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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

NEON BILLBOARDS OF FORGOTTEN BUSINESSES So there’s this building in Red Hook with a gigantic neon billboard framework on it, and the other letters of the ad are long gone…

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…

There are more streets still sporting their original brick or Belgian block pavements than you may think. There are still dozens, as a matter of fact… here are some of…