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
Explore via menus, the search window, or interactive map. On the map, click the colored, numbered dots to expand multiple items in that location. Then, click on a pin to explore that item. Anchor icons mean sites of major importance.More about this site
Click empty spot on map to activate it
Featured Item
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 Advetisement 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 THE…
War Materials about to be shipped out From Erie Basin, 1941
"An aerial view made from an American Airlines plane of Erie Basin where 15 ships are shown ready to load crated war material crammed on piers. Vividly reflected in the photo is the manner in which…
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…Decline in Buttermilk Channel Passenger Traffic by the numbers:
1934 – 594,6201935 – 576,4631936 – 515,0141937 – 420,9491938 – 431,4881939 – 368,6541940 – 447,7381941 – 482,0291942 – 261,2631943 – 675…
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…
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…
PortSide NewYork
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…
Red Hook Building Company
The Red Hook Building Company was the brainchild of Col. Daniel Richards, a man who grew up in Upstate New York. When the Erie Canal opened in 1825 and had a powerful economic effect, Richards was…Select text from the Proposal. (A pdf of the full original is linked below)
"The advantages of Brooklyn as a place of residence, as well as for commercial purposes - in view of its proximity to the…