Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
A sign pointing to Red Hook’s abandoned Fishport could still be found on Columbia Street near Halleck, at least in 2008. The sign pointed the way to an ambitious fish wholesaling project that never got off the ground in the Erie Basin area. Between 1983 and 1989 the city renovated the boat basin and built [...]
I’m in Red Hook about once every 4 years or so. When I lived in Bay Ridge I would sometimes bicycle in, but not that often, because it was ringed by a nearly impenetrable barrier of slums, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel entrance. Red Hook, known as South Brooklyn when, in the 1800s, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Red Hook
Red Hook is Brooklyn’s Australia: an island nation unto itself. Cut off from downtown and Park Slope by the Gowanus Expressway and forbidding housing projects, it boasts a street system all its own, with few streets that stretch into other neighborhoods. Odd creatures found nowhere else in Brooklyn stammer and stumble down the streets. Efforts [...]
Bob Diamond, who explored and later instituted tours in the long-defunct Atlantic Avenue Tunnel, attempted to reinstitute a trolley line from Red Hook to downtown Brooklyn along Columbia Street in the late 1990s. He acquired several trolley cars from around the country and laid a square block of track along Conover and Reed Streets, long [...]
About ten years ago – at the Dawn of Forgotten New York (ca. 2000) I was aimlessly wandering around Red Hook Brooklyn — long before Fairway, long before IKEA, before the Todd Shipyards were dismantled, when the abandoned Revere Sugar factory still stood and the remains of a lightship where still floating in Erie Basin. A familiar [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Trolleys Tagged with: Brooklyn Red Hook
Having heard that Columbia Street, a lengthy stretch that runs along the Brooklyn waterfront for much of its route, was finally free of construction after three years of rough driving, bus reroutes and general chaos [as of 2008], I decided to take a look. Freebird Books, seen above, at Columbia and Kane Streets, was the site [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Cobble Hill Red Hook
Coffey Street in Red Hook and your webmaster have never been close associates, but have been, shall we say, acquaintances over the years. I first laid eyes on it sometime in the Super 70s, in high school, when the van transporting us kids made a pit stop there to pick up a classmate, Ed Burkard. Remember [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Red Hook
Your webmaster spent the dying summer embers of 2008 in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a neighborhood I had not been in in about three years (since 2005). The reason being… I was holding out and waiting for the latest round of sweeping changes that have taken hold here to be completed: more than any other Brooklyn [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Red Hook
Revere Sugar Refinery, a Red Hook landmark for decades, was demolished in 2007. “It’s hot in the poor places tonight.” SO SAYS Jeff Tweedy on Wilco’s 2002 LP Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I thought the lyric was apropos to Red Hook’s situation…after decade after desolate decade, the western Brooklyn neighborhood is now in line to get some high-income spillover [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Red Hook
WE’RE FADING TO GRAY this week as we mourn the possible imminent death of one of Brooklyn’s last colonial links. Red Hook Lane, running diagonally in downtown from Fulton and Pearl to Boerum Place and Livingston Street, has been there even before the British and Dutch arrived in Brooklyn as an Indian trail, but it [...]
Spring 2003′s relentless rain did not deter the busiest Forgottentour season to date on May 31, 2003 as nearly 40 Forgotten Fans set forth on a day of exploration in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a gritty outpost nestled between the Gowanus Expressway and the Buttermilk Channel. Film historian and freelance writer Mike Olshan was our Virgil in the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Brooklyn Red Hook
Are trolleys truly extinct? According to the City of New York, they are. But for a brief shining moment in Brooklyn, they weren’t. There was a Jurassic Park-like experiment that went on in remote Red Hook, Brooklyn, where a Flatbush resident named Bob Diamond dreamt of returning trolley cars to their rightful place on the [...]
Categorized in: Cobblestones Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights Cobble Hill Red Hook
The streets of New York City used to be paved with bricks. The term ‘cobblestones’ refers to uneven stones of varying shapes and sizes. This style of paving went out of style nearly a century and a half ago, to be replaced by even stones with a smoother finish known as “Belgian blocks.” They were [...]
Categorized in: Cobblestones Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn Manhattan Meatpacking Queens Red Hook Ridgewood
