A project by PortSide NewYork

Welcome to 400+ years of Red Hook!  Inclusion is a theme in this e-museum that memorializes forgotten, overlooked and erased histories. It’s a resource for locals, tourists, history buffs, urban-planners, educators, students, flaneurs.  It tells NYC’s maritime story in microcosm.  Explore:

  • our waterfront past & present
  • contemporary Red Hook retail, arts, non-profits, schools, recreation, transit

  • flood prep & resiliency info

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Random Items

PortSide NewYork created this Red Hook WaterStories product. PortSide is a maritime non-profit founded in Red Hook in 2005. Our goal is to create a waterfront center with a landing for boats, a home…

Cowhey Marine Hardware operated in Red Hook for about 150 years. The rump remains of the business was at 440 Van Brunt Street, the northwest corner of Van Brunt and Beard Street, and closed in 2005.…

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 man in Red Hook if not all of Brooklyn. According to accounts written around the time of his death he came to…

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…Full article text: Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 26, 1915 WINTER LIFE ON CANAL BOATSResidents of Erie Basin Celebrate the Holidays in Much the Same Fashion as Folk Ashore. GUESSING the right house…