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
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contemporary Red Hook retail, arts, non-profits, schools, recreation, transit
- flood prep & resiliency info
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Welcome to Red Hook, a neighborhood with a fascinating past and dynamic present!
Red Hook WaterStories is a virtual guide to both past and present of this special neighborhood created by PortSide NewYork. We cover the past via our maritime aka "WaterStories" theme. You can search…
Brooklyn Spar Company, 1921
In 1921, the Brooklyn Spar Company advertised in The Marine Journal that it sold wooden masts and posts for derricks and flag poles, which the company made at its waterfront facility at the foot of…
Winter Life on Canal Boats, 1915
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…
Random Items
PS GENERAL SLOCUM - Disaster and Memory
The GENERAL SLOCUM ended service as a sinking fireball June 15, 1904, killing over 1,000, most of them women and children. 1,300 were aboard.
That made the SLOCUM famous. Her fame was then forgotten…
The MARY A. WHALEN
A PDF guide to MARY A. WHALEN inEnglish,French,German,Spanish,Italian
The oil tankerMARY A. WHALENwas launched May 21, 1938.The ship is PortSide NewYork's ambassador to theBLUEspaceand site of our…
Ad For Atlantic Docks, 1847
Construction of The Atlantic Dock - a massive, man-made harbor for deep water ships, began on June 3, 1841. The erection of stout stone warehouses and towering grain elevators that could handle…●
Text from an Advertisement in Doggets New York City Directory for 1847
Storage for Grain, Flour, Sugar, Molasses, Cotton, ETC.,
AT THE
ATLANTIC DOCK, NEW-YORK.
FORTY ACRES WATER SURFACE WITHIN…
How the Hamilton Avenue Ferry ended, 1942
In 1846 when Hamilton Avenue Ferry service to Manhattan started it was the only mass transit option to and from Red Hook, Brooklyn. This was no longer the case in 1914, street cars and elevated subway…Decline in Buttermilk ChannelPassenger Traffic by the numbers:
1934 – 594,6201935 – 576,4631936 – 515,0141937 – 420,9491938 – 431,4881939 – 368,6541940 – 447,7381941 – 482,0291942 – 261,2631943 – 675…