Reclaiming the Red Hook Waterfront
Red Hook, in what used to be called South Brooklyn, with its Italianate rowhouses, corner bodegas, and old warehouses, has a vibrant architectural story to tell. The neighborhood’s relative isolation—it occupies one of Brooklyn’s westernmost peninsulas, with no subway service—meant that over the last seventy years, as shipping ebbed and surrounding areas gentrified, its streetscape was preserved. What remains today is a visual reminder of New York’s maritime history and the Italian and Irish longshoremen who once lived and worked along the city’s waterfronts.
In recent years, Red Hook has slowly begun to change. Although it still has no subway, in the years before superstorm Sandy, small businesses, many owned by people who live in the area—like Brooklyn Welding and Fabrication Inc., which services many of the city’s architects and designers, and the sweet-smelling Widow Jane whiskey distillery, which supplies a popular bar across the cobblestoned road (see Figure 9)—began to take over old warehouses, which offer flexibility of use and low rent.
The Red Hook peninsula, once at the center of New York’s shipping industry, is recognizable by its man-made coastline, with Erie Basin to the south and Atlantic Basin the west. Today, the area is still defined by transportation infrastructure, bounded by the Gowanus Expressway and Hugh L. Carey Tunnel approach (I-278/478), and the Gowanus Canal. Courtesy Google Maps.
Now the neighborhood is on the cusp of a more significant transformation. Its proximity to highways, bridges, and tunnels, and to all those gentrified neighborhoods that surround it, are bringing in a new type of tenant: e-commerce giants like Amazon and UPS.
While the jobs are welcome, there are reasons to be wary. Unlike the moribund industries that once rose up around the port, which employed tens of thousands, or the small-scale light industries that have set up this century, the new tenants imagine using the neighborhood in a more fleeting way, as a way to move goods from regional warehouses in the exurbs to customers. The growing volume of trucks has already disrupted traffic and led to complaints about noise.
E-commerce also threatens to upend Red Hook physically. In more developed waterfront areas of Brooklyn, like Williamsburg and Sunset Park, industrial facilities were modernized in the twentieth century with glass and steel structural framing. Red Hook’s warehouses, which were older, and which constitute a unique South Brooklyn vernacular style, were left fallow, and considered behind the times (see Figure 4). Framed in timber and often just one story tall, they evince a striking Classical simplicity and an intimate, neighborhood scale. This horizontality makes Red Hook feel like a small town amidst of America’s largest, densest city. But e-commerce, which covets their sites, has no use for these structures. And already, they are coming down.
This map of the northern half of Red Hook shows how the streetscape is oriented to the irregular coastline. Note the large stores and warehouses surrounding both Erie and Atlantic Basins. From George W. and Walter S. Bromley, Atlas of the Borough of Brooklyn City of New York, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: G. W. Bromley, 1908), plate 30. Courtesy Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library.
In May 2019, in the middle of the night, just days before the city was to vote on landmark protections for the Lidgerwood Warehouse—a prominent red-brick warehouse located at the mouth of one of the neighborhood’s most popular parks, Valentino Pier (see Figures 13, 14)—UPS began to bulldoze. Rallying in the dark, dozens of residents and business owners persuaded contractors to halt demolition, but not before half of one façade was destroyed (see Figures 11, 12).
Containerization of shipping left Red Hook’s docks dormant by the 1960s. But the physical traces of that world which remain are invaluable—to the neighborhood and its residents, and to the city beyond, including me, a newcomer from London struck by the unexpected scale of the architecture and relationship between land and sea. The intimacy of the built environment reminds us of what we need in a community: human-scaled urbanism and the local flavors it cultivates.
