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
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 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....
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Agwisun Oil Tanker Blast Several blasts tore through and shredded much of the 4,000 ton Agwisum oil tanker as it was undergoing repairs in the yards of the Robins Dry Dock and Repair Comapny. The effects of the explosions were felt as far away as...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Photograph of Erie Basin first graving dock, taken in 1866 its inaugural year. The ship in the graving dock with two tall masts as well as a chimney stack and a large side wheel is believed to be the MORNING STAR, a 2,000 ton liner of the New York...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The racing yacht VALKYRIE , was the unsuccessful British challenger of the ninth America's Cup race in 1895 against American yacht DEFENDER. While in dry dock in Erie Basin, being redied for the race, she was a popular attraction....
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The 1903 America's Cup was won by the American sloop Reliance , who won all three races against the Irish challenger, Shamrock III . This was the 12th America's Cup. Reliance was designed by legenday Nathanael Herreshoff, and skippered by...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
America's Cup sloop Shamrock III . Shamrock III was entered in the 1903 America's Cup by Scottish selfmade millionaire Sir Thomas Lipton, founder of the Lipton tea company. The 12th America's Cup was the third consecutive Cup to be unsuccessfully...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Canal boats moored in a tightly-packed cluster in the Erie Basin ca. 1900. These flat bottomed boats, moved grain, potatoes and a variety of other produce and goods down the Erie Canal to Brooklyn's Red Hook. In the warm months...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The trans-Pacific sidewheel steamship GREAT REPUBLIC built by Henry Steers in Greenpoint being fitted out in Graving Dock No. 1 of Erie Basin. The photo was taken in 1867. The dock is one year old. The Erie Basin breakwater is unfinished and at...
