Court Street, from Bryant Street to Gowanus Canal, showing in the background the Ira S. Bushey and Sons boat building plant. October 8, 1937. P. L. Sperr. PortSide note: Ira S. Bushey & Sons was more than a shipyard. They also were a fuel...
Street address: Court Street & Bryant Street, Brooklyn, NY
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
"Steamers Loading Exports in the Atlantic Basin" One of a large series of picture postcards published by the Brooklyn Eagle in the early 1900s. In addition to steamers, numerous barges - both square and Dutch style of rounded ones - also fill...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Lightship No 84, sunk off old Revere Sugar dock in 1997. Its tall masts remained sticking up out of the water for 12 years, a reminder of what will happen when a boat is not cared for. Built in 1907, the ship served for many years as a floating...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Floating grain elevators were used to move grain up, out of the holds of ships and barges and then top load the grain into storage bins on land or on other vessels. According to Henry R. Stiles in A History of the City of Brooklyn , Daniel Richards...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
During a tuberculosis scare in 1934 a New York Health Commissioner study disproved the belief that people of color suffered in greater numbers than whites. The New York Age: National Negro Weekly reported that the study which compared Harlem...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
A giant timber raft, 595 feet long and 55 feet wide, containing 22,000 ‘sticks’ (logs) was floated from the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia to the Erie Basin, Brooklyn, in 1888. An experiment in cost savings, it was calculated that if the wood was...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
In 1934 the workers on Isbrandtsen-Moller ‘s Pier 30 near the Hamilton Avenue ferry house were part of an experiment. The Musak Corporation of Manhattan, dispenser of music for, cocktail and dinner patrons, cigar workers, chocolate dippers,...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
" We have mostly men here - very few women. No unattached women permitted at the bar. That’s a simple way of preventing trouble." One of the best known watering holes in Red Hook was the Shaft Alley saloon. Fortune magazine, in a 1937 essay...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
A small blurb in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle , July 1852 paints an image of scrappy Red Hook. A man named Hayes, who keeps a junk store in Red Hook Point, was taken before Justice King this morning, on a charge preferred against him by David W. Sweet,...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Pier 30 at the foot of Irving Street, Brooklyn, September 10, 1918. Photographed for the Robbins-Ripley Company. Pier 30 today is part of the Red Hook Container Port. Irving Street has been swallowed up by the container port and no longer exists. It...