Reporting Red Hook

Across from the Red Hook Container Terminal on Columbia Street, two elderly men sit at a card table that’s been set up out on the sidewalk. One is slouched over, asleep in his folding chair, a Spanish-language newspaper crumpled in his lap. The other is eating rice and beans from an aluminum take-out container and smiling widely at the passers-by. They look a bit out of place amidst the upscale restaurants and trendy cafes that line the block, but they seem to feel right at home.

“I came here from Puerto Rico in 1959.  I was one of the first!” said Ocasio Figaroa, the more alert of the two.  “We lived in an apartment on Amity Street, and I went to P.S. 29.”  Figaroa is a relic—a member of the first Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn and one of the first in New York, a community that was once thriving but is now mostly vanished or invisible. “I had all my adventures on Columbia Street,” he said, “there were bars with happy hours; music, dancing, beautiful women.  This was all Boriqua.”

“The first Puerto Ricans ended up on Columbia Street because the boat that brought them landed here,” said Manuel Ortiz, a Puerto Rican-American and director of the Carroll Gardens Association.  They stayed in the Columbia Street District—defined as the area between Atlantic Avenue and the Gowanus Expressway, the BQE and the waterfront—to work in the docks. When containers and hydraulic lifts began replacing manpower in the 1960s, most of the jobs moved to New Jersey, where there was more space for large container ports. “They used to pick us up from here and bus us to Jersey,” Figaroa explained.  “I worked on the ships in Bayonne until I left for Vietnam.” With few jobs, the neighborhood experienced a long period of neglect and decline. “Columbia Street became a real abandoned neighborhood,” said Ortiz. 

A recent article in the New York Times laments the fact that Columbia Street has yet to see the level of revival visible on neighboring Smith and Court Streets in Carroll Gardens.  The waterfront is still occupied by the container terminal and is inaccessible to the public; the promises of a Columbia Street Urban Renewal Plan remain unfulfilled.  But the neighborhood, alive with restaurant goers and young couples pushing baby carriages, has changed enormously in the past decade or so. 

“There used to be something called Puerto Rican village—it was an empty lot on Columbia Street where people would build their shacks,” according to Jerry Armer, a former chairman of the local community board. Locals recall a shantytown of hand-built wooden and tin-roofed structures that stood in the neighborhood for decades. No one seems to remember exactly when the settlement appeared, but around a dozen people still called it home until 1994, when it burned to the ground in a blaze that killed two people.

“When I first bought by house here, my dad really discouraged me. He was like, ‘That’s Red Hook!’ It was considered a tough neighborhood.” That was 8 years ago.  Now, Maritsa Beltre owns a restaurant on Columbia Street and sends her daughter to P.S. 29. “Some of the old Puerto Rican men come by and tell me how this used to be a bar where they met their sweethearts,” she said.  But asked if she’s noticed any remnants of the Puerto Rican community she said, “I don’t think there’s really anything—on this street, everything is pretty much new.”

The Iglisia Cristiana Pentecostal on Summit Street just off Columbia still holds bi-lingual services.  Reverend Rene Baez said that the church used to be almost all Puerto Rican, but that now it’s a mix of Hispanics and African Americans who come over from the Red Hook housing projects.  According to Baez, the Puerto Rican community hasn’t vanished, it’s just become less visible.

“We’re assimilated now.  My own kids speak Spanish, but some of the kids who grew up in this church don’t even speak a word of it,” Baez said. “We’re not really immigrants; we were never immigrants, we’re patriotic U.S. citizens,” he said.

Some Puerto Rican-Americans prefer to embrace their dual identity. “We are Americans of course, we serve in the military and everything, but generally a Puerto Rican will tell you that he’s a Puerto Rican first,” said Ortiz.

According to Reverend Baez, many Puerto Ricans in the Columbia Street District bought their homes decades ago, so they aren’t affected by increasing rents spurred by the gentrification of the neighborhood.  But that’s not true for everyone. A sign in the window of a local real estate agency offers a one-bedroom apartment for $1800 per month. Ocasio Figaroa, the man eating his lunch at the card table, has suffered from seizures ever since he went to Vietnam, and the $910 a month that he receives as a disabled war veteran is not nearly enough to afford a place to live the neighborhood where he grew up.  He usually sleeps at his brother’s house in Staten Island, but still spends his days on Columbia Street.  “God put me in Brooklyn,” he said, “that’s where I had all my good times, all my loves.  They’ve been fixing it up and it’s even better now, way better.”