Defiant in the face of history, or how history is lost and maybe found again  

History is a hard business in Red Hook. Every local fight to save a historic building (plus, the Todd graving dock) since 2002 was lost. I know; I was were involved in all of them, working with the PortSide team after I founded this nonprofit. All the strucutures were demolished.

Perhaps Fort Defiance was destined to leave a legacy in abstraction alone.

Earthen fortifications fade back into earth if left alone, which is what happened at Fort Defiance and Cyprus Island.

Not much is known about the fort in the period directly after the Battle of Brooklyn, but the presumption is that the island was levelled in the 1840s to fill the marshes and tide mill ponds as Red Hook was becoming an important port locally, nationally, and internationally; and more land for development was needed. Red Hook history, and New York history as a whole, has been sacrificed at the altar of development for a long time. 

As far as we can tell, after 19th century history books, the name “Fort Defiance” would disappear until the 1950s, when a plaque commemorating the fort was placed at Todd Shipyards. as reported here. The only problem is that Todd Shipyard was several blocks east of the fort’s real location.  

In the mid-1990s, the fort’s name popped up again when Red Hook residents (Edie Stone? John McGettrick? We are still looking into this) procured a key to access a sliver of land alongside the federal ATF property on the northwest shore of what would become Valentino Park. Edie and friends jokingly referred to the land beyond the gate as “Fort Defiance Park.”

During some of our 2026 research, Scott Pfaffman, remembered this informal "Fort Defiance Park” with typical sarcasm saying “park” meant walking along the top of the cement bulkhead to get to a tuffet of weeds with a grand view of the harbor. “I think there was a bench…  maybe a bench and a few chairs. It could seat 3 people… it was a quiet meditation spot.” 

Edie Stone, who has since left Red Hook, answered our questions by email, saying: 

“Ft Defiance Park came to be when the ATF building was planned for that location. John McGettrick knew somehow that the lot line did not go to the water so we were able to get permission to use that strip of land as a garden. This was well before Valentino Pier was rebuilt. Sadly it didn’t last very long because the seawall was faulty and the garden started to cave in making it unsafe.”

This informal park appears, unnamed in a 1996 New York Times article as the place where "Gardeners have to use a key to get through a chain-link fence to tend their plants."

Hardly commemoration on the level of the National Register of Historic Places. 

Later in 1996, Valentino Park opened at a time when retiree John Burkard was Red Hook’s self-appointed historian. He remembered the Fort Defiance plaque at Todd Shipyard and agitated for Red Hook getting recognized for its role in the American Revolution. He's quoted in a 2006 article about the discovery of a cannonball in the backyard of 165 Coffey saying:

“One of the things that used to bother me: Every year they’d have these Battle of Brooklyn commemorations, and there’s never any mention of Red Hook,” said Burkard, whose family has lived in Brooklyn for three generations. “History happened here. I’d like to have something like that down here; maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I’d love to see it happen.”

The discovery of that cannonball at the home of Edie Stone and Matt LaDuca (when digging a grave for a pet iguana!) prompted more conversations about Fort Defiance and made frustrated Burkard's claims about the fort seem more real to those who doubted.  

Burkard used a relentless codger method of demanding that Red Hook history get its due. He badgered elected officials, the DOT, the staff of major landowner Greg O’Connell, and finally got commemoration for the former Lenape path used during the revolution (then called Red Hook Lane) in the form of DOT street signs in Red Hook and downtown Brooklyn. 

Commemorating Fort Defiance was more elusive. Why was it more elusive? 

Perhaps the differing geographic location stories brought about by the misplaced plaque at Todd Shipyards and the lack of physical proof of the site prevented an earlier commemoration?  Confusion persits: in early 2026, PortSide discovered that the American Battlefield Trust still had Fort Defiance in the wrong place - where the plaque was at Todd Shipyards in the 1950s. We notified the American Battlefield Trust of this mistake, but they have yet to update their map. 

Or was Red Hook so written off after being dubbed the crack capital of the USA in the late 1980s that local claims that Red Hook played a role in creating the United States were not believed?

Or were the commemorators of history only going to do that in “nice” neighborhoods? 

When Valentino Park opened in 1996, there was no plaque hailing this as the site of an important Revolutionary War fort. John Burkard was indignant, and his indignation rippled outwards via the butterfly effect, mobilizing people (sometimes in fear of getting more pressure from him) until New York State historical signs were installed. 

By June 2009, local awareness of the fort had grown enough that a bar/restaurant opened on Van Brunt Street called Fort Defiance. 

In 2011, Burkard got Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz to designate August 27 Fort Defiance Day. 

February 13, 2015, John Burkard died. PortSide had hoped to get all his research papers, but his wife discarded them after his death. 

In 2019, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Fort Defiance restaurant, a large mural by Duke Riley about the battle was added to the bar. However, that beloved “third place” was soon closed by the pandemic and wound down over a few years, closing in late 2023. Duke's mural is stored in a basement.

The NYC Parks department says they have info about the history of Fort Defiance posted in Valentino Park as part of their Historical Sign Project; but we could not find a Parks department sign with the history they have on their website here. In the park, we find Parks Department signs about fallen firefighter Louis Valentino for whom the park is named.

In 2019, right before Memorial Day weekend, UPS destroyed the beloved and magnificent buildings of the Lidgerwood company next to Valentino Park, despite a petition to save the building and people crying in the street. This wiped out another historical site and left a rubble field after UPS changed their minds and moved into a Bayonne facility instead of Red Hook. 

In December 2024, Mati Kalwill started an effort “Friends of Fort Defiance” to commemorate the history via a Fort Defiance park that would include climate adaptation features and a museum on what locals now call “the UPS site.” Some of Mati's talking points are two cannonballs, also discovered while burying at pet (this time a rabbit!) on Coffey Street at Bettina Magi's house, the property next to where a cannonball was discovered in 2006 during the pet iguana burial at Edie Stone and Matt LaDuca's. See! Red Hook has so much history that pet burial equals archeology!

In May 2019, as the Burkard family prepared to sell their 1899 rowhouse at 176 Coffey Street, John’s son William donated to PortSide a DOT sign saying “Red Hook Lane” that had been on the front of their home since his father got the DOT to recognize that historic Lenape trail. So that sign is still in Red Hook. So, Red Hook has some DOT signs and has found three cannonballs, but does not have full-blown recognition of our significance in the Revolutionary War, yet.

As was the slogan of Todd Shipyard during WWII, “the difficult we do every day, the impossible takes a little longer.”  That’s the Red Hook way. Onwards.