Red Hook History

Red Hook has a history as colorful as its sunsets and has always been an inspiration to artists and writers.
The area is generally defined as the peninsula west of the Gowanus Canal and south of the Brooklyn – Queens Expressway. The neighborhood is bound by Atlantic Avenue to the north, the BQE to the east, the Buttermilk Channel to the west, and the Erie Basin and Gowanus Bay to the south.  In the 1600’s, Red Hook was settled by the Dutch, who named the area Roode Hoek after its red soil and the hooked shape of the jutting peninsula.

In the 1700’s, Red Hook served as an important site in the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Brooklyn. Later, Red Hook became a center of the sea trade, visited by pirates and crowded with immigrants.

Red Hook entered the twentieth century as a tough ethnic cauldron. During prohibition the neighborhood was the site of a poisoned “whiskey-jack” epidemic, the ascension of Al Capone and the establishment of Brooklyn’s largest public housing project. The second half of century saw a decline in Red Hook’s economic fortunes. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway cut the neighborhood off from the rest of Brooklyn, and changes in shipping technology moved maritme jobs to New Jersey. In the 1970’s, the general decline of New York City and the drug epidemic that followed hit Red Hook hard, leaving abandoned homes and warehouses in its wake and turning the area into a frontier outpost on the Brooklyn waterfront.

Red Hook’s turnaround has been well documented. The abundant warehouse space and low-priced housing made Red Hook attractive to artists and artisans as well as manufacturers and small businesses.

Without subway service and with its century-old reputation to overcome, gentrification has come relatively slowly to Red Hook. Today, the neighborhood remains a mix of the old and the new. Mammoth big-box developments are beginning to loom over cobblestone streets. Barge traffic in the Harbor provides a background for high-end boutiques. Tractor-trailers share streets with gourmet shoppers, and cruise ships crowd up against Red Hook’s last stevedoring company. Despite these changes, the neighborhood remains a close-knit place where residents are still proud to call themselves “Red Hookers.”

For more history http://www.waterfrontmuseum.org