Red Hook, Brooklyn

[Edward]

The view of downtown Manhattan (http://www.wirednewyork.com/manhattan/default.htm) from Beard Street Pier in Red Hook in March of 2002.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/brooklyn/red_hook/images/red_hook_beard_street_pier_manhattan_17march02.jpg



Red Hook Stores, the Civil War-era warehouse at 480-500 Brunt Street.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/brooklyn/red_hook/images/red_hook_480brunt_stores_17march02.jpg



The Brooklyn Historic Railway Association (BHRA) (http://www.brooklynrail.com) is a non-profit organization dedicated to returning trolleys to the streets of Brooklyn, NY.

The BHRA museum and trolley barn is located in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on the historic Beard Street Piers (circa 1870). BHRA currently has a fleet of 16 trolleys (15 PCC trolleys and a trolley car from 1897).

http://www.wirednewyork.com/brooklyn/red_hook/images/red_hook_beard_street_pier_trolley_17march02.jpg



Statue of Liberty (http://www.wirednewyork.com/landmarks/liberty/default.htm) and Staten Island Ferry. The view from Beard Street Pier in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/brooklyn/red_hook/images/red_hook_beard_street_pier_liberty_17march02.jpg



At the Warehouse Pier in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in May of 2001.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/brooklyn/red_hook/images/red_hook_warehouse_pier_12may01.jpg



Warehouse Pier in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/brooklyn/red_hook/images/red_hook_warehouse_pier_plant_12may01.jpg

[amigo32]

Cool pictures of vintage buildings!

[Kris]

A Breached Trolley Rebirth
*
By Joshua Robin
Staff Writer

Clang, clang, clunk went the Brooklyn trolley.

A year after the borough toasted a plan to roll street cars on the Red Hook waterfront, the projectis dead, halted by red ink and legal controversy.

Once roundly praised for merging nostalgia with mass transit for far-flung Brooklynites, the trolley fell victim to a cash shortfall amid infighting, rivalry among trolley groups, charges of greed, and a struggle that even broke up best friends.

Bob Diamond, the force behind the quixotic venture, now faces a swarm of problems of his own, not the least of which is a possible $1,000 fine for trespassing into a manhole, as well as how to dispose of 16 trolley cars he bought.

"I think we've hit the rock bottom right now," said Diamond, the 43-year-old Brooklyn Heights trolley fan who for the past 12 years labored to bring street cars back to Brooklyn after a 43-year absence.

A rival railcar group, meanwhile, which recently splintered from Diamond's Brooklyn Historical Railway Association is proposing to build a separate line on the other side of the Gowanus Expressway, using tracks near Borough Hall last used in 1930.

To succeed, the group will need to avoid the same mistakes that prompted its founders to quit Diamond's line.

"His way did not seem to work out. We hope our way does," said co-founder Arthur Melnick of Midwood.

The group Diamond founded in 1993 once had federal and city officials dishing out hundreds of thousands in seed money, but in the end, he managed to lay track on only two streets at the tip of Red Hook's gentrifying peninsula.

Those who followed the sputtering end of the trolley plan say two factors caused the failure.

First, Diamond, who also manages a New Jersey apartment building, didn't do enough private fund-raising to supplement the $310,000 in public funds he got, said Tom Cocola, a spokesman for the city Department of Transportation. In June, the agency revoked its consent to allow him to build the line.

"We stand that at this point in time, Mr. Diamond hasn't shown us the ability to get private money, to raise private money," Cocola said.

Second, according to Diamond's critics, his distrust and unwillingness to delegate power among his volunteers cost him.

By Diamond's own admission, he fired his second-in-command, Greg Castillo, who was also his childhood best friend, and watched passively as other volunteers deserted him.

"Everybody was viewed as a potential enemy," said one former volunteer, who did not want to be named. He said Diamond once even asked him to sign a loyalty oath, but never followed through.

Diamond acknowledged his shortfall in fund-raising, but pointed out that he raised about $500,000 in grants and private funds. It still wasn't enough, because unlike his competitors' plan, he had to lay his own tracks. He said he spent the private money to purchase insurance and to buy and restore 16 trolley cars, cars he now seeks to sell.

Diamond also dismisses complaints from those who fled the organization, saying his management style became necessary when volunteers became "greedy," — thinking the project could make money.

"I think I wasn't controlling enough," Diamond insisted.

Told that, Jan Lorenzen, a former volunteer who founded the new trolley organization with Melnick last year, said money was never the motivation. "We do this because we like trolleys," Lorenzen said.

Despite the downward trajectory of Diamond's streetcar project, its founder maintains his nonchalant, folksy manner — even as he faces legal hurdles and duels with the city officials and former allies who left him.

Last Wednesday, Diamond was given a $1,000 city ticket for removing a manhole cover on Atlantic Avenue, attempting to visit an old subway tunnel where he hoped the Red Hook trolley would eventually run en route to Downtown Brooklyn.

"I was really insulted when they told me I looked like a terrorist," Diamond said, vowing to fight the ticket.

In another brush with the law, Diamond is refusing city orders to remove tracks laid down along Conover and Reed streets in Red Hook.

"For BHRA to dismantle the project based on 'orders' from CDOT [the city Department of Transportation] may in fact be tantamount to destruction of public property, and open BHRA personnel to criminal prosecution or other civil liability," Diamond argued in an open letter posted on his Web site.

Meanwhile, the 16 trolley cars Diamond bought now sit in storage at a Red Hook warehouse and at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Diamond wants to sell them and use the proceeds to revive his dream.

Greg O'Connell, who is converting the property where five of the cars are stored into a Fairway supermarket and lot, has sued Diamond to force the removal of the trolleys, but the two men are negotiating to resolve the problem.

Diamond, meanwhile, has filed claims against the city's Department of Transportation, alleging that when city crews trucked away old rail tracks in May, workers took not only equipment bought with tax dollars — but also $616,000 worth of equipment belonging to the organization, including some that Diamond said he bought with his own money.

Cocola denied those charges. "I guess he's doing all he can to spice up the story," he wrote in an e-mail.

While Diamond's project is kaput for now, he hasn't abandoned the dream of bringing trolley cars back to Brooklyn (a place that, after all, inspired the Dodgers — shorthand for Trolley Dodgers.)

As for the rival trolley project — which Diamond dismisses as a "copy cat" of his own — that group is proposing two main trolley lines, saying they would cost $15 million to build.

Cocola, of the Department of Transportation, said the agency would consider any proposals submitted. To date, none has been.

One of the proposed lines, the Park Line, would hug the Brooklyn waterfront south of the Brooklyn Bridge along a route that travels through a planned city park. The other, the Street Line, would haul riders along routes from Borough Hall along Washington Street to the trendy neighborhood dubbed DUMBO — or "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass."

"Not only can they serve as a tourist thing. They can also be practical," said Lorenzen, of Williamsburg, whose day job is working on airplane interiors.

Added Borough President Marty Markowitz: "Trolleys make just as much sense today as they did 100 years ago."

Copyright © Newsday, Inc.

[normaldude]

I wonder how much Red Hook will change when Ikea opens their store there in 2005.

http://www.ikearedhook.com

[billyblancoNYC]

Hopefully, it'll fail. *They are pushing hard, though. *Sick of chains - Ikea, Home Depot, etc, bulding on valuable waterfont land. *It's unacceptable. This can be in any damn location.

[Kris]

August 20, 2003

No Red Barn, but That's a Farm in Red Hook

By DIANE CARDWELL

In the middle of a large, empty playground, just down the street from a strip of engineering businesses and industrial parts manufacturers in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a farm is beginning to take shape on top of the buckling pavement. It is not yet much to look at: just a few raised beds amid the weeds sprouting between the cracks in the ground.

But the farmers — a group of teenagers organized by a nonprofit group called Added Value — have already planted baby lettuce and late-season greens, which they will sell later at the Red Hook Farmers' Market and to neighborhood restaurants and shops, or donate to food pantries and soup kitchens. Through the program, now in its third year, the students have been planting and harvesting Japanese eggplant, pattypan squash and sugar-snap peas on a quarter-acre in Far Rockaway, Queens, and at a smaller garden on Wolcott Street in Red Hook.

But the playground, until recently populated mainly by men flying toy helicopters, the occasional resident practicing tai chi and people using drugs, offered the program space to realize even greater ambitions. The lot, nearly two acres bounded by Sigourney, Otsego, Halleck and Columbia Streets, will be home to one of the largest farms in the city and will allow the group to expand into composting, hydroponics and even fish farming.

The spot, near a huge public housing complex, industrial warehouses and a car pound, is far from bucolic, though it is maintained by the Parks Department. But it was enough to bring a program co-director, Ian Marvy, 30, to tears when he saw it about two years ago.

Michael Hurwitz, 30, the other program director, said Mr. Marvy told him, "Oh, my God, this is our future."

Near the end of last week, even as the city sputtered through the paroxysms of the blackout, that future was becoming present. One bed, measuring 8 feet by 128 feet and 10 inches high, had already been built and a few teenagers were filling it with soil from a huge pile in a corner. A few other teenagers were fighting off biting flies to work with John Ameroso, an educator for Cornell Cooperative Extension who is a consultant to the project, on building a second bed. Denia Cuello, 14, was dancing across a 2-by-8 piece of lumber placed over the soil to compact it. The group is behind schedule in filling field green and herb orders for 360, a nearby French bistro, Mr. Marvy said, so they cannot wait for gravity to compact the soil.

"I am not going to be a farmer when I grow up," said Denia, who lives in the nearby Red Hook Houses, bounding off the bed. "They got to do so many things." Even so, she said, she has found that she likes to build things, and she especially likes earning her own money for clothes and sneakers. "When I need something, I don't have to ask my mother."

The program pays participants, who work 16 hours a week, $250 or $350 a month, depending on seniority.

Although Mr. Hurwitz and Mr. Marvy, who met while working at the Red Hook Youth Court, started the program in part to create job opportunities for low-income city teenagers, their farming efforts are about much more, they say. The city has a rich tradition in community gardening, but Mr. Marvy and Mr. Hurwitz were quick to distinguish their program as having its roots in the urban agriculture movement, which, they say, is different.

Urban agriculture focuses on growing food for a variety of reasons. For Mr. Hurwitz and Mr. Marvy, those reasons are to provide affordable, high-quality food to low-income areas that do not have regular access to items like ruby chard or red mustard. The program also focuses on teaching job skills, communication and leadership to young people.

"We wanted to create entrepreneurial opportunities for kids," said Mr. Hurwitz, who has a background in social work. "Every drug dealer I ever worked with was a better entrepreneur than I am."

Mr. Marvy and Mr. Hurwitz plan to build 30 beds, and turn half of them over to neighborhood schools, centers for the elderly and Just Food, another nonprofit group that promotes urban farming. There are plans for a greenhouse so they can grow year-round, including plants for the city's parks. The two men also plan to start a vermiculture program, using worms to help turn waste into worm castings, a high-quality growing material that they can package and sell.

For the teenagers, the program offers, at first, a job. Jose Felix, 18, has been in the program since it began. "It's good to get paid and learn a lot at the same time," he said. "It's better than working in a fast-food job where you're not learning very much and you're not getting paid enough."

But taking part in the program has also given him other opportunities. Recently, he traveled to Costa Rica for a youth conference, which he said opened his eyes to the advantages he has in the United States.

"The youth in Costa Rica were basically doing things their parents were supposed to be doing," he said, adding that the boys had jobs at 14 and young girls were having babies. "You can just do so much more here."

Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, said he had approved the project because it was an adaptive reuse of a site that was being used. "And it's a community-oriented, environmentally appropriate project with economic development possibilities."

It involves plants, young people and environmental education, making it a perfect Parks Department project, Mr. Benepe said.

But even as urban agriculture should be encouraged, he said, it seems unlikely to spread far and wide in the city because land is so valuable and there are so many pressures to develop the little that is vacant. Much of what exists are demonstration farms with historic backgrounds, like the Queens County Farm Museum, or community vegetable plots.

At the same time, Mr. Benepe said, it was especially critical in the city to strengthen the connection between people and the food they eat.

"Most of us are so removed from agriculture, from where food comes from," he said, "just having people understand that vegetables grow on vines or out of shrubs and that it's possible to grow tasty vegetables without pesticides or herbicides" is important.

Then, too, the city has a history of children's farm gardens, like one that existed at the turn of the 20th century in DeWitt Clinton Park in Hell's Kitchen. There, Mr. Benepe said, in what was not considered one of the city's finer neighborhoods, children learned about agriculture and economics. "That's a predecessor of what's going to be happening here."

Last week, all that was very much in evidence. Mr. Marvy was describing his vision of a place where young people could learn math and science through farming, while eight of the participants were bustling about in the heat, readying beds, watering plants and ferrying dirt.

As Jose passed a bed where Nastassia Gore, 14, had been planting baby greens, he asked Mr. Hurwitz if they were mizuna, a feathery Asian green.

They were not, but were green mustard, which is related.

"I am thoroughly impressed that you knew that it was a cousin of a mizuna plant," Mr. Hurwitz said. Jose shrugged and moved on.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

January 10, 2004

ABOUT NEW YORK

The Trolley Guy's Last Ride (All 12 Feet of It)

By DAN BARRY

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/01/10/nyregion/about.large.jpg
Bob Diamond, with trolleys in a garage in Red Hook, has been trying for two decades to return trolley service to Brooklyn, but his efforts appear to have been in vain.

IN a darkened bay at Red Hook's watery edge, the trolley guy of Brooklyn steps over the bits and pieces of his grand vision to board his magnificent vessel. Come on, he says, in that weary-whiny voice of his. "I'll take you on the world's shortest trolley ride."

He turns on the lights, rings the bell — ding, ding — and an 1897 trolley of mahogany and oak lurches six feet and stops. He walks to the rear, rings the bell — ding, ding — and the trolley lurches six feet back. That's it; 12 feet. Ride over.

The last stop returns Bob Diamond, the trolley guy, to his cluttered world. In this cold and cavernous bay, from which he is about to be evicted, you will find old trolley fare boxes; books about electromechanical devices of the 1930's; pneumatically powered door engines; a BB gun to scare away pigeons and rats; heavy-duty machine tools; and ever-accumulating piles of spare trolley parts.

Rising from this mess are two meticulously restored, but stranded, trolleys: the brown 1897 model, once used by the king of Norway, and a green-and-silver 1951 Pullman that once cruised along Boston's green line. And beside them always, Mr. Diamond: a rumpled shrug of a man who was married once for two days; whose dinner most nights is three hot dogs, cheese fries and an iced tea at Nathan's; and who is now the only person in New York with 16 trolleys and nowhere to put them.

Mr. Diamond, 44, wheezes out the approximation of a laugh. "I'm laughing but I should be crying," he says. "It must be post-traumatic stress."

This man was once the adopted darling of city officials, proponents of Red Hook revitalization, and anyone else who nursed an ache for the way things used to be in Brooklyn. More than just an electrical engineer, he was a Flatbush visionary — an asset of the city.

He earned his place as a bona fide Brooklyn character more than two decades ago by discovering a forgotten railroad tunnel beneath Atlantic Avenue. He created the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association and enlisted a band of volunteers to restore the tunnel and lead tours. Soon they were launched on the odd but honorable mission of returning trolleys to Brooklyn for the first time since the mid-50's.

Piece by piece, they built their fleet. The Norwegian trolley, on permanent loan from a Staten Island man. Three Pullman cars from Boston that Mr. Diamond managed to buy for $9 — plus $10,000 shipping. A switching locomotive that he recovered from a New Jersey soybean field for $8,000. A dozen more trolley cars from Ohio that cost $10,000 to buy and $50,000 to ship from Buffalo.

In 1994, Mr. Diamond and his group moved their operation to this bay in a 19th century warehouse at the end of Van Brunt Street. Their efforts attracted the attention of local and federal officials who saw the charm and the need for light-rail service that would link isolated Red Hook to the rest of the borough.

With the help of the city's Department of Transportation, Mr. Diamond's group received $286,000 in federal money to lay a few hundred feet of trolley line in Red Hook. Who knew? Maybe it would someday lead to the development of light-rail service all the way to downtown Brooklyn.

The volunteers lovingly laid the track, polished the trolleys and worked out the intricate electrical system needed to activate service. Mr. Diamond estimates that he spent more than $100,000 of his own money — earned in part by managing a New Jersey apartment complex — on sundry items, including several thousand dollars for jackhammer rentals. "It's still on my credit card," he says.

Everything seemed to be on track. In 1999, that glorious Norwegian trolley glided out of its darkened bay, looped around the warehouse, and went a few hundred feet down a track; soon, tourists were paying to take the short waterfront ride. Then city transportation officials gave permission to Mr. Diamond's group to lay track on Conover Street, the hope being that a trolley would one day lead to a bus stop a half-mile away.

Mr. Diamond may have been a visionary, but his single-mindedness caused problems. City officials grumble that he wasn't doing any fund-raising; he counters that his contribution came in sweat equity. As for allegations that he did not want to share responsibility for the trolleys, Mr. Diamond says that he was worried about a "takeover group" within his core of volunteers.

"When I didn't like them trying to take it over, they said I didn't want to share responsibility," he says. "I wasn't going to turn it over, especially after I sunk in 20 years of my own time and money."

In August 2001, the bulkhead along the pier outside his trolley bay gave way, damaging the track and auguring a larger collapse.

The two trolleys inside had nowhere to go. Volunteers left to create their own trolley group. And the disagreements with city officials became so contentious that in early 2002 they announced that they would no longer support the spending of federal money on Mr. Diamond's dream project.

Mr. Diamond now had five stranded trolleys in Red Hook, including the two in the bay; 11 stranded trolleys and a locomotive at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; a half-built track on a city street — and an ever-diminishing number of supporters.

He accused a former volunteer of breaking into the bay one night and downloading his plans from a computer; nonsense, the former volunteer says. He charged that a city transportation official was related to one of his competitors; not true, a spokesman for the city agency says. He also accused the Department of Transportation of having him tailed and even arrested; ridiculous, the spokesman says.

A few weeks ago, Greg O'Connell — the owner of the warehouse who describes himself as a believer in Mr. Diamond's vision — sent an eviction notice to Mr. Diamond and his organization. The group had been using the warehouse space, rent-free, for nearly a decade.

"We've been left with no other choice," Mr. O'Connell says. "There are other nonprofits. We get many calls to use that space from people who could make a real contribution to the neighborhood."

"Bob's difficult sometimes to work with," Mr. O'Connell adds. "He's unique."

Then, a couple of weeks ago, as Mr. Diamond watched, the city ripped up the tracks that had been laid by volunteers along Conover Street; his dream had become a hazard. Tom Cocola, a spokesman for the Department of Transportation, says that Mr. Diamond had been notified several times that the tracks had to be removed.

"We were excited to jumpstart the trolley initiative," Mr. Cocola said in an e-mail message. "But promises made by Mr. Diamond were not met, so we decided that — in a time where the city has experienced budget difficulties — it would not be prudent to waste any more taxpayers' money on this project, no matter how noble it appeared on paper."

Mr. Diamond says that he has no idea what to do, and no more money to spend on his vision. He continues to level charges that all his former supporters have betrayed him and may be conspiring to take his trolleys from him.

"What a huge waste of time and money," he says. "It's sort of like being dressed up with no place to go."

For now, there is just him, and a young volunteer named Donald. They sit in the back of this Red Hook bay, hunched around a portable heater, watching a black-and-white television, while all about them lay pieces of trolley.

After taking the 1897 trolley for its 12-foot ride, Mr. Diamond climbs aboard the sleek Pullman to point out the attention given to its restoration, down to the row of incandescent bull's-eye lights. He turns on the air compressors, and begins to open and close the door. For a little while, at least, this stranded trolley sounds as though it is breathing.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

What a forlorn photo.

[GowanusGuy]

What a forlorn article.

"that weary-whiny voice of his"

"whose dinner most nights is three hot dogs, cheese fries and an iced tea"

"wheezes out the approximation of a laugh"

"They sit in the back of this Red Hook bay, hunched around a portable heater, watching a black-and-white television"

Some of that stuff is just mean. Shame on you NY Times.

This is sad. This would have been pretty cool. Not an essential project perhaps, but a real treat.

[ZippyTheChimp]

New York Newsday

Red Hook: The Next Murano?

By Vera Haller
NYNewsday.com

January 21, 2004, 11:27 AM EST

Although tourists do not throng to its shores by the boatload to buy glass-blown trinkets as they do in Murano, comparisons can be drawn between Red Hook and the Italian glassmaking center.

Like Murano, an island near Venice, Red Hook, too, is on the water -- a peninsula jutting into the New York Harbor.

And like Murano, Red Hook is home to a cluster of glassblowers and artisans who engrave, bend and color glass.

Some 14 glass or glass-related businesses are located in the neighborhood, according to Phaedra Thomas, director of the Red Hook and Gowanus programs for the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corp.

Affordability of studio space and industrial zoning that allows them to operate the ovens needed to melt glass were some of the reasons that first drew the glass companies to Red Hook.

"They also consider themselves kindred spirits with the other artists and artisans," such as the many woodworkers who also have settled in Red Hook, Thomas said.

It was a search for more space in 1989 that led Charles Flickinger to leave Williamsburg and relocate his glass-bending shop, Flickinger Glassworks, to Pier 41 in Red Hook.

"We're probably the first glass business that moved to this neighborhood and quite a number have followed," he said. "I think I have the best office in New York, 30 feet from the water staring at the Verrazano Bridge."

With 12 employees, Flickinger Glassworks creates custom bent glass pieces for lighting, cabinetry and display cases by shaping sheet glass into steel molds.

The company provided the glass used for the refurbishment of the clock atop the information booth at Grand Central Terminal.

It was the presence of glass companies such as Flickinger that drew Tomas Tisch, a glass engraver, to his studio in the Beard Street warehouse, which like Pier 41 is owned by developer Greg O'Connell.

"People who love glass, who have a passion for glass, tend to stick together," Tisch said.

He said those in the glass community depended on each other to provide services. For example, if Flickinger had a client who wanted engraving on a piece of bent glass, he could easily send that work to Tisch.

"It's just like in an ancient city where all the coppersmiths were in one row and all the silversmiths were in another area and all the butchers were in another. I think that whole idea still holds true," Tisch said.

Tisch spoke with pride of his craft, which was passed on to him by his father and grandfather.

Using a simple machine with a spinning grinding stone and water to cool the surface, Tisch creates intricate designs on glass. Much of his work is restoration.

Downstairs in the same warehouse, another scene of old fashioned artisanry played out in the studio of Pier Glass, where Kevin Kutch and Mary Ellen Buxton were beginning work on a new glass creation.

Starting with a blob of molten glass taken out of a red-hot oven, they used a tube and hand-made metal tools – such as tongs and tweezers -- to blow, bend, shape and mold the glass.

They periodically returned the worked glass to the oven to be softened so more molding and shaping could be done. The final product was a delicate perfume bottle.

They also create high-end glass 'sculptures,' which are shown and sold in art galleries. Buxton said the couple's signature work usually included clear glass, a small amount of color and "multiple blown chambers."

Kutch is optimistic about the future of his business in Red Hook even though other artists and small business owners are apprehensive about development changes in the neighborhood.

Tisch worries that the neighborhood's quiet atmosphere will disappear if Ikea wins zoning approval to open one of its huge stores in Red Hook.

And Flickinger, noting rising rents, said he knew of two glass companies in Red Hook that have gone out of business in the past two years.

But Kutch and Buxton were hopeful their company would grow with the neighborhood.

Their studio faces yet another waterfront warehouse, also owned by O'Connell, that is being developed to house a Fairway supermarket. If all goes as planned, ferry service connecting Manhattan to Red Hook will open with a stop right at their doorstep.

In anticipation, the artists have set aside a portion of their studio for a future retail outlet. Their vision: boatloads of shoppers delivered to their shores to buy their glass-blown trinkets.

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

Video - Inside a Glassblower's Studio (http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/brooklyn/nyc-redhookvideo,0,7909635.realvideo?coll=nyc-topheadlines-right)

Photos - Red Hook Glassblowers (http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/brooklyn/nyc-glasspromopix,0,6878377.photo?coll=nyc-topheadlines-right)


Red Hook: A Storied Past

By Vera Haller
NYNewsday.com

January 21, 2004, 11:24 AM EST

Judith Dailey, 58, has fond memories of growing up in Red Hook when the Brooklyn neighborhood was still bustling with longshoremen and their families.

She remembers seeing movies at the Pioneer Theater, going fishing with her father, a dock worker at Todd Shipyards, and attending church bazaars in what was then an open field behind the convent at Visitation Place.

"The bazaars were like a mini-Coney Island with rides and games," reminisced Dailey, a teacher's assistant at Red Hook's P.S. 27. One man from the neighborhood gave out candy to all the children, she said.

She described a close-knit family and community life. Not only did she have her family, which was of Puerto Rican heritage and included seven brothers and sisters, but Dailey said neighbors also looked out for each other. "You didn't get away with a thing," she said. "Everybody knew everybody. It was such a sense of security."

Red Hook became an important shipping center in the mid 1800s with the opening of the Atlantic Basin, a wharf with warehouses used largely for the storage of grain.

During its shipping heyday -- from the 1850s until the 1950s -- Red Hook also had its tough side. Al Capone got his start as a petty criminal in the neighborhood before moving to Chicago in 1920. It reportedly was during Capone's days in Red Hook that he was wounded and was given his nickname "Scarface."

The dark side of life on Red Hook's docks was dramatized in the 1954 movie "On the Waterfront," starring Marlon Brando.

Dailey, who remains a Red Hook resident, remembers when the neighborhood began its downward spiral as shipyards, including Todd Shipyards where her father worked for 27 years, began closing.

According to the Encyclopedia of New York City, Red Hook's decline in the late 1950s and early 1960s was linked in part to the demise of so-called break-bulk shipping, when goods were packed in boxes and longshoremen physically unloaded them from ships.

This mode of moving goods was used less and less with the advance of container shipping, which involves placing cargo in large containers lifted off ships by cranes. The region's new container shipping hub shifted across the harbor along New Jersey's shores.

"Businesses moved out and people also moved. We lost a lot of families," Dailey said.

Red Hook's maritime history goes back much further than last century. The area was first settled by the Dutch in 1636, one of the earliest settlements in Brooklyn. The Dutch named the area Roode Hoek -- red for the color of its soil and hook for the way the peninsula curved into the harbor.

With the opening of the Atlantic Basin in the 1850s, Red Hook became one of the busiest shipping ports in the country. Brick rowhouses lined the residential areas and in 1936, the Red Hook Houses East -- a big public housing project -- was built to provide residences for dockworkers, many of whom where Italian, Irish and Puerto Rican immigrants.

The decline of the shipping industry was not the only reason Red Hook fell on hard times. The neigbhorhood was physically cut off from the rest of the city when the Gowanus Expressway was built in 1946. Later, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, whose Brooklyn entrance sits at the northern tip of Red Hook, did more to isolate the neighorood.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Red Hook earned a reputation as a crime-ridden, desolate place. Abandoned warehouses and empty lots abounded.

That is why Dailey welcomes any new businesses that want to settle in the neighborhood. She supports a controversial proposal to build a huge Ikea furniture store in the old New York Shipyards.

"I support Ikea because I remember what it was like when people were able to work in their community," she said.

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.


Red Hook Photo Tour (http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/brooklyn/nyc-redhookgallery,0,1268720.photogallery?coll=nyc-topheadlines-right)

[Kris]

Red Hook at a Glance (http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/brooklyn/nyc-redhook.flash)

[ZippyTheChimp]

From the Home Depot parking garage, the view across Gowanus Creek of the long abandoned Port of New York Authority granary.
http://www.pbase.com/image/25411121.jpg

[krulltime]

Is Red Hook real Estate that hot?


WHEN AGENTS BUY


By ELIZABETH WINE

April 16, 2005 -- Barbara Corcoran has put her money where her mouth is - in Red Hook.

The founder of the giant real-estate group recently touted Red Hook as one of the hot neighborhoods in the country on "The View." And she's now in contract to pay $1.075 million for a three-story semi-attached brick house there.

The property at 293 Van Brunt St. was listed at $1.1 million. (Why pay asking?)

It has two apartments and a first-floor storefront.

Ms. Corcoran, who was not available for comment at press time, has already enriched the seller, who bought it a year ago for $400,000.

But Carver Farrell has had to work for his money. The designer/builder, who has done five renovations in Brooklyn in the past four years, says he planned a simple renovation.

But after he started work, he found more problems than he had bargained for. "We gutted it to a shell. After we discovered it was in such bad shape we rebuilt it from scratch," he says.

He ended up shoring up the foundation, putting on an entirely new roof, and adding new plumbing and electrical circuits.

As for Ms. Corcoran, she nearly missed the deal. Farrell had listed the house himself in the New York Times and on the Craigslist Web site. It was only after a bid fell through that Farrell gave the listing to the Corcoran Group.

If you want to bargain hunt alongside Barbara, be aware that Red Hook's prices have been climbing. The area, which lacks subway access, is luring buyers with the promise of a new Fairway and an IKEA.


Copyright 2005 NYP Holdings, Inc.

[NYatKNIGHT]

For Whom Will the Foghorn Blow?

By JOSEPH BERGER (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=JOSEPH BERGER&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=JOSEPH BERGER&inline=nyt-per) and CHARLES V. BAGLI (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=CHARLES V. BAGLI&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=CHARLES V. BAGLI&inline=nyt-per)
Published: January 19, 2006



Red Hook could've been a contender, just like Marlon Brando's character in "On the Waterfront," a film that immortalized the bleak, harsh atmosphere of the Brooklyn (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/classifieds/realestate/locations/newyork/newyorkcity/brooklyn/?inline=nyt-geo) docks (even if it was filmed in Hoboken).


With acres of piers for hauling cargo, and sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline, Red Hook should have become a leading industrial port or another charming Brooklyn village like nearby Carroll Gardens.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/01/19/nyregion/redhookbig.jpg

But a series of government miscalculations - like cutting the neighborhood off from the rest of Brooklyn with the Gowanus Expressway and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, and shifts in the waterfront economy to containerized cargo - left the square-mile peninsula with forlorn blocks pocked by tumbledown houses, unkempt lots and hollow-eyed factories.

In recent years, however, Red Hook has become a vigorous place again, so much so that it is now a contested ground for apartment developers wanting to cash in on the views, artists and restaurateurs looking for cheap space, factories seeking a haven from gentrification elsewhere and old-line residents wanting to keep the old-time flavor.

Red Hook is poised to receive stores like Ikea and Fairway, million-dollar condominiums, humming factories and bustling docks, and even a pier for the 1,132-foot Queen Mary 2 and other cruise ships. Yet, its future is caught up in a battle royal.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/01/19/nyregion/19red184.1.jpg
A pier under construction in Red Hook is big enough to accommodate the Queen Mary 2. It is scheduled to open in the spring.

Developers want to convert waterfront warehouses and factories into apartments, even though the areas are zoned for manufacturing. But factory owners and cargo haulers fear that well-heeled apartment dwellers would not take kindly to their trucks barreling through Red Hook's narrow cobblestone streets or their middle-of-the-night foghorns and bright lights.

"You're going to be doing something they don't like, even if it's interfering with a guy barbecuing on the block," said Michael DiMarino, owner of Linda Tool and Die Corporation, a precision metal fabricator with clients like NASA and Boeing. "I don't blame him, but we were here first."

Many factions dread the prospect of big-box stores like Ikea, which plans to build a waterfront furniture emporium with 1,500 parking spaces by 2007.
Blue-collar businesses fear that Ikea's shoppers would clog Red Hook, stalling their trucks. Homeowners worry that Ikea would shatter the quiet.

Yet residents of the housing projects, whose 8,000 tenants represent three-quarters of Red Hook's population, are eager for the 500 jobs Ikea is dangling.
Dorothy Shields, 74, the president of the Red Hook Houses East Tenants Association, who has taken a liking to Ikea's Swedish meatballs, supports the store because one of every four of the projects' tenants is unemployed.
"It's the jobs," she said. "I have so many people who needs jobs."

Artists and craftsmen trickling in from Dumbo and Williamsburg fear any change because they suspect they will end up priced out of another blossoming neighborhood. Madigan Shive, a 29-year-old cellist, moved from San Francisco into a rental house with three other artists.

"There's a good chance we could lose our house in the next year," she said. "If I lose this space, I don't know that I can stay in New York."

The neighborhood quarrel is embodied in two men, John McGettrick, co-president of the Red Hook Civic Association, and Gregory O'Connell, a former city detective turned millionaire developer and one of Red Hook's largest property owners.

Mr. O'Connell, who supports expanding blue-collar businesses, is a ubiquitous figure who uses the paper-strewn dashboard of his pickup as his desk and file cabinet. Mr. McGettrick, whose father slung cargo on the docks but who favors housing, manages an investigations agency.

The two antagonists tap into different elements of Red Hook history and are backed by rival civic groups. Mr. McGettrick contends the city hurt Red Hook in 1961 when it zoned as industrial numerous blocks in which frame or brick houses had always been mixed in. Homeowners could not expand and banks would not offer mortgages, and the result, he said, was abandonment and arson. "There is a desperate need to rebuild the population that was lost," Mr. McGettrick said.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/01/18/nyregion/19red184.3.jpg
John McGettrick, the co-president of the Red Hook Civic Association, favors more housing for the neighborhood.

Mr. O'Connell has revamped Civil War-era warehouses set on waterfront piers but filled them with blue-collar trades like wood and glass workers. Those tenants will be joined this spring by a Fairway, the grocery cornucopia, which is also on Manhattan's West Side and in Harlem.

Much of the tension has crystallized around a mammoth concrete warehouse at 160 Imlay Street that a Manhattan group bought in 2000 for $7.2 million and for which it received a zoning variance allowing conversion into 144 condominiums. Standing on the windswept sixth floor overlooking the harbor, with the building shrouded in netting, the developer, Bruce Batkin, said: "We're not here to rape and pillage. We're going to do something beautiful. How can we do something worse?"

But the project, supported by Mr. McGettrick, has been mired by stop-work orders resulting from a two-year-old lawsuit brought by opponents including more than 80 local businesses, as well as Mr. O'Connell.

"Imlay Street could be the tipping point that affects all the zoning in Red Hook," Mr. O'Connell said. "You pay $1 million for an apartment, you don't want to hear trucks loading or unloading early in the morning."

In court papers, the opponents contend that the city's Board of Standards and Appeals was improperly swayed into believing that the building could not attract industrial tenants. A lawyer described a meeting between a lobbyist for the owners and Daniel L. Doctoroff, the deputy mayor for economic development, which the lawyer said resulted in a $100,000 gift to Mr. Doctoroff's favorite cause, NYC2012, the group that bid unsuccessfully for the 2012 Olympics.

In an interview, Mr. Doctoroff described the claim as "completely absurd," adding: "I'd isolated myself from the fund-raising effort. I didn't even know there was a contribution."

He described Red Hook as the city's "single most complex land-use issue" because it has potential in retailing, housing and manufacturing. "Every conceivable issue is wrapped up in this one community, which makes everything you do there very sensitive and very difficult," he said.

The outlook for industry in Red Hook is no longer bleak. According to Phaedra Thomas, executive director of the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation, the number of industrial businesses has grown 60 percent since 1991, to 455, and jobs have increased 19 percent, to 5,000.

Waterfront activity has also rebounded. The Erie Basin Bargeport was vacant 15 years ago, but it now provides staging for 500 barges used for repairing bridges or shooting off Macy's Fourth of July fireworks.

Another pier operator, John Quadrozzi Jr., president of the Gowanus Industrial Park, has taken a 46-acre complex of grain silos and docks and uses it, in part, to unload hundreds of thousands of tons of Chilean salt for de-icing the city's streets. He says he opposes Ikea but is finding it hard to resist offers from megastores that want to move in nearby. "If I'm a salmon, I can only swim upstream so long," he said. "I get tired."

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/01/18/nyregion/19red184.4.jpg
John Quadrozzi Jr., president of the Gowanus Industrial Park, says he can resist big-box offers for only so long.

Factory owners also fret when they see the kind of shops new to Red Hook sprouting on the commercial spine of Van Brunt Street: Baked, a SoHo-like bakery; 360, a French restaurant; and LeNell's, a specialty liquor store that sells 100 brands of bourbon.

Until now, the Bloomberg administration has encouraged residential and commercial development along the waterfront. The city and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey gave American Stevedoring Inc., which operates gantry cranes for moving large containers, only a short lease extension on Piers 8, 9 and 10 that expires in April 2007 and removed the company from Pier 6 and 11. Pier 7 is in litigation.

But a year ago, the administration, apparently responding to a reaction against rezoning to residential in Dumbo and Long Island City, mapped out 15 "industrial business zones" where rezoning would be forbidden. Such a move would protect companies like Linda Tool from speculative landlords who might raise rents and offer only short leases. What is not yet clear is how many factories would be vulnerable in a murky "ombudsman" zone, where the city could consider zoning changes for housing.

For developers like Joseph Sitt of Thor Equities, who eyes the waterfront ravenously, the problem is that his property is in the industrial zone. Last year, he paid $40 million to acquire the crumbling pier that holds the old Revere sugar plant.

He has told city officials that he is considering a residential project that would include a marina. The officials say he may retain Revere's steel funnel silo as a memento of the industrial past. In the coming weeks, Mr. Sitt will lobby the city to pull in the borders of the industrial zone so he can consider other uses.

Many old-timers want to see the neighborhood livened up with more apartment dwellers. Sue and Annette Amendola, two of the 10 children of an immigrant longshoreman who hauled bags of coffee on his back, live in the apartment where they were born in the 1940's and do not want the neighborhood moribund any longer.

Sunny Balzano, 71, a painter whose family has owned a bar on Conover Street since 1890, wants more housing, too, but worries that development that would attract big-box stores would also destroy the neighborhood's singular character. He remembers when the noon whistle blew for lunch and children had to escape the sidewalks because of the stampede of beefy dockworkers trying to grab lunch or a shot of whiskey at one of the 40 bars in the neighborhood.

"In the summer, you can hear the water lapping against the docks and the foghorns and the ships going by," he said. "But if you're going to have thousands of cars, the quality of life is about to change."

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/01/19/nyregion/18red184.2.jpg
Bruce Batkin, a developer who is converting a concrete warehouse into 144 condominiums, says: "We're not here to rape and pillage. We're going to do something beautiful. How can we do something worse?"

Copyright 2006 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html)The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/nyregion/19redhook.html?pagewanted=1

[ZippyTheChimp]

I'd like to see this area remain a manufacturing zone, with industrial development encouraged - if for no other reason than it is not being done anywhere else.

[antinimby]

And definitely keep the big box stores OUT! Them and their parking lots. Brooklyn isn't suburbia.

[ASchwarz]

I'd like to see this area remain a manufacturing zone, with industrial development encouraged - if for no other reason than it is not being done anywhere else.

I'm on the other extreme. I think the city has waaaay too much land zoned industrial. I used to live in an industrial zone, which was largely vacant except for loft dwellers and a few scrap metal/auto parts places.

The city has far too much empty industrial space and too little residential space. I think they should keep areas like Sunset Park, East NY, Maspeth industrial and they should rezone Red Hook, Gowanus and East Williamsburg to allow residential.

[ASchwarz]

And definitely keep the big box stores OUT! Them and their parking lots. Brooklyn isn't suburbia.

No, bring the big boxes in. It's more sustainable to have big boxes in Brooklyn (where people will walk and take public transportation to the store) than to build way out in the burbs, where everyone drives.

I don't own a car, yet I patronize Target, Loews and Marshalls, all in Brooklyn and all convenient to public transportation. Sure seems more sensible than wasting fossil fuels on a trip out to Jersey.

[Ninjahedge]

There is no real convenient line to Red Hook, if I remember from our real estate visits a year or so ago.....

Big box has problems with parking, as we have had to deal with with a HD going up in Queens (and yes, there are many more coming!).

Of all the larger markets that are lacking in the city, I think the one that is needed the most is a good sized supermarket/grocery store. Even the "Ultra-mega-super-giganto" ones that are there are nothing compared to the suburban bigguns.

maybe Wal-Mart will have some buisness sense and open up a THIRD store under it that deals with only produce/groceries and push it under a different name.

Political opposition is usually MUCH weaker to a subsidiary than to the main company. People find it harder to make the connection...

(I am not advocating this, but I am surprised they have not done it like they have with Sam's.....)

[ZippyTheChimp]

The city has far too much empty industrial space and too little residential space.Red Hook is unique.

[kevinny657]

Any of you guys have any idea how the new ship terminal is coming along, Have been told it should be ready for The Queen Mary 2 in April.

[ablarc]

I'm on the other extreme. I think the city has waaaay too much land zoned industrial. I used to live in an industrial zone, which was largely vacant except for loft dwellers and a few scrap metal/auto parts places.

The city has far too much empty industrial space and too little residential space. I think they should keep areas like Sunset Park, East NY, Maspeth industrial and they should rezone Red Hook, Gowanus and East Williamsburg to allow residential.
Not sure it has to be either/or. It can be both/and. Industrial areas can be great places to live for folks with certain inclinations, and industrial zones can benefit from a full-time population.

It's a potentially heady mix. But the folks who move in have to understand that living among factories isn't like living in the suburbs. If they don't like what they find they shouldn't buy in with the intent to change things later.

The government should recognize this by applying different environmental standards to different neighborhoods; it already does some of this with zoning. If a district needs to be noisy at certain times of night, that district should have a different noise ordinance. If dockworkers in a place should knock off work at 4am, there ought to be a local place open to sell them a beer. And so forth.

And to hell with the recently-arrived NIMBYs. They don't like it, they can sell their place to someone who does.

[infoshare]

I wonder how much Red Hook will change when Ikea opens their store there in 2005.

In addition to the site plan, there is an animated tour at this
weblink - http://www.ikearedhook.com/plan.asp - enjoy!

[lofter1]

Hope they don't let them paint those big old cranes that IKEA blue + yellow!

[Edward]

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Red Hook Fairway store opening soon
BY ELIZABETH HAYS
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Wednesday, March 8th, 2006

A controversial supermarket, known for its 500 kinds of cheeses and for bringing down a city councilman, will soon open on the Red Hook waterfront.

Workers are scrambling to put the finishing touches on a 45,000-square-foot Fairway Market on Van Brunt St. slated to open as soon as the end of April.

The store, in a renovated Civil War-era warehouse, will be the first Fairway in Brooklyn. It also will be the biggest outpost of the mini-chain, which has stores on the upper West Side and in Harlem, and is known for gourmet food at competitive prices.

"I suspect that with this store, we'll have the three highest-volume grocery stores in New York City," said co-owner Howard Glickberg, whose grandfather opened the original Manhattan store in the 1940s. "We always make sure to have the lowest prices."

The project, which has roiled opponents in the secluded neighborhood, is more than a year behind schedule.

Glickberg blamed the delays on complications renovating the 150-year-old former coffee warehouse and on the investigation of former City Councilman Angel Rodriguez.

Rodriguez pleaded guilty in 2002 to trying to extort Red Hook developer Greg O'Connell in exchange for his support.

O'Connell, owner of the Fairway building, is a former cop who wore a wire to record Rodriguez. He has said he tried to keep the structure's historic details, such as its signature shutters and interior wood beams.

Opponents tried to sue to stop the project, arguing it was too big for the neighborhood and would clog its streets with traffic and trucks.

"We continue to be concerned about the size of the store," said Red Hook activist John McGettrick.

The new store will roast its own coffee, bake its own bagels and smoke its own fish. It also will have a cafe, a kosher section and a room dedicated to organic food. Glickberg and O'Connell hope to open a restaurant on the second floor.

The developers are renovating 45 luxury live/work apartments on the top three floors. They surround an open-air courtyard and have views of the harbor.

Shoppers outside Red Hook's only grocery store, Fine Fare, were skeptical that Fairway's prices would be lower, but they were eager to find out.

"We'll check it out," said Fay Hernandez. "[It's] just like the new restaurants that are opening here; they're very expensive."

[Ninjahedge]

Sounds interesting.....

[BPC]

Red Hook is the only truly deep water ocean port in the NY metropolitan area. The Port Authority has spent hundreds of millions of dollars blasting shipping canals to the Newark port, but it still is not deep enough for the new "super-tankers." Red Hook is. The decision to build up the Newark terminal and abandon the Red Hook terminal was a political one, not an economic one -- a decision that can still be reversed by smarter, more forward-thinking future policy-makers. To devote this space to grocery store parking lots is a tremendous waste.

[ablarc]

To devote this space to grocery store parking lots is a tremendous waste.
Store has a parking lot? That's bad.

All parking lots in any urban setting are a waste. Worse, they're a disruption of urban fabric and continuity. They're not an integral part of the city; they represent the absence of the city.

[Schadenfrau]

Indeed, Ablarc.

Not to mention that it's pretty unlikely people will drive towards Manhattan to get groceries. Wouldn't it just be easier to drive away?

[Ninjahedge]

Depends.

A grocery store has more people coming in cars than other venues simply because people go there less often, and buy for a longer period.

I do think they should rethink the lot and maybe build a parking garage somewhere nearby and use the land for something nice like a park or something, but I will have to see the area first before I can judge something I have only heard about.

[GowanusGuy]

Here's a couple of of photos of the new Fairway building before they started work on it, and after. And here's some more Red Hook photos; they're mostly industrial shots:

http://www.angelfire.com/pro2/urban_photographer/RedHook/

[BPC]

Here's a couple of of photos of the new Fairway building before they started work on it, and after. And here's some more Red Hook photos; they're mostly industrial shots:

http://www.angelfire.com/pro2/urban_photographer/RedHook/

They actually did a nice job with it. Adaptive reuse of industrial buildings is awesome.

[Edward]

http://www.nypost.com/food/63060.htm OFF THE HOOK

By ANDREA STRONG

April 30, 2006 -- IT'S hard to imagine that New Yorkers are willing to brave the subway and a bus ride for much, but the promise of great food in an up-and-coming neighborhood is a powerful motivator. And it goes a long way toward explaining the exodus to Brooklyn's final frontier: Red Hook.

To be sure, the migration has taken some time. One of the earliest areas in Brooklyn to be settled, Red Hook (originally Roode Hoek) was named by the Dutch in 1636 for its red clay soil and its hook-like protrusion into New York Harbor. By the 1850s, Red Hook was one of the busiest ports in the country, and later became the setting for Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge."

But Red Hook's gentrification has lagged behind other Brooklyn neighborhoods like DUMBO and Williamsburg. That is, until recently. Since 2003, this neighborhood has slowly been changing from blue-collar to bustling culinary destination.

The most recent (and delicious) reason to make the Red Hook trek is The Good Fork, a snug seasonal American with exposed brick walls and a nautically inspired curved-birch ceiling. It's owned by Ben Schneider (who built the place), and his wife, chef Sohui Kim, who honed her skills at Blue Hill and Annisa.

Like many business owners in Red Hook, Kim and Schneider live around the corner from their restaurant. "I fell in love with Red Hook because it had the feeling of a Midwestern industrial city with a seaside harbor," says Schneider. "It's this great odd ragtag community."

While the couple's goal was to open a neighborhood place, they're currently hosting Manhattan diners drawn by word of mouth. It's easy to fall in love with Kim's menu of dishes touched by her Korean heritage and crafted from local ingredients: plump pork and chive pot stickers ($5), pan-seared scallops with shrimp-scallion pancakes, asparagus and soy vinaigrette ($20), and steak and eggs "Korean-style" with kimchee rice topped with a fried egg ($17).

But before Kim and Schneider opened the Good Fork, they were loyal patrons of Red Hook's pioneer, Arnaud Erhart, who three years ago opened his cool French bistro 360.

A veteran of Balthazar and a longtime Red Hook resident, Erhart and his chef Rick Jakobson (Daniel, Bouley) scour greenmarkets for their daily three-course $25 prix fixe menu, which lately reflects spring with dishes like chilled sugar snap pea soup with mint and monkfish fricassee with fava beans, carrots, and snowpea greens, alongside classics like steak tartar and duck leg confit.

While the restaurant has been busy since it opened in May 2003, Erhart is looking forward to the mid-May opening of Fairway market. "Fairway is something that a lot of small businesses have been waiting for," says Erhart. "I think the people I am trying to target are very much the people Fairway is trying to target."

Indeed, the tipping point of the neighborhood may be the store - a 52,000-square-foot food market set in a restored Civil War-era building with reach-out-and-touch-the-Statue-of-Liberty views.

"Red Hook is a lost gem," says Howie Glickberg, co-owner of Fairway. "It was one of the few spots where we could get the space we needed, and we're helping the boom of Red Hook by creating 300 new jobs."

In addition to its line of gourmet foods, dry goods and produce, this Fairway will feature a kosher butcher, an in-house coffee roaster, a 5,000-square-foot room dedicated to organics and, eventually, a second-floor restaurant and café. To help New Yorkers get there, Fairway has contracted with New York Water Taxi for ferry service (tickets cost $5 each way), and will have parking for 400 cars.

While Fairway stocks its shelves, the community continues to thrive. Residents congregate at the Hope and Anchor, a local joint for breakfast, lunch and dinner (and karaoke) and meet for strong coffee and freshly frosted cupcakes at Baked, a sleek urban bakery. If the sweets give way to a need for something a bit stronger, there's LeNell's, a cozy wine and cocktail shop owned by LeNell Smothers, an Alabama transplant.

Smothers will teach you the ins and outs of bourbon (she has more than 100 in stock), show you how to make a proper mint julep, and take you through her collection of small-production wines.

"I wanted to create a cocktail haven for the home and professional bartender and a store featuring small family wineries," Smothers says. "But I also wanted to be in a neighborhood with a sense of community, where I could afford to own a home and have a business and get to know my customers."

A subway and bus ride away in Red Hook, she's found it all.

[Edward]

http://www.brooklynpapers.com/html/issues/_vol29/29_18/29_18nets3.html
Water Taxi heads to Fairway
By Ariella Cohen
The Brooklyn Papers

Who needs the highway to get to Fairway?

A new weekend ferry service to bring Manhattanites to the new market — and perhaps to sample Red Hook’s other attractions — began last weekend.

“I had no idea about this place, it’s really beautiful,” said ferry rider John Bedan.

The newly renovated New York Water Taxi terminal sits at the foot of Van Brunt Street — facing the soon-to-open gourmet emporium.

Passengers will be able to stop in Red Hook, or hop a ride to Brooklyn’s Fulton Ferry Landing, or to Lower Manhattan, 17 times each Saturday and Sunday — a tourist-friendly schedule created with an eye towards the market, as well as the city’s plans to connect the notoriously hard-to-reach waterfront neighborhood to future parks in Manhattan, Brooklyn Heights and Governor’s Island.

A receipt from Fairway — expected to open on May 17 — will earn ferry passengers a $3 discount. Operators are hoping it’s enough of a deal to lure Manhattan’s Fresh Direct shoppers to the converted Civil-War era warehouse store.

“My brother is always saying what a pain it is to get to Red Hook, but when he got off the ferry he was like, ‘That was easy,’” crowed Red Hook resident Katie Dixon. “It was 15 minutes door-to-door from his apartment in the financial district to Red Hook.”

Not only residents and tourists are impressed. Last month, the federal Small Business Administration awarded the Fairway site’s developer, Greg O’Connell, its “Small Business of the Year” award, citing his role in “turning Red Hook into New York’s hottest new neighborhood.”

The opening coincided with the second docking of the Queen Mary 2 at its pier at the foot of Pioneer Street. Some passengers were a little too enthusiastic.

“We got e-mails from cruise ship passengers who wanted to catch the ferry in Manhattan and take it to the dock at Red Hook,” said NY Water Taxi president Tom Fox. “But the walk is too long with baggage.”

This week, Ikea unveiled its plans for transporting shoppers to its big-box store on the waterfront — slated to open in the summer of 2008. In response to concerns about the traffic impact of its gigantic blue-and-yellow store, the Swedish furniture retailer said it will shuttle shoppers to the distant F and G train station at Smith and Ninth Street, and provide a non-stop ferry from their site to lower Manhattan.

Ikea’s ferry will be free — with the right shopping bag, of course.

[lofter1]

This week, Ikea unveiled its plans for transporting shoppers to its big-box store on the waterfront — slated to open in the summer of 2008 ... the Swedish furniture retailer said it will shuttle shoppers to the distant F and G train station at Smith and Ninth Street, and provide a non-stop ferry from their site to lower Manhattan.

Ikea’s ferry will be free — with the right shopping bag, of course.

Water taxi's are great idea -- although the return trip might make for some interesting crowding on board.

[atraene]

Basicly, all of Red Hook is a disgusting and run down place. Not safe there at day, not safe there at night.

[Ninjahedge]

Basicly, all of Red Hook is a disgusting and run down place. Not safe there at day, not safe there at night.

Tell us what you really think. :rolleyes:

[atraene]

Red Hook is a sucky bad neighbrohood. People not from the area i expect to say 'oooh its a nice place, its not bad'. Forget that, if your not from the area dont speak of it. I lived on Columbia Street, seen how it changed. Nothing but roving gangs and has a high drug crime rate.

To everyone:

Red Hook is a BAD neighborhood. That, and South Brooklyn. It's run down, the water is absolutly disgusting and polluted.

[ablarc]

I lived on Columbia Street...
How long ago?

...seen how it changed.
For better or worse?

Nothing but roving gangs and has a high drug crime rate.
Nothing but?

[atraene]

-about 7 months ago, recently moved to Astoria, Queens.

-worse.

-more then half.

[krulltime]

Here is a family who seem to enjoy living in Red Hook...


An Unlikely Paradise, Right Around the Corner


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/05/14/realestate/14habi2JPG.jpg
Elizabeth and Mark Ehrhardt and
their children, Charlotte, 8, and
Jasper, 5. Through a lucky break,
they got to buy a house in Red
Hook. "There's a lot of kismet in
our lives," Mr. Ehrhardt said.


By STEPHEN P. WILLIAMS
Published: May 14, 2006

MARK AND ELIZABETH EHRHARDT and their two children see bright stars in the night sky when they look out their windows deep in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

"When was the last time you did that in this city?" Mrs. Ehrhardt said on a recent morning, standing in her loftlike living room, her strawberry blond hair bubbling off her head. "Everywhere else, there's too much light. It amazed me when I first saw the stars."

Inhaling smoke from a Camel, Mr. Ehrhardt said: "There's a lot of kismet in our lives. We have plans and ambitions like anyone else, but so many of the good things that happen to us are by happenstance and coincidence."

For instance, there's the immaculately renovated, plain-Jane town house the family lives in with their dog, Cricket. It's just off Van Brunt Street, a few blocks up from a soon-to-open Fairway supermarket that's causing residents to bemoan the expected traffic at the same time they look forward to being able to buy organic vegetables and aged balsamic vinegar, items not traditionally associated with Red Hook.

This is the Ehrhardts' third year on the waterfront, and their Volkswagen Passat has the mileage to prove it, since this part of Brooklyn is a 30-minute walk to the nearest subway. Late last summer, the Ehrhardts were living in a rental around the corner, but they wanted more space.

Most mornings Mr. Ehrhardt, 39, would head to Movers Not Shakers, his moving company on Columbia Street. Mrs. Ehrhardt, 36, would then carve out time from taking care of Jasper, 5, and Charlotte, 8, to surf propertyshark.com and other Web sites for housing bargains. She didn't find any.

Often, when the couple were out taking Cricket for a walk, they would pass a certain dilapidated two-story town house nearby.

"We thought it was a cute little thing," said Mrs. Ehrhardt, who favors teal biker boots and outlandish coats, including a fake white fur that wouldn't look out of place on a Palm Beach doyenne visiting New York for the winter holidays.

One day the couple noticed that a construction crew was gutting the house, and they assumed they had missed out on buying it.

Then by chance, Scott Baker, a neighbor who keeps up with what's happening in the community, walked into LeNell's, the eccentric Red Hook liquor store that's known for stocking more varieties of bourbon than a Kentucky colonel ever heard of. He asked Tonya LeNell Smothers, the proprietor, if she knew anyone who deserved a good deal on a good house. She recommended the Ehrhardts, perhaps in part because Mr. Ehrhardt had recently given her a good price on moving a big piece of furniture.

It turned out the little house that Mrs. Ehrhardt thought was so cute was being renovated by the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council as a public service. The Ehrhardts applied for the privilege of buying it at cost: the $90,000 purchase price and more than $400,000 in renovations.

They learned last November that the house was theirs. It's not a fancy "brownstone Brooklyn original crown moldings" sort of place.

It has a stubby concrete stoop, and polyurethaned Home Depot style doors and kitchen cabinets that might look at home in a suburban apartment complex. The windows are small. The backyard is paved and lifeless except for some raised planting beds that Mr. Ehrhardt recently built from lumber salvaged from a house down the block.

But it is a private house that has been renovated from top to bottom. It has two stories with a large master suite, a bedroom for each child and a finished basement that will be the perfect place for teenage angst.

What's more, the parents feel a sense of community in the neighborhood, and the children, who go to elementary school in nearby Cobble Hill, can walk down to the beach and have seaweed fights with clear views of the Statue of Liberty, Governors Island and Lower Manhattan. On a recent day a neighbor brought kayaks to the beach and let all the children paddle around.

The house is an unlikely paradise for the Ehrhardts, who a few years ago hardly knew that Red Hook existed. They had both lived in Manhattan for years when, in the summer of 2001, they made plans to trade their cramped one-bedroom rental in Hell's Kitchen for a two-bedroom rental in a grand old brick and wrought-iron building in Cobble Hill.

Mr. Ehrhardt, who plays drums in a rock band called the Saloonatics NYC, feared that he would ache for the street life, excitement and crowds of Manhattan if the family moved across the river. But Mrs. Ehrhardt was weary of struggling around Manhattan with strollers and toddlers. She prevailed.

Then came Sept. 11. To safeguard a subway power station, the police closed the Ehrhardts' block of West 53rd Street, and this delayed their move until October. When they finally got to Brooklyn, their apartment near the East River looked out on plumes of smoke rather than the Twin Towers.

"Still, Brooklyn felt leafy and safe," Mrs. Ehrhardt said.

Her husband added, "It took me just 48 hours to open up to the trees, the space and the light — the sky was so big it was like being in Montana."

In the new apartment, their younger child staged a sleep strike when they tried to wean him. To lull him, Mr. Ehrhardt would pile him into the car and meander around. One night he ended up in a desolate neighborhood of low-rise houses and vast Civil War-era warehouses that seemed to border an endless expanse of water.

"It felt undiscovered," Mr. Ehrhardt said. He later realized that he was in Red Hook, and after exploring a bit more, he and his wife were so taken with it that they decided to relocate.

In 2004, Mrs. Ehrhardt, who has what she considers a healthy passion for real estate, found a most peculiar house. She describes it as a "shrunken raised ranch house" of the sort you can find in many suburbs. But it had been crammed into the backyard of a 19th-century tenement on Van Brunt Street.

Although the yard was concrete, not grass, and it had a view of a wall, the Ehrhardts thought it was a nice $1,800-a-month, 1,200-square-foot home.

When the landlords put the whole parcel on the market, the Ehrhardts realized their days were numbered.

Not long after that, they were the new owners of a well-priced house that they hadn't even known was for sale. And they're happy. "Red Hook is less planned than other neighborhoods," Mrs. Ehrhardt said. "Things don't always fit together perfectly here, which is comforting to me."

The Ehrhardts believe that they are living through a special time in Red Hook, with a lot of opposing forces, including cruise ship operators, Ikea and local families who like the status quo all battling to determine the future of the neighborhood. But they aren't too worried.

"It's still got a working-class mentality around here that I like, with glassblowers, carpenters and artists," Mrs. Ehrhardt said. "It's a place where you can be yourself."


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/05/14/realestate/14habi1JPG.jpg
Mark and Elizabeth Ehrhardt's
newly renovated house is not
a fancy "brownstone Brooklyn
original crown moldings" sort
of place, but they were able
to buy it at cost, for around
$500,000.



Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[antinimby]

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/05/14/realestate/14habi2JPG.jpgDamn. Red Hook roving gangs are getting younger and younger.:rolleyes:

[ablarc]

That's a relief. I have a close relation moving into Red Hook this very day.

We all know how trustworthy assurances of a place's safety have been at times past on this forum. This assurance seems genuine and plausible.

[atraene]

That family oviously loves to live in a slum.










;)

[ZippyTheChimp]

Although it is far from the point when decline began (I lived nearby then), it has not gotten much worse in the short time you lived there.

It needs a lot of help, but conditions have improved over the recent past. It is on the way up, not down.

[GowanusGuy]

http://www.carrollgardenscourier.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16664246&BRD=2384&PAG=461&dept_id=576289&rfi=6

On the waterfront…

A former Civil War-era warehouse in Red Hook has become home to a new 52,000-square-foot supermarket with high hopes of transforming the once-deserted riverside area into a thriving commercial corridor.

The grand opening of the borough’s first Fairway at 480-500 Van Brunt Street, was marked by a program of welcome and celebration by the close-knit community, much of which hailed the $25 million partnership between the store and local developer Greg O’Connell, which boasts a five-story building and spectacular views of the Statue of Liberty, plus the Manhattan skyline.

O’Connell played happy host to a steady stream of shoppers and well-wishers, who poured in throughout the day – among them Department of Transportation (DOT) Commissioner Iris Weinshall and area firefighters from Ladder Company 202.

“We’re really thrilled to be coming to Red Hook and we think we can become an anchor to this community and bring about a renaissance in Red Hook,” said Dan Glickberg, a junior partner in the supermarket and great-grandson of Fairway Founder Nathan Glickberg.

Glickberg, who loaded a cart with items as he shopped at the store with his father, Howard, added that about 150 people from the immediate area had already been hired.

Nathan Glickberg opened the first Fairway in 1940 as fruit and vegetable shop at West 74th Street and Broadway where it still stands. The Brooklyn Fairway offers a large selection of high quality fish, meats, baked goods, fresh produce, cheeses, coffees, plus gourmet and organic foods, at lower prices than its competitors because of Fairway’s policy of buying directly from the farmers and producers.

The store is open seven days a week, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.

[Edward]

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Red Hook drug trade $50M a yr.
BY NANCIE L. KATZ
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Friday, May 26th, 2006

Red Hook drug dealers were making as much as $140,000 a day - $50 million a year - until an undercover sting brought them down this year, District Attorney Charles Hynes said yesterday. Despite the real estate boom in Red Hook and the opening of a new Fairway market and a cruise ship terminal, drug dealers were terrifying tenants of the Red Hook Houses.
"Despite all the changes, the residents were under siege by drug gangs," said Hynes, describing the booming drug business. "The numbers are astounding."

Flanked by Red Hook residents, Hynes announced a 374-count indictment against 143 people, saying he would seek maximum sentences of up to 25 years to life in prison for dealers who used minors to sell crack, heroin, marijuana and powdered cocaine.

"We're not going to tolerate people in our community to be treated as second-class citizens," he said. "They are the real victims.

"It's not going to be permitted for drug dealers to hold them captive."

The flourishing drug trade run by more than 150 dealers is four times the $12 million take estimated last month at a news conference by Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly when he announced the massive Police Department-district attorney's office bust.

But residents were not so sure the benefits of the drug busts, though appreciated, would stand the test of time.

"There's a slight difference," said Andrea McKnight, 61, who described how she saw youths grow up in the houses and turn into drug dealers during her 37 years there.

"After a while, they stop looking at you. It's sad for us also," she added.

"I don't know if it's going to last. Drugs have always been there."

She and other residents described having to dodge gunfire and violence to avoid getting harmed in drug disputes, and having to bypass areas where drug deals were going down.

Hynes said the gangs divided the houses into 17 sections and 32 buildings to conduct business.

He said the dealers collectively decided who was allowed to sell drugs, where, the cost and how lower-level dealers would get paid.

Frances Brown, a patrol officer at the houses, said the area is much less dangerous since the arrests.

"It feels much better," she said.

[capoeta cypher]

Here is a family who seem to enjoy living in Red Hook...
An Unlikely Paradise, Right Around the Corner

A lot of people like to live in their own neighborhoods, but do they get reported on the news about it? No. The only reason they are getting media attention on it is because they know that Red Hook is a bad area.

[pianoman11686]

Yale on Hook: Park and park

http://www.brooklynpapers.com/html/issues/_vol29/29_31/29_31yaleplans.jpg
A vision for Red Hook designed by Yale architecture students E. Sean Bailey, Shelly Zhang and Jacob Reidel.

By Dana Rubinstein

The Brooklyn Papers

What do you get when you put the future of Red Hook into the hands of some of the Ivy League’s brightest young architects? A big parking lot.

Sadly, that’s what happened when a Yale professor asked his School of Architecture graduate students to plan the future of the historic neighborhood.

The CarPark plan — one of a handful of ideas drawn up by the students — calls for turning 143 acres of Red Hook into a parking lot and another 143 acres into a park (together, that comes to almost half of the neighborhood’s 680 acres). The plan would create an additional 31,021 parking spots, or 3.4 spots per dwelling unit.

The plan is one of a handful on display at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition’s Summer art show.

Those with a personal stake — rather than academic curiosity — in Red Hook were dumbfounded.

“Wow, is that what they’re teaching at Yale?” said Craig Hammerman, district manager of Community Board 6. “I can’t imagine worse public policy.”

Other student suggestions for the Hook included a theme park, a “naturalistic recreation park with camping,” an animal preserve, and big box stores spread evenly throughout the Hook, rather than congregated near the waterfront.

BWAC’s Summer art show (499 Van Brunt St., between Reed Street and the water) continues on weekends through Aug. 20, from 1 to 7 pm.

Professor Edward Mitchell and his students will be on hand on Saturday, Aug. 12, at 4 pm for an artists’ talk.

Copyright BrooklynPapers.com (http://www.brooklynpapers.com/index.html)

[Edward]

http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/08/12/arts/12hook_CA0.600.jpg Drawing from Yale School of Architecture
Teams of Yale architecture students have envisioned the Red Hook shoreline as a center for ecotourism.


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/12/arts/design/12hook.html

August 12, 2006
Yale Students Imagine the Future of Red Hook
By SEWELL CHAN

The Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, based in Red Hook, operates one of the rawest exhibition spaces in New York City: a corner of the Beard Street Warehouse, an 1869 complex of storehouses built of rough-cut schist on reclaimed marshland. The galleries have no air-conditioning or heating. Light enters through arched iron shutters and bounces off wooden ceiling beams and support columns. Electric fans provide feeble ventilation.

The space is a remnant of Red Hook’s long-faded status as one of the country’s busiest shipping centers. Settled by the Dutch in 1636, the area exploded with maritime activity after the completion of the Erie Canal, which established a connection between the New York harbor and the Midwest, in 1825. In the warehouse dock workers once carted raw sugar, spices, flax, hemp, jute, rubber, leather, dried fruit, seeds, coffee and cocoa.

But by the 1950’s, with the decline in grain traffic and the completion of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which cut the neighborhood off from the rest of Brooklyn, Red Hook began a long demise, which has only recently been halted by gentrification.

A new show in the coalition’s gritty exhibition site tries to reimagine the future of Red Hook, taking account of the area’s waterfront location, on Upper New York Bay, and of trends in urban planning and architectural design. It is on view on weekends through Aug. 20 as part of the coalition’s summer show, “Food for ... a Feast for the Eyes.”

The Red Hook exhibition arose from a spring-semester studio class at the Yale School of Architecture that was organized around the theme of urbanism, but unlike other academic exercises, it focused on more than the merely theoretical.

Like other gentrifying neighborhoods, Red Hook is in the throes of rapid social and economic change. In April a terminal for giant luxury cruise ships opened on Pier 12, which had been part of the last remaining container-shipping terminal in Brooklyn. In May a 52,000-square-foot Fairway grocery store, with a 300-space parking lot, opened at the foot of Van Brunt Street. Ikea, the Swedish furniture company, plans to build its largest store there, on a 22-acre site that was once a shipyard and dry dock.

At the mouth of the Erie Basin, on a pier next to the warehouse’s pier, a developer wants to replace a long-shuttered sugar factory with loft-style apartments, offices and stores.

In 10 proposals the Yale students, who are entering the last year of a three-year master’s program in architecture, responded to those developments in varying ways. The results are on view in the form of computer renderings and paper models.

One team tried to disperse and integrate the big-box stores into the historic neighborhood, rather than reject them — although that was an option. In its proposal a doughnut-shaped Wal-Mart has a public square at its center, connected to the street by a colorful archway. Nearby, a giant self-storage building has a running track and a park on its roof, within view of the expressway overhead.

“Most people see these stores as a negative when they come into their neighborhoods,” said James Tate, 26, who developed that proposal with Harris Ford and Sini Kamppari. “By taking those types of stores and combining them with other kinds of large-scale public space — everything from parks to gardens — you could create a new form of public space, which could actually benefit the city.”

Another proposal envisions using new paving materials that allow vegetation to grow between the pavement’s squares, to create an adaptable landscape that could be used for sports fields, farmers’ markets and parking for 31,000 vehicles.

“There is a great potential for big-box stores to do good, to be a positive force in urban areas, to move from the fringe into a place in the urban fabric, as long as it’s handled in a sensitive manner,” said Neil Sondgeroth, 24, who designed the proposal with Weston Walker.

(Mr. Sondgeroth cited Le Corbusier as an inspiration, but he admitted that he was also influenced by his current part-time job in the hardware department of a sprawling Lowe’s home-improvement store on the outskirts of New Haven.)

Perhaps the most fantastic proposal conceives of Red Hook as a “self-contained world that operates on its own logic,” according to Jacob Reidel, 27, who collaborated with E. Sean Bailey and Shelley Zhang. The three were fascinated by model-railroad hobbyists, who create neatly ordered worlds.

“It’s not a far stretch to see those impulses guiding not just Robert Moses, but more contemporary planners as well,” Mr. Reidel said.

Their proposal would preserve a core of historic buildings but erect a thin “curtain” of high-rise buildings directly to their east. On the other side of the curtain, the Red Hook Houses — one of the city’s oldest and largest public housing projects, built in 1938 — would be reconfigured into suburban-style “bungalows” reminiscent of those in early streetcar suburbs. Farther east and south would be an “agricultural zone”: community gardening on a grand scale.

Edward Mitchell, who organized the exhibition, praised the students’ willingness to indulge in the implausible. “They have the advantage of being able to be visionary, and not getting caught up in the real-world stuff too early,” said Mr. Mitchell, an adjunct assistant professor of architecture at Yale. “The interesting part of any urban vision is it rarely gets built, but that vision may feed the thinking of the public over a longer term.”

The Bloomberg administration, which has been squabbling with the operator of the Red Hook container terminal over the city’s plans for redevelopment of the waterfront piers, seems to have taken no notice of the exhibition, but it has drawn some buzz — not all positive — since it opened on July 22.

The exhibition was featured on Curbed, a blog at www.curbed.com that focuses on real estate, prompting several residents to express alarm. “As an architect who lives in Red Hook, all I can say is ... please stop!!!” one person wrote on the Web site. Another asked: “Do they teach context in architecture school anymore? Or do they just teach people to pursue an egotistical vision no matter what the impact is on people?”

Steve McFarland, who runs a blog called B61 Productions, at www.b61productions.com, named for a bus line that serves Red Hook, said that the griping was understandable, because both longtime residents and urban pioneers feared being engulfed by big-box stores and the resulting traffic — or displaced by rising rents. “Nobody is taking into account the history of the place in their plans,” he said.

Others saw the show in a different light. Anna M. Hagen, a sculptor who lives in Ditmas Park and is a vice president of the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, said the students’ proposals would have been preferable to what she sees as the haphazard development now taking place.

“If Yale had presented these drawings three years ago, and Red Hook had a possibility of choosing among them, it would have been a beautiful thing,” she said.

[ablarc]

Two articles on the same phenomenon. You'd never know it if you left out the names.

Were the two reporters looking at the same exhibit? Were they on the same planet? What was one of them smoking?

I don't have any trouble deciding which one to believe.

The other is yellow journalism.

[NewYorkJets]

How is this a relaxing place? One of the worst ghettos in NYC and one of the ugliest areas of the city. I'd much rather be in Central Park relaxing by the lake. You wouldn't cath me walking through there much less sitting there waiting to get shot.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/brooklyn/red_hook/images/red_hook_warehouse_pier_12may01.jpg

[ablarc]

Red Hook’s not so bad. A close relation lives there. He showed me around.

After I saw it, I advised him to get together a down payment so he could invest in a place with a lucrative future. Truth is, to my eye its present is even better than its future. Reason: you can still read so much of its past.

RED HOOK: a village in the city.

Almost a ghost town. When the port died, the longshoremen left:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/00.JPG

On cobbled streets, brick rowhouses freshened with vinyl amid disused warehouses:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/01.JPG
Working class taste.

Other houses departed, leaving gaps:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/02.JPG

Artists arrived seeking cheap space. An artist’s stash:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/03.JPG

Recycled junk, like Red Hook itself:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/04.JPG

Best way to arrive is New York Water Taxi. Too bad it only runs to Red Hook on weekends:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/05.JPG

A scene of tragic decay waits to greet you. Rusting streetcars and Civil War warehouse:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/06.JPG

Appalachia in Brooklyn. Battered, beat up, crumbly, damaged, decayed, decrepit, dog eared, faded, fallen in, injured, marred, neglected, old, ramshackle, rickety, run-down, seedy, shabby, threadbare, tumble-down, unkempt.

But not: broken-down, crummy, decaying, dingy, impaired, ratty, raunchy, rinky-dink, ruined, ruinous, shaky, slummy, tacky, uncared for, unimproved, used up, worn-out.

Where else can you find Christmas lights strung across the street in August?


http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/07.JPG
At once forlorn and funky.

Streetcars are exactly what subwayless Red Hook needs; its underpopulation can be partly explained by how hard it is to get to. One resident realized this, formed a small collection of PCCs, and even laid some track. But the regulators would have none of it. So here, picturesquely and tantalizingly, they rust on the pier where you arrive by water taxi:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/08.JPG

[ablarc]

To keep them company, the adjacent Fairway supermarket has set out picnic tables where you can eat your deli fixins. Here on the ground floor of a Civil War warehouse is ensconced the biggest and best supermarket I’ve ever seen…and it’s in Red Hook!

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/09.JPG

Those streetcars arrived at the ferry dock on these tracks. They should be in use:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/09a.JPG

Also in Red Hook, you’ll find another form of transport:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/10.JPG

And there’s even a small container port, last remnant of a once bustling waterfront:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/11.JPG

Downtown Brooklyn skyline tantalizes. So near and yet so far…

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/12.JPG

Inauspicious surroundings for disembarkation:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/12a.JPG
Welcome to New York!

Van Brunt, the main street, is well equipped with trees and cobbles. You can tell the yuppies are arriving by looking at the cars:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/13.JPG

Though other vehicles might make you think you’re in Durham:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/14.JPG

Other yuppies sell things to their comrades:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/15.JPG

[ablarc]

Gentrification caught in the act:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/16.JPG

Some can afford to build themselves houses. Concrete block, double-height piano nobile, spiral stair, security fence and ramp in place of stoop:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/17.JPG
Check out the plywood portico next door, and the industrial-grade graffiti.

Directly across the street, the look of prosperity comes all the way from Italy:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/17a.JPG

How more of it used to be before the big depopulation. It once so greatly resembled Hoboken that On the Waterfront –supposedly set in Red Hook—was actually filmed in Hoboken. Carpetbagger’s Benz:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/18.JPG

Walled-up storefronts await re-opening:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/19.JPG

Waiting for a building. Mr. Scarano, where are you?

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/20.JPG

View from the Red Hook ferry:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/21.JPG

Red Hook with two skylines:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/redhook2/22.JPG
(Maybe really a skyline and a half.)




All in all: Red Hook is pretty nice. I'd live there. But I would need a car.

[pianoman11686]

Thanks for another wonderful photo tour, ablarc.

Did you happen to pass by this block? It was voted 8th best in New York City by Time Out NY:

8 Coffey Street between Conover and Ferris Streets, Red Hook, Brooklyn

Red Hook isn’t everybody’s thing, and that’s a huge part of what draws people here. The combination of community, sea air, the bustling waterfront and, in recent years, plenty of cool places to eat and drink offset the distance to the subway—especially if you call this stretch of Coffey Street home. The quaint townhouses are nestled amid peace and quiet (and birdsongs!), and the warehouse on the block adds to the industrial vibe without being grotty. Granted, life is easier here with a car (or at least a bike), but residents get a singular New York City flavor in a highly unusual setting. Bonus: +3 points for the amazing view, especially at the end of Coffey Street on Valentino Pier—where you’ll find people fishing, launching canoes and kayaks, or taking in fireworks, with Lady Liberty’s front side about as close as you’ll see it from land.

[ablarc]

Did you happen to pass by this block? It was voted 8th best in New York City by Time Out NY: 8 Coffey Street between Conover and Ferris Streets, Red Hook, Brooklyn
One side of this block is factories. It's like much of Red Hook: a highly refined but acquirable taste --like eating kidneys.

TimeOut cultivates that kind of worldliness.

[ablarc]

...plenty of cool places to eat and drink...
Filled to the brim with good vibes, Hope and Anchor dispenses vittles as warm and comforting as the surroundings they're served in. Whatever their provenance the customers all morph seamlessly into old shoes. You'll find geriatric hippies in grey ponytails, artists in animated conversation, and dudes in dreadlocks hunched over heaping breakfasts and overflowing lunch plates; a New York rendition of Alice's Restaurant.

[antinimby]

Light surface rail with connections to the subway system should do wonders for this area - and frankly, any neighborhood without good subway service in this city. The Westside of Manhattan is another one of those areas.

[ablarc]

Light surface rail with connections to the subway system should do wonders for this area
Well, that's what all those old PCC streetcars were all about. The guy who collected them tried for twenty years to get the city to allow him to run them as you describe. Brooklyn would have had its version of San Francisco's F-Line, the historic streetcars that rumble from Fisherman's Wharf via the Embarcadero and Market Street to the Castro.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2938
Scroll down.

[pianoman11686]

Mickey Mouse plan
Critics rip Disneyesque theme park on Red Hook piers

By Ariella Cohen
The Brooklyn Papers

Elected officials from Washington to City Hall this week derided Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to turn the Red Hook and Cobble Hill waterfront into a maritime-themed tourist attraction as “Disney on the Waterfront.”

And one Red Hooker described the plan as “a pimping of the waterfront.”

“The history of maritime trade is as old as prostitution and it looks like the maritime trades are about to be prostituted,” said Tom Kerr, a resident of Beard Street.

The criticism is a reaction to city plans to oust the area’s remaing cargo business and transform the fenced-off working waterfront into a phantasmagoria of family-friendly attractions, housing and restaurants.

“This is part of a scheme for a New York with as few blue-collar jobs as possible,” said Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-Coney Island) at a public hearing last week on the plan’s environmental impact.

A spokesman for the company that operates the area’s last working cargo port sees Bloomberg’s plan as a plot against Democratic union jobs.

“It’s a dollars-for-developers scheme from a Republican administration with no interest in keeping good jobs in Brooklyn,” said Matt Yates, director of operations for American Stevedoring, which is facing eviction next March from the publicly owned piers.

The city Economic Development Corporation says it can create 3,000 new service sector jobs — and housing for 700 people — by evicting ASI and its several hundred full-time longshoremen.

The cranes operated by those dockworkers would disappear to also make way for a 250-room hotel on a currently inaccessible stretch of waterfront west of Columbia Street.

A smaller working port, with 100 jobs, would be retained.

Residents who testified at last week’s Community Board 6 hearing cautioned against rezoning the waterfront for residential development.

“There are other places to put housing,” said Dan Wiley, spokesman for Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-Sunset Park).

Others complained that development would overcrowd schools and parks, taking a large toll on the quality of life in a neighborhood that is slowly regaining a residential population that vanished after World War II.

“We need the peaceful waterfront community and good schools that we have spent the last forever fighting for,” said Grace Seifman, who has lived in the neighborhood for nearly a decade. “We don’t need more housing blocking our views, another theme park or a South Street Seaport.”

But city planners promise that their theme park will be suited to the historic character of the dockyard community. One proposal, by PortSide NewYork, includes cafes, a maritime-themed shop and two salvaged, historic ships where students and tourists would learn about waterfront trade.

“There is space in Red Hook for a hinge between the world of recreation … and the world of work, because there is still a thriving industrial waterfront there,” said Elaine Carmichael, a planner on the project.

Meanwhile, ASI is trying to hold onto its working-port turf.

“I don’t know if the city is trying to kill maritime industry in Brooklyn, but this plan will certainly hurt it,” said Edward Kelly, president of the Maritime Association, which represents 400 maritime businesses, including ASI.

“It’s fairly obvious that forcing one of the last port operators to leave will do irreparable harm.”

[JCMAN320]

Well Port Newark, Port Elizabeth, and Port Jersey better get ready to make more room for more cranes, people, jobs, and ships.

[ablarc]

Anyone have any pictures of this scheme?

The container port ain't much.

[lofter1]

Recent articles from the NY Observer ...

Public Meeting for Piers (http://therealestate.observer.com/2006/10/public-meeting-for-piers.html)

Matthew Grace
October 12, 2006

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The New York City Economic Development Corporation will hold a scoping meeting tonight at the Long Island College Hospital at 6 p.m. for the planned development on Piers 7 through 12 on the Carroll Gardens and Red Hook waterfront. The E.D.C. has some grand plans for the development -- from parks to housing and waterfront access.

Critics of the plan point out that it doesn't provide any additional housing in Red Hook -- instead it will generate more traffic, which is a bone of contention that Red Hookers have been pleading to the city about for months. (Readers of this blog will rememember our coverage of a Fairway-related traffic fatality earlier this year and the D.O.T.'s seeming complacency.)

It's a guaranteed packed house; emotions are sure to run high! Turn off that damn TV and show up. It's better than Lost!

*****

On the Waterfront

therealestate.observer.com (http://therealestate.observer.com/2006/10/on-the-waterfront.html)
Matthew Grace
October 13, 2006

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Representative Jerry Nadler came out swinging last night at the scoping meeting for the New York Economic Development Corporation's planned redevelopment for Piers 7 through 10 on the Carroll Gardens / Red Hook Waterfront. Mr. Nadler opposed the transformation of Pier 10 -- currently used for maritime shipping -- into a second cruise-ship terminal and 250-room hotel.

Citing the vulnerability of the Kill Van Kull -- which connects Newark Bay and the Upper New York Bay and is the principal access for container ships to the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, the 15th-busiest port in the world -- Mr. Nadler said that the shipping operations must continue in Brooklyn. "The Kill Van Kull is too narrow and shallow for the [metropolitan] area to depend on it," Mr. Nadler said, noting that if by accident or terrorism a ship sunk in the narrow straight, the economy of the region would be seriously affected. The Red Hook piers would be needed if any traffic to New Jersey is disrupted.

Mr. Nadler also emphasized the importance of retaining blue-collar jobs in the area, calling the redevelopment a "mad vision of New York where there are as few blue-collar jobs as possible" to thunderous applause from the audience of area residents, business owners and union workers from the nearby docks.

Matt Yates, the director of American Group RHCT, echoed Mr. Nadler's sentiments, saying that the city is failing to fully appreciate the effects of a port closure. "This is a quick and dirty process where the Republican administration wants to wrest control of public property." The land is question is owned by the Port Authority, a state agency, and is leased out to American Stevedoring.

Shortly after Mr. Yates spoke, E.D.C. vice president Kate Ascher left the meeting--before area residents could address her.

The E.D.C.'s plan includes 350 units of housing on the west side of Columbia Street between Atlantic Avenue and Degraw Street. Reactions from area residents were mixed; while most agreed that more housing was desirable, there was concern that the units would be market-rate, and that current views from Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens would be blocked. Several speakers, including John McGettrick of the Red Hook Civic Association, noted that Red Hook, across the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel to the south, is in desperate need of new housing and residential buildings should be developed there.

Other speakers at the meeting insisted that the E.D.C. try to develop a plan that would not decrease the number of waterfront jobs. The plan currently would allow Piers 7 through 9 to continue shipping operations.

Mr. Yates, outside the meeting, expressed confidence that the development plan would ultimately stall. "It's bound to fail," he said, noting that with the probable election of state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to the Governorship later this year, the P.A. would quit "dancing to the development whims of the Mayor."

The E.D.C. hopes to begin the land-use review process later this year, with a vote from the City Council by next summer. Land acquisition would follow shortly thereafter.
(http://therealestate.observer.com/DraftScope09.html)

Key from the E.D.C..'s draft E.I.S.:

Parcel A: This approximately 49-acre parcel would be dedicated entirely to marine terminal and industrial/manufacturing uses. It is anticipated that Pier 7 would include a brewery, and an associated 40,000 sf beer garden. Piers 8, 9A and 9B would be utilized for warehouse/distribution, a general cargo pier for containers and break bulk cargo and other similar uses. The uses on this parcel would be predominantly maritime in nature, with warehousing and shipment functions. The approximately 623,200 sf of floor area in the three existing pier sheds are assumed to be re-used for these uses, while the remainder of the lot area is assumed to continue being utilized by marine terminal/container/storage activity.
Parcel B: Passenger cruise ship terminal on Pier 10, as well as an approximately 250-room hotel with approximately 40,000 sf of conference/meeting facilities, and approximately 2 acres of open space are assumed to occupy this parcel.
Parcel C: For this parcel, the RWCDS assumes approximately 71,400 sf of light industrial, warehousing and office uses.
Parcel D: For analysis purposes, this small parcel is assumed to be occupied by space for artists and galleries, with an estimated 24,000 sf.
Parcel E: As shown in Table 1, the RWCDS assumptions for this parcel consist of approximately 34,700 sf of retail uses, and a total of 152,400 sf of light industrial, warehousing and office uses.
Parcel F: This parcel is assumed to be occupied by up to approximately 147,200 sf of light industrial and warehousing uses.
Parcel G: This parcel, which is the only parcel located directly on Atlantic Basin, would accommodate a variety of uses that would create a Dynamic Maritime Marketplace concept, including retail, markets, restaurants, performing arts, education (a 25,000 sf trade school), arts and crafts, light industrial, office, maritime (marine services, ship repair, fueling, boat lift, ferry, etc), recreation, a marina with up to 200 slips, and open space uses. Some of those uses would re-use the existing 168,000 sf shed on Pier 11.
Parcels H and I: These two small parcels, located at the back of two existing buildings on Imlay Street, are assumed to accommodate cafes/restaurants.
Parcel J: This parcel is assumed to be occupied by approximately 50,400 sf of retail, and up to 96,800 sf of light industrial/warehousing uses.
Parcel K: Artists studios, arts and crafts, retail, restaurant, office and maritime uses are assumed to occupy this parcel, totaling up to approximately 177,100 sf.
Parcel K: Artists studios, arts and crafts, retail, restaurant, office and maritime uses are assumed to occupy this parcel, totaling up to approximately 177,100 sf.
Parcel L: This parcel is occupied by the new cruise ship terminal on Pier 12, and would remain unchanged under future With-Action conditions.
Parcel M: The RWCDS assumes that the two existing office buildings between Kane and Warren Streets, which are currently occupied by offices for the Port Authority and the Waterfront Commission, would remain. These offices are estimated to consist of approximately 61,700 sf. The remainder of the parcel is assumed to be developed with approximately 37,700 sf of ground floor retail and approximately 350 dwelling units (assuming 1,000 gsf per unit).
copyright © 2006 the new york observer, L.P.

[lofter1]

curbed has some stories: http://www.curbed.com/archives/2006/10/18/red_hook_piers_smackdown_update.php

Some more info here: http://www.brooklyngreenway.org/

A pdf with all sorts of schemes (beyond just Red Hook): http://www.rpa.org/pdf/BWGsummary020105.pdf

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Courtesy Brooklyn Greenway Initiative
The proposed path of the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative would span 14 miles
of waterfront and transverse many varied neighborhoods.
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[lofter1]

A Place That Matters: Red Hook Graving Dock

http://www.brownstoner.com/rhgravingdock234fh.jpg

brownstoner.com (http://brownstoner.com/brownstoner/archives/2006/10/a_place_that_ma.html)
October 17, 2006

In an effort to advocate for "places in New York City that preserve history and sustain culture," the Municipal Art Society (http://mas.org/), in partnership with organization called City Lore, publishes a website called Placematters.net (http://www.placematters.net/flash/home.htm). Readers are invited to nominate locations that they think fit the description.

This week, for example, the Red Hook Graving Dock — currently on the verge of being demolished to make way for the IKEA parking lot — gets special attention, having been submitted by Mary Habstritt:
As of October, 2006, Graving Dock No. 1 is the only structure still standing to remind us of the mighty Todd Shipyards Corporation, once a nationwide company, birthed in Erie Basin. All the shipyard buildings have been demolished as part of developing the site for an IKEA store. Once one of the largest dry docks in the world, it is a symbol of Red Hook's long maritime history, of technological innovation, and of New York's contributions to national war efforts. It is a place where ships could still be repaired and it is part of what makes Brooklyn unique. It is a place that makes New York a place, different from all others.
There's lots of historical info about the Graving Dock on the Place Matters site. Our only gripe: Too much Flash technology for our tastes. It's easier to read about on the MAS site.

Week 13: Red Hook Graving Dock (http://mas.org/viewarticle.php?id=1470&category=5) [MAS]

[ablarc]

Can't see that IKEA store as anything but a mistake.

They should have put it somewhere in Manhattan in a large-footprint, multi-story building with exactly zero parking, and provided a delivery service.

[Edward]

NYPOST
SOUR ENDING FOR B'KLYN SWEET SPOT

By RICH CALDER

December 8, 2006 -- The iconic Revere Sugar Refinery - whose domed rooftop has defined Brooklyn's Red Hook waterfront for a century - could be demolished as early as today by a developer hoping to bring luxury housing to the gritty waterfront area, The Post has learned.

The property's owner, Joseph Sitt of Thor Equities, received a Buildings Department demolition permit for the rusting, long-vacant refinery on Tuesday, records show.

Thor did not return phone messages yesterd