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...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Photo of three mustachioed Italian dock workers reported to be taken at Pier 30, Red Hook, Brooklyn on November 6, 1918. (photographer unknow to us)
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Charles Yale Harrison best known for his anti-war novel Generals Die in Bed set his second novel A Child is Born (1931) among the poor of Red Hook. He focused on society's ills in hopes of effecting change. A reviewer in the Brooklyn Eagle...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Joe was reeling himself. He stuck his head in a bucket of water and cleaned up the cabin and threw the bottles overboard and started working on the claxon regularly. To hell with ‘em, he kept saying to himself, he wouldn’t be a plaster saint for...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Cargo ships are designed to carry heavy weights, and without it they ride too high in the water and are unstable. Ships not laden with enough goods would take on ballast, often in the form of sand or gravel to allow them to safely sail. ...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
At the beginning of the 19th Century, one out of five American sailors were black; at the start of the 20th Century, Black sailors in Brooklyn were facing severe job discrimination. The Brooklyn Eagle reported in 1903 that: The race question...
