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

The concept of quarantine has been around for a long time. As early as A.D. 549, the Byzantine emperor Justinian ordered the isolation of people traveling from places ridden with the bubonic plague.…Full text of the article from theNew York Herald, June 12, 1870 QUARANTINE WARDr. Cochrane Defending the Brooklyn Merchants --- Who Rules the Roost? --- Exciting Scenes Along the…

Month after month a three-mastered schooner was seen anchored off-shore in the Red Hook Flats.  On board was just one man who never went ashore.  How he got by was a mystery to the few folk who knew…Full transcript from the Brooklyn Eagle, May 29, 1931  Red Hook Flats has Hermit on Mystery Ship--Jack-of-All-Trades is Aboard Old Schooner Waits for It to Be Sold--By O. R. Pilat  She has been called…

Todd Shipyards started life in Brooklyn, in 1869, as Handren and Robins. After Handren's death in 1892, it became the J. N. Robins Co. and then, after merging with the Erie Basin Dry Dock Company,…The Erie Basin yard was closed in 1986 and sold to Rodermond Industries, which sold to IKEA around 2005. Click here for a curated tour of stories about and related to Todd. Or see the list of…

A Cruise in the Erie Basin, an article by Don C. Seitz, and published in Frank Leslie's magazinesin 1892, relates the story of Red Hook's Erie Basin. It grew from a scene with “hardly a building to…