By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Captain Tom Smith was interviewed over lunch in the galley of the MARY A. WHALEN in 2016. For part of his long career, he worked for the same company that owned The MARY, then a working oil tanker, now the flagship of PortSide NewYork....
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The 2022 public art project, @Work was by Zoe Beloff and Eric Muzzy. Portraits were made of essential workers in acrylic paint. These were then put on banners with QR codes linked to documentary films they made were essential workers describe...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Select passages from The Citizen guide to Brooklyn and Long Island , 1893 [Page 103] A comparison between the commerce of New York and Brooklyn will serve to show the relative importance of the two cities as regards shipping and allied industries....
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Four years before the American Civil War, a legal battle emerged from a situation that occurred aboard a steamship from Savannah to New York. One of the passengers, Thomas Steele, a light skinned man, was accused of being a fugitive slave by another...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The large Red Hook, Brooklyn estate of Jordan Coles was put up for sale on June 2nd, 1836, following his death. The map shows the Gowanus Creek, before it was turned into a canal; mills and mill ponds; scattered houses and a mansion, not aligned...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Construction of The Atlantic Dock - a massive, man-made harbor for deep water ships, began on June 3, 1841. The erection of stout stone warehouses and towering grain elevators that could handle products coming down the Erie Canal began in...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
A hand-drawn map of Brooklyn from the 1770s, showing Red Hook, "the road to the new ferry" and distances from Flatbush.
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
In 1846 when Hamilton Avenue Ferry service to Manhattan started it was the only mass transit option to and from Red Hook, Brooklyn. This was no longer the case in 1914, street cars and elevated subway lines crossed the Brooklyn Bridge,...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The Hamilton Avenue Ferry was established in 1846. It was run by the Union Ferry Company, who also ran the Fulton Ferry at that time. A major destination was a new upmarket cemetery. The ferry offered a “direct approach by way of the Gowanus...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Bowne Street is likely named after Rodman Bowne who owned land in the area in 1834. The Bowne brothers Rodman (November 1784-1845) and Samuel (1791-1845) made their success in the ferry business. They ran the Catherine Street Ferry that landed at...
