By The Red Hook WaterStories team
A fair portion of today’s Red Hook was once water. An 1887 article in the Brook Eagle marvels that Henry and neighboring streets have been extended nearly half a mile in ten years. Marshes with knee-high water, or deeper, were being...
Historic nautical charts provide interesting details on the evolution of Red Hook. From NOAA Office of Coast Survey: Today's Office of Coast Survey traces its charting efforts back to 1807, when President Thomas Jefferson founded the Survey of the...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The “Brooklyn Basin” is another one of those big plans for Red Hook that did not happen . The plan appeared on maps as if it was built - with no indication of its aspirational status - leading people in the 21 st century to think...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
2016 draft map created by Eymund Diegel, based on his research describing Red Hook streams, ponds, tide mills up to around 1850.
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
In 1868, engineer G. B. Brainerd, reported in The American Naturalist on the sedimentary layers under the Erie Basin. He found beneath 10 feet of water at low tide: 1. Two feet of mud, the ordinary sediment of the bay 2. One foot of yellow sand 3....
You can see Red Hook and Gowanus shoreline changes in this illustration of two maps overlaid, the 1766 Ratzer map and one by Eymund Deigel using a 2004 NYC map. Bernard Ratzer was a military surveyor who mapped the Gowanus marshes...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
1844 Coastal Survey. Red Hook's watery past has a bearing on how this place floods in current times. This map shows the topography at the end of Red Hook's tide mill pond era, meaning that much of what is today called Red Hook is still...
Sandy essentially flooded anyone who built on the former tidal marshes. Map Explanation by mapmaker Eymund Diegel: Red lines are the upland Sandy flood lines (minus part the Fort Defiance Island area which is missing dry non flood area during...
