the world around us: in historic sites, monuments, museums, memorials, tours, reenactments, genealogy and media. In these places and forms of public history, history is interpreted by the public historian for broader audiences -- through physical signage, verbal communication, digital projects, and more. The approaches to communicating history to the public are distinctly different from the way that historians communicate history within their scholarship."