In 1834, Brooklyn is incorporated as a city, but most of Brooklyn is still farmland and woods, except for a suburb that is now Brooklyn Heights. At that time, Red Hook is a watery place, with tide mills ponds, corn fields, orchards, the Bull Creek canal and middens (large piles of oyster shells, the remains of a long history of Lenape meals). Almost no one lives here.

That changes abruptly in the late 1840s when the canal is filled, and the Atlantic Dock Company builds a man-made harbor with granite warehouses. The Atlantic Dock (also called the Atlantic Basin) was envisioned by Col. Daniel Richards, a developer who set Red Hook on the path to becoming one of the world's major commercial ports. While living in upstate New York, Richards saw the powerful economic effects resulting from the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. Looking to capitalize on it, he moved to Brooklyn to build a terminus that could handle all the boats and products coming down the Canal.

The main impetus for building Atlantic Basin was to improve the efficiency of unloading ships and storing cargo compared to the chaos in the Manhattan area now called the South Street Seaport where a street ran between piers and warehouses, and warehouses were inadequate to service the needs – and to create a large consolidated, vertically integrated facility. In modern terms, Atlantic Basin was planned as a de-mapped industrial park. It was designed so ships could dock parallel to the pier/wharf upon which the warehouse sat and cargo could be lifted right up into that warehouse without street traffic being in the way. It was also a vertically integrated facility in that it had places to sell the cargo (showrooms) and supply the ships themselves in areas that did not impede the ship unloading. We recently found evidence that the vertical integration even included plans for ship maintenance in the form of a hydraulic dock but did not find evidence that the dock was built.

Then as now, change triggers NIMBY complaints. The lament is that the maritime action ruins the pastoral view, so “nice” people are moving away from Columbia Street.

During the next century, Atlantic Basin is always packed. Freighters, tugs, barges, grain elevators, and passenger ships cram the place. A major step in the abolition of slavery takes place here when the slave ship ERIE is sold at government auction, impounded for breaking laws against shipping humans for the slave trade. President Abraham Lincoln is involved in the matter and uses it as a national example. The Captain of the ERIE Nathaniel Gordon is executed for his crime, the only American to receive this punishment. Later in the 1800s and 1900s, refugees and waves of immigrants arrive by ship including the first Puerto Rican community in the city.

Several modernizations erase the Victorian cobblestones and looming brick and granite warehouses. Today’s Atlantic Basin of sprawling asphalt and flimsy metal sheds arrives in the late 1950s and early 1960s when about half the waterspace is filled (the water used to reach almost to Imlay Street) and the last historic buildings are leveled. This modernization is promptly out-of-date because the introduction of containerization means that piers designed to handle break-bulk cargo (stuff in barrels and sacks and on pallets) have less and less use. The waterside freight railroad chugs along until the late 1980s.

Freight activity picks up again in the early 2000's filling the Pier 11 shed with cacao beans under management by ASI (American Stevedoring Inc), but real estate speculation and plans for the cruise terminal soon flatten the freight story.

WHO OWNS AND RUNS THIS NOW?

2024 Update: A plan was announced by the NYC Economic Development Corporation, NYS Governor Kathy Hochul, and other elected officials on May 14, 2024 for the City to take ownership of Atlantic Basin, the Red Hook Container Terminal and all the waterline from there to Atlantic Avenue. The are was dubbed the Brooklyn Marine Terminal. See the Brooklyn Marine Terminal below and PortSide's blog

Atlantic Basin was part of the Red Hook Container Terminal (RHCT) until 2005, when the City said they needed it to support the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal that was being planned for Pier 12, the pier along the Buttermilk Channel.

The current “Atlantic Basin” has more asphalt than water and runs south from RHCT to Wolcott Street, and east to Imlay Street and includes Pier 11 (our home) and its warehouse, along with Pier 12 and its warehouse (converted into to the cruise terminal). Most of the site (minus a chunk along Imlay Street that the City owns) is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a bi-state agency, and rented to the Economic Development Corporation of New York City (NYC EDC), a non-profit that does major economic planning and real estate management for the city. The EDC rented the Pier 11 shed to Phoenix Beverage who, a few years later, sold their beverage distribution business and became the stevedoring company that now runs RHCT.

Recently, Atlantic Basin has been home to a quirky-as-Red-Hook combination of users.

Tenants in the three sheds bracketing the waterspace have included the Secret Service, the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, and businesses renting party supplies, a fruit and vegetable distributor, a recycler of glass and plastic bottles, a firm installing internet cables, a restorer of vintage cars and others. Around late spring 2018, Phoenix Beverage pulled out of their lease, and the EDC began to directly manage the Pier 11 shed. Businesses that had been tenants of Phoenix in the Pier 11 shed began leaving, Some of these left due to the disruptions of the Formula E car race that takes over the place for about a month. During 2019, Pier 11 shed spaces were not re-rented.

During the first years of the DockNYC program running the Pier 11 berth spaces, the boat tenants were the most diverse array of boats on a NYC pier: a tall ship, replica paddle wheeler, tour boats and dinner boats, a repurposed historic tug and two repurposed oil tankers, one in commercial use as a dockbuilders platform; and PortSide NewYork is located on the historic tanker MARY A. WHALEN at the south end of Pier 11.

In early 2019, the EDC announced plans to convert the Pier 11 berth space north of our ship to NYC Ferry Homeport 2. This work was delayed during the pandemic and the homeport footprint changed; and the work commenced on 9/26/22 after the abrupt eviction of all the boat tenants the preceding week except for Manhattan by Sail and PortSide. That same week, PortSide's pandemic pop up park was also evicted by the EDC.

The historic name for the south end of the basin is “Clinton Wharf,” and on June 1, 2017, service started on the NYC Ferry that has a dock on Clinton Wharf. That ferry is likely to transform Red Hook, just as Atlantic Basin transformed Red Hook in the 1850s. The presence of the ferry and the cruise terminal here make Atlantic Basin "the maritime gateway to Red Hook" as PortSide explained to the EDC, a gateway that would benefit from PortSide's proposed services in the form of wayfinding, interpretation, activations of the exterior space, and building space in the Pier 11 shed to handle more visitors.

Below are some Atlantic Basin WaterStories. Many more can be found by browsing the "subject" Atlantic Basin in the top menu, or by following tags.

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