RED HOOK THEN TO NOW: marsh, mill pond, port, derelict, renewal
PortSide NewYork acknowledges that we are are land and waterways that are the homeland of the Lenape, a place they "Lenapehoking." The Lenape were displaced by European settlers and forced to move as a group multiple times to several US states far from here. Lenapehoking encompasses all of NYC and a large part of downstate NYS, all of New Jersey, part of western Connecticut and of eastern Pennsylvania. More info at the Lenape Center.
Pre-colonial Red Hook
The Native American Lenape people call Red Hook "Saponickan” or “Sapohanican.” It is a fertile marsh where the Lenape fish, hunt waterfowl, grow corn, dig shellfish and create large oyster middens along the southern and eastern shoreline. These shell piles are used up in industrial production after the arrival of Europeans many years later.
From what we understand, and we seek more info, for the Lenape, this area is a place of summer use and temporary settlement. Their path from Red Hook to what is now downtown Brooklyn becomes Red Hook Lane, one block of which survives into 2016. The Lenape are rapidly pushed out by Europeans after the arrival of the Dutch. We acknowledge that this is Lenape land and seek Lenape historians to help flesh out the pre-colonial history of their people in what is now called Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Typical Brooklyn tide mill of the mid 1600s to mid 1800s.
1636 to 1850: 200 years as a blue green space
In 1636, Duch colonists arrive, a people, then and now, noted for their water management skills. They install tide mill ponds using water to generate power. (At high tide, a dam shuts water in the pond; and when the tide is low, the dam is opened, and the falling water turns the mill wheel.) Cleverly, they seed the bottom of the millponds with oysters, so the mill ponds generate power at high tide and make for easy food harvesting at low tide. An early Dutch settler, Adam Brouwer, proposed a canal that was dug through Red Hook to allow goods to be brought back and forth by water without having to go all the way around the peninsula. See the text of the original petition to built the canal in Henry Reed Stiles' 1867 "History of Brooklyn."
See a video of a computer model of a working tide mill here.
See a video of a historic mill in the UK here.
During these 200+ years, most of Red Hook remains rural (and marshy) and is used for fishing, shellfishing, and light farming (grass, corn, orchards). The harbor is fecund and not fished out nor destroyed by pollution. Oysters are so plentiful that the poor, not just the wealthy, eat them in great quantities.
It is a sleepy place with few buildings. Most buildings are humble affairs associated with work (mills, fishing). In comparison, during this time, Brooklyn Heights evolves from a village with a bustling ferry landing to a cityscape with row houses.
Red Hook farm owners are often big names in Brooklyn Heights, it being a manageable daily commute by horseback between the Heights and here.
Certificate of the Red Hook Building Company, collection of PortSide NewYork
Change is in the air by the late 1830s. Maps are published showing Red Hook fully covered in a street grid, including many streets of residences. These are for the development plan of the Red Hook Building Company led by Col. Daniel Richards. It fails, and much of the grid shown on those maps is not built out until decades later; some as late as the early 1900s. Richards goes on to build Atlantic Dock, the original name for what is now called Atlantic Basin, though Atlantic Dock is much bigger and busier than the modern Atlantic Basin.
1851 depiction of part of Atlantic Dock. The current Atlantic Basin is a downsized, modernized version of the facility that was built with granite warehouses and piers within the waterspace.
1850-1950: 100 years of intense urbanization and growth
Brooklyn is incorporated as a city in 1834. Most of Brooklyn is farmland, except of the suburb of Brooklyn Heights.
In Red Hook, a major, man-made harbor surrounded by warehouses called Atlantic Dock is finished in the late 1840s, and the Bull Creek canal from Gowanus Bay to Buttermilk Channel is filled to construct Atlantic Dock. (Atlantic Dock is sometimes called Atlantic Docks and is called Atlantic Basin as of the 1960s.)
Atlantic Dock triggers urbanization in Red Hook at an explosive pace and ends Red Hook’s mill pond and farm era.
The creation of Atlantic Dock leads the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to report that Brooklyn is on its way to become a commercial center and a player relative to New York City (which is just Manhattan at that time.)
Yes, a Red Hook maritime development is seen as that significant to the future of Brooklyn. Maritime businesses begin moving en masse from Manhattan to Red Hook.
During the next 100 years, massive port, shipyard, warehousing and manufacturing sites are constructed, most of them related to the waterfront if not on it. Housing is constructed on many blocks, and Red Hook’s population increases in size and diversity with immigrants from multiple countries and parts of the world, plus visiting sailors from many nations.
In the age of sail, sailors are often not hired for the return trip of a ship, so they stay in Red Hook until they cand get signed on with a departing ship. Red Hook thus becomes a "sailortown," a multi-cultural community. A short description of NYC sailortowns by Johnathan Thayer is archived here, and a link to his full 361-page thesis on the topic is here.
The waterfront is busy, and not just with massive cargo vessels. There are tugs, there are yachts. Small boats are for rent, there is a floating pool, excursion boats pick up in the neighborhood, many marine businesses run small boats to transport visitors or seek business from vessels in the harbor. Photographs from the early 1900's show scenes that look the New England shore that New Yorkers now like to visit, with all sorts of boats and maritime uses cheek by jowl.
Erie Basin, Photo by Jenny Young Chandler, from The Henry Ford
Erie Basin, Photo by Jenny Young Chandler, from The Henry Ford
Erie Basin canal boats, ca. 1900, source New York State Archives
Erie Basin, WWII war materials ready to be shipped. International News Service photograph, March 1941. Collection of PortSide NewYork
During much of these 100 years, Red Hook has a combination of industry, residences built on the street grid, shantytowns off the grid, and undeveloped land - what zoning language now calls "mixed-use;" and Red Hook remains a mixed-use area until this day.
Shantytowns - not to be confused with squatters - are low-income, hardscrabble housing that is common in Brooklyn and Manhattan through the 1800s where the residents often build the home and pay "ground rent" for the land. The shantytown residents get no heat, water, sewage or waste removal services, and the roads are not paved. Residents often keep livestock and have small businesses on site taking in sewing or running taverns or processing waste (rag picking, scrap metal) making them also . For more, see our essay "Shantytowns, affordable housing, back in the day."
Red Hook is also what is known as a "sailor town," where "urban waterfront districts that catered to the transient population of seafarers constantly coming and going in between voyages at sea." Some sailors end up staying. All this gives Red Hook a multi-cultural, multi-lingual, and multi-racial community. Red Hook becomes the home of the first community of Puerto Ricans in NYC because shipping lines from the island docked here. Spaniards and Norwegians are other groups associated with specific piers this way. This all creates an "otherness" distinct from other neighborhoods, compounded by the fact that Red Hook is a peninsula (a place separated by water on most sides) contributes to that sense of difference and otherness, a strong cultural stamp which continues today.
Amazingly, despite a booming economy that has Erie Basin become the busiest maritime facility in the nation and be the heart of Brooklyn's port of international significance, Red Hook still retains open land and shantytowns, vestiges of its watery shoreline, until the 1930s.
The late 1930s is when the last of Red Hook's marsh is filled. That is when streets are constructed over all of Red Hook on the grid envisioned 100 years before by Col. Daniel Richards. This final phase occurs when the NYCHA Red Hook East development is built in 1938, followed by the ballfields and pool. NYCHA Red Hook West is built in 1955.
During the late 1990's and into the first decade of the 21st century, the media often reported that the construction of public housing is one on the changes that drags Red Hook down (the construction of the BQE and containerization leading to the departure of shipping are the other two factors often cited).
However, when the NYCHA houses are built in Red Hook, they are hailed as a great improvement and are popular - not surprising, given the many acres of Red Hook that still have shantytowns, a squatter colony, and the rough land of a waste dump that recently filled former marsh and tide mill ponds.
Look at eastern Red Hook in NYC's 1924 aerial to see a lot of acreage that shows paths through weedy undeveloped terrain. Also, some blocks south and east of Coffey Park are on the street grid but remain undeveloped.
Much of that rough land in southeast Red Hook is replaced by the Red Hook ballfields and pool. According to the New York Times, the opening of the Red Hook pool was attended by 40,000 people. (We'd love someont to fact check that. It feels like a typo that should have said 4,000.)
The shantytowns of the 1800s were modest to hardscrabble housing but not as wretched as the squatter camps that sprang up in the 1920s. One of those, Ørkenen Sur, arrived before the Great Depression due to a collapse in international shipping that stranded many Norwegian sailors.
Newly constructed NYCHA Red Hook building, 1939
1960 to 1992: the plummet, 32 years when most maritime and manufacturing departs
On April 26, 1956, Malcom McLean, shipped the first ocean containers aboard the IDEAL X (Ideal Experiment) from New York to Houston. This triggers the birth of modern container shipping, and in changing how shipping is done, triggers huge changes in Red Hook.
Red Hook’s economy rapidly collapses from boom town to abandoned warehouses and empty lots, from a bustling shoreline to a silent, rotting one. The death of Red Hook is not just because shipping changes with the advent of containers and moved to NJ, as the story is often told.
Yes, in 1956, the shipping container is invented; and, yes, in 1962, the Port Authority opens the world’s first container port, in Elizabeth, NJ which causes most shipping to move to NJ. But the collapse of Red Hook is clinched by the inaction that follows.
A lot of property is warehoused (and some still is) by the private and public sector. Government policies about the waterfront play a big role. Some are policies of doing nothing, others of doing things that fail, others that block efforts to reactivate it.
In the early 1960’s, Red Hook’s major waterfront landowners include the Port Authority, the City, Todd Shipyard and the Revere/Sucrest Sugar refinery.
The Port Authority owns much of Red Hook’s waterfront after buying the former NY Dock properties in 1955, eg, much of the waterfront running from the Brooklyn Bridge to and including the Grain Terminal on Columbia Street in Red Hook. The City owns some large parcels inside that stretch.
Also in there is the largest privately-owned waterfront site in Brooklyn, the Todd Shipyard. Next to that, to the west, is the Revere/Sucrest Sugar refinery. The rest of Erie Basin is owned by the Port Authority.
An early plan for a Red Hook containerport envisioned one much larger than was built.
A public discussion simmers for years about whether to build a Red Hook containerport and how the City and Port Authority will work together (or not). Traditionally, shipping used "finger piers," piers jutting out at 90 degrees from the shoreline the way your fingers stick out from your palm. Warehouses were often on each pier or directly adjacent. Wtih containers, the "boxes" are not put in warehouses, they are stacked outside; and since computers don't exist so just-in-time shipping doesn't exist, huge areas of land are needed to stack these boxes until they are picked up, their "dwell time." Red Hook is ringed with finger piers and does not have open land to make such a big port. The decision is made to put huge ports on the marshes in New Jersey, with the investment of land-filling and dredging to deepen the channel.
Red Hook's land-mass is all-built up by the advent of containerization, so making a modern port here would mean demolishing many privately-owned buildings to create space needed to hold stacks of containers before they are picked up (aka "dwell time") and thus maybe the use of emminent domain. The Port Authority updates some of its holdings in the 1960s by razing Atlantic Dock structures and filling over half its waterspace to create the current Atlantic Basin.
In 1972, a joint City-Port Authority plan is approved to make 230 acres of Red Hook into a containerport that would run from the entrance of Erie Basin up to the current port. The promises include one by the City to build new housing for displaced residents.
During these years of limbo and the spector of eminent domain to build a port, many homeowners sell, the real estate market withers, buildings are razed. Decay intensifies along the waterfront which for 300+ years has been the source of Red Hook’s power, appeal and its connection to the larger world.
In 1979 the Brooklyn newpaper The Phoenix reported on Scores of Red Hook Residents Protest Board Six Proposals.
The full containerport plan is never built; a smaller containerport is installed in the 1980s after the Tri-Party Agreement between the City, the State, and the Port Authority is finalized December 18, 1979. That says that the Port Authority should maintain the port for 50 years until 2029. See these documents:
The result is a small containerport and long scar of abandonment along the west and south edges of Red Hook from the water's edge of west and inland several blocks, plus the stigma of inaction.
In the late 1980s, the Port Authority invests $42MM in the Erie Basin Fishport which opens, flops, and closes within months in 1987. This failure does not help the economy of Red Hook nor its reputation.
Good policies also have destructive effects
The Clean Water Act of 1972 improves water quality, and marine borer worms return and live up their name. They bore through the wood pilings holding up piers which begin collapsing because the property is being warehoused and not maintained.
Next, the US Army Corps drift removal program pulls down the inactive finger piers destroyed by borers and rot so timbers don’t break loose and create hazards floating around the harbor. This removes a lot of maritime infrastructure. Fire takes out others such as the pier that becomes Valentino Park.
All of this degrades and removes docking infrastructure which state environmental regulations of the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) will make hard to rebuild once new property owners try to bring the waterfront back into maritime use.
In the early 1990s, the Port Authority begins selling an arc of waterfront properties along the southern edge of Red Hook to (moving counterclockwise around the shore) to Greg O’Connell and his partners, Hughes and Reinauer who set up the Erie Basin bargeport, and the Quadrozzi family.
All those landowners report that their efforts to reactivate the water’s edge face the challenge of the DEC that is reluctant to grant permits for shoreline repair. Many of their complaints with the DEC are detailed in a 2005 New York City Council Waterfront Committee Hearing.
Getting a DEC permit remains a major challenge in the present day.
Urban blight of the era
Inland, gangs, crime, and crack use wreak a toll on the Hook during the 1980s. A stalwart, rump remains of the Red Hook community soldiers on, while the media portrays Red Hook as the poster child of the crack epidemic. For outsiders, Red Hook's waterfront becomes known as a place where people drive to do illegal dumping (tires, stolen cars, an occasional body), drag racing and other illegal activities. You can hear about that era in a conversation recorded in 2024 between Red Hook leader Wally Bazemore and planner Ron Shiffman at a Pratt Institute graduate class here.
By the late 1980s, the maritime industry in the region is growing and seeking dock space, but waterfront parcels in Red Hook are inaccessible and warehoused for years. A vivid example is the warehousing is the Sucrest/Revere sugar refinery property that sits idle, often for sale, after the refinery closes in the 1980s.
The word on the street (from a rag tag marina of locals that existed there for many years) is that the refinery is owned by a crony of Imelda Marcos. That owner, and the one that follows, has the property listed at high prices that are more than a decade ahead of their time, so the site doesn't sell. During this limbo, the site's docking infrastructure and buildings deteriorate badly.
Towards the end of this tough 30+ year phase, quietly, urban pioneers start moving into private housing. The Port Authority also sells off large chunks of their waterfront bringing life back to what lay moribund while they warehoused it.
Revere Sugar in 2007 after Thor Equities had begun demolition. Photo (c) 2007 Carolina Salguero
1992 - 2016: 24 years from nadir to hot real estate and superstorm Sandy
December 12, 1992 is widely deemed to be Red Hook’s nadir when the beloved Principal of PS15 elementary school Patrick Daly is shot and killed by drug dealer crossfire in broad daylight. Civic betterment groups swing into action, and the neighborhood rebound begins.
The large waterfront parcels sold by the Port Authority slowly come to life for varied uses (maritime, retail, mixed use of commercial, industrial and public access), and the effects of the increased activity, and safer waterfront, ripple inland.
The Port Authority sells their failed Fishport site, and it becomes the Erie Basin Bargeport owned by Hughes Marine and Reinauer Transportation.
The Quadrozzi family buys the Port Authority grain terminal and large amount of land underwater of the never-built Brooklyn Basin in plans decades ago.
The most visible buyer is the retired cop Greg O'Connell who buys the Beard Street Pier and Pier 41 in the 1990s. He promptly provides a home for the Waterfront Museum Barge and the arts nonprofit BWAC, and their events help rebrand Red Hook as artsy - and this is key - safe to visit. On their heels are years of graduate students coming to the O'Connells to study urban decay and how to plan renewal. The O'Connell Organization website is here.
The urban pioneers and small scale manufacturers continue coming, so that by the early 2000's, the media rebrands Red Hook from "no-go zone" to "destination." Red Hook becomes the poster child of artisanal, design-build, New Brooklyn by the sea.
O'Connell then buys the huge building at the foot of Van Brunt Street that his other property surrounds; and in 2002, he leads an effort to change the zoning so it can house a vast supermarket Fairway Market with residences above. It's a choppy start in many ways, one being that the Councilman at the time Angel Rodriguez tries to extort O'Connell. The project proceeds, and the prospect of gourmet food coming to the food dessert of Red Hook sets off a real estate boom.
There's a city pattern, but as ever, Red Hook doesn't quite fit it.
By the late 1990s, NYC is "revitalizing" its waterfront by re-zoning and building luxury housing, supported by new waterfront parks. The small Red Hook Container Terminal (RHCT) begins facing the threat of such gentrification, a key pivot point being the Piers 6-12 study led by the NYC EDC that kicks off in late 2002. Community push-back, lead by PortSide's ED (before founding PortSide) Carolina Salguero, filmmaker Allison Prete, and then-District Mananger of Brooklyn Community Board 6 Craig Hammerman via the website Waterfront Matters archived here leads to this study being buried by the NYC EDC.
Since then, recurrent proposals to gentrify the port come from developers, Port Authority board members, Governor Andrew Cuomo picking up on the AECOM proposal below, and others.
In 2004, a zoning change clears the way for IKEA to create a store on the old Todd Shipyard, and IKEA closes on the shipyard in 2005. (In the last days of the shipyard, PortSide tapes several oral histories about the shipyard on site).
In 2005, the City announces that the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal will be developed in Atlantic Basin.
For the sleepy peninsula of Red Hook, the arrival of the Fairway, IKEA and cruise terminal in rapid succession are sudden change.
The question of "what will Red Hook become" hangs over the neighborhood after the arrival of the Fairway, and discussing land use and urban planning is often part of daily conversation and what you discuss at the bar.
Red Hook's revitalization proceeds with ups and downs, unlike places like Williamsburg or Long Island City that experience a massive, single rezonig effort that leads to an erupstion of condo towers and a waterfront esplanade park.
The fact that Red Hook's western waterfront has a port and that the O'Connell organziation put businesses not condos in their waterfront warehouses surely prevents Red Hook from flipping as fast as other places, not that developers aren't ogling the peninsula.
The 2008 recession stunts the gentification, the 2012 devastation of Superstorm Sandy does as well.
Gentrification hiccups are evident in stories like these: A luxury townhouse is built on Van Brunt Street opposite the VFW but doesn't sell for so long that the price drops and they offer a free Tesla car to sweeten the deal. By 2024, the luxury condo development of 160 Imlay has stalled for years leaving residents living in a job site, and they sue the developer.
Tesla themselves move to Red Hook after the major marine repair firm Golten sells their building that was damaged by Sandy. Damaged ships often docked in RHCT on Pier 9A so Golten could repair them.
The Port Authority, led by Chris Ward, creates the Brooklyn Rotterdam Exchange planning process which proposes major changes. Soon afterwards, Chris Ward leaves the Port Authority to work for AECOM, and AECOM stuns everyone by proposing a massive gentrification of Red Hook as part of their Southwest Brooklyn plan with condo towers in ports and on NYCHA land, plus the addition of a subway line from Manhattan.
Their are fights over building a nursing home (2015) and a 14-story mixed-use "model block" on industrial land (2020-21) proposed by local resident Alex Washburn. These fights get ugly. There is an ongoing struggle inside public housing to get apartement interiors repaired by the notoriously negligent and corrupt NYCHA. Housing in Red Hook is a fight.
The pandemic brings a real estate boom of another sort.
The pandemic and last mile facilities
The pandemic leads to a boom in internet shopping. During the Obama administration a federal economic development policy "Opportunity Zones" is developed to encourage investment in economically depressed areas.
These two things converge and lead to the construction of very large last-mile facilities in Red Hook which has large, abandoned, warehoused properties described above, the proximity to internet shoppers in Brownstone Brooklyn and in lower Manhattan via the tunnel. UPS buys the huge Lidgerwood site next to Valentino Park and demolishes that beloved, historic complex in 2019. Investors build last mile facilities on spec. The former sugar refinery becomes an Amazon last mile facility during the pandemic, and two years later, another Amazon one opens on the other side of IKEA. Earlier, Amazon Fresh started operating out of a new building a block inland at Bay Street and Columbia Street. The former Bushey site, where our tanker MARY A. WHALEN started her working life, is being developed by RXR, also on spec, as one of the largest last mile facilities on the east coast.
Red Hook becomes concerned about what is dubbed the "truckopalypse" of trucks moving all that stuff in and out of Red Hook; and non-maritime people develop a keen interest in maritime, particularly the "marine highway," as a way to reduce the truck traffic from these last mile facilities. This leads PortSide to write this explainer blogpost "Marine Highway 101 for Last Mile Planning."
UPS tests a "trailer on barge" version of the marine highway using Pier 9A in April 2022. PortSide's ED Carolina Salguero kayaked over to document it; see that here.
Replanning the Brooklyn Marine Terminal
In September, 2023, the Port Authority condemns two finger piers in RHCT, Piers 9A and 9B, dramatically reducing the working footprint of RHCT and impacting its ability to participate in the marine highway as UPS tested above. We hear that this news is the trigger for the City to get involved, leading to the massive news below.
May 14, 2024, maritime Red Hook moves to the center of a raging planning debate over "what will Red Hook become" with the annoucement at a press conference on that the City will take over the Port Authority's last stretch of working waterfront in Brooklyn along the Buttermilk Channel. Video of event and transcript. The 122 acres is rebranded "the Brooklyn Marine Terminal."
The site contains "Atlantic Basin" (formerly Atlantic Dock covered extensively on this website) with the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal as a small part of it, the Red Hook Container Terminal (RHCT), and Piers 7 and 8 which the Port Authority had run separately from RHCT as the "Brooklyn Marine Terminal" aka BMT.
That is almost all of Red Hook's western edge running north from the former Lidgerwood, now UPS site, to Brooklyn Bridge Park/Atlantic Avenue.
That runs past what is now called the Columbia Waterfront or Columbia Street Waterfront, but had been called Red Hook until sometime late 1980s or early 1990s until realtors rebranded it to help sell property. The BMT planning process is reconnecting the two neighborhoods that were once one.
The BMT process has also prompted many community voices to passionately advocate for BMT to stay in maritime use, building on the awareness covered in the section above The pandemic and last mile facilities especially because, in December 2024, the plans include adding massive amounts of housing, and mostly luxury housing to the site.
The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYC EDC) is running the replanning process; and as of midnight June 11, 2024, also managing the whole site. The Port Authority has turned over day to day management to the NYC EDC but still owns most of the land within the site. Note that there are some City parcels (look them up here) within BMT which is significant in terms of whether the NYS rezoning process GPP is used instead of the City rezoning process ULURP - if a rezoning happens - as would have to happen if the EDC proposal is approved since the EDC is proposing massive amounts of housing both north and south of RHCT. The EDC is also proposing buying the UPS site to put housing there.
BMT is a very complicated story that evolves constantly and rapidly with timeline extensions and new meetings. We cover this in detail on a blogpost about it here.
The core of this was written for the launch of Red Hook WaterStories 1.0 in 2016. Some updates have been made, and we continue adding info about the post 2016 period AND add older content as our research finds it.