By The Red Hook WaterStories team
From the mid-1800s, lots of kinds of cargo were carried by canal boats from the U.S. inland to Red Hook to be shipped out around the world or to be used in local manufacturing. Grain was one of the largest imports, but some canal boats regularly...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
"You don't know what I mean about that job out there do you? I thought not. Well, it's this way. Down here in the towing, and ice and water supply business we have a great deal of competition. No, it is not friendly competition, I might almost say...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Huge waves crashing down on the deck as hail, steamers burning through their coal just to stay in place against the wind, ships being thrashed by the storm and everything, and everyone, frozen and encrusted in ice. These are the stories that the...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
This is not the origin story for the comic strip Little Orphan Annie, created by Harold Gray and first published in 1924, but it is the story of a little orphan girl named Annie who was adopted by a wealthy family. In 1908, the Annie of our story...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
"The Bridge, Erie Basin, N.Y.," is an etching Henry B. Shope (1862 - 1929). Tall masted ships, barges, horses and telegraph poles would have been a common site in Broolyn's Erie Basin from its construction in 1864 through the begining of...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
William Yorke was an artist who lived on a boat in the Erie Basin with his wife, son, and two dogs in 1882. After his boat was destroyed in a steamboat accident and Yorke was found living in a hut by the waterfront with his family, his story was...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
A Cruise in the Erie Basin , an article by Don C. Seitz, and published in Frank Leslie's magazines in 1892, relates the story of Red Hook's Erie Basin. It grew from a scene with “hardly a building to be seen south of Atlantic Street, and not...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The discovery of germ theory at the second end of the 19th century, following the close of the industrial revolution, brought hygiene to the front of people’s minds. As a result, when they organized committees and groups to keep their communities...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
"Carolina Salguero was Associate Curator of the exhibit. Mary Habstritt, President of the Roebling Chapter of the Society of Industrial Archeology was the curator. Salguero was the mole for the Save the Graving Dock effort since she had unfettered...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Three photographs of Erie Basin by George Bradford Brainerd (1845-1887). Brainerd was a civil engineer who worked for the city of Brooklyn as Deputy Water Purveyor from 1869 to 1886. His book The Water Works of Brooklyn: A Historical and Descriptive...
