Reporting Red Hook

Reporting Red Hook features original reporting and writing about the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, in addition to commentary by its reporters.

This is a collaborative effort of current students of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism covering the Red Hook neighborhood for their RW 1, boot-camp journalism course of the first semester.

We picked this neighborhood for various reasons, including the proliferation of healthy bar life, rich characters and storytellers and that it is surrounded on two sides by waterfront, among others. Like any other decision, the reasons involved in its formulation are often so subtle that they border on being imperceptible, and are profound.

That said, Red Hook is a fascinating neighborhood whose history reads like the tragic life of a child whose loving parents died early in life. This is where Capone cut his teeth and On the Waterfront was based…and Time Magazine said in the peculiar style of a 1927 article that, “In one of the more exclusive gangs initiates, usually aged about nine, have to drink twelve glasses of dago-red wine and have a revolver pressed into their temples while they take the pledge….and amuse themselves throwing rocks, shooting craps, fighting gang against gang with clubs, stones, bottles, telling jokes, holding a section of street against invasion by a rival gang, stealing, cop-baiting, hanging around poolrooms, attending cheap cinema shows, begging pennies, playing poker, drinking liquor, accepting the solicitations of older uptown girls.”

The streets were once thriving with longshoreman, sailors, suppliers and families. The ports on the waterfront were an integral cog of a thriving shipping industry in the New York area and generated employment and propelled community all the way through the advent of modern, containerized shipping of the 1960’s.

It was also the site of the one of the first Puerto Rican communities in New York City. Puerto Ricans currently make up the largest Hispanic population of the city.

It is also home to the first and largest public housing development in Brooklyn, the Red Hook Houses, which was built in 1939.

But, the construction of the Gowanus Expressway in the early 1970’s, planned by the infamous mayor of New York, Robert Moses, acted like a tourniquet and cut the area off from surrounding neighborhoods of Carrol Gardens and Gowanus.

The neighborhood became isolated and meanwhile the shipping industry died.

Modern day Red Hook began to take shape, a post-industrial landscape, with no train stop to stimulate real-estate development, and no local jobs for the local population.

The eighties and nineties made ‘The Hook’ notorious for crack cocaine and the murderous turf wars associated with it. Some people on the street credit the Guiliani administration for is attention to detail and petty crimes, like drinking in the street and loitering, for cleaning up Red Hook. Now, the Houses are walkable, and the parks are playable and the swimming pool swimmable, much to the disbelief of some visitors.

Where are the people who live there now, one could ask. Why aren’t the streets bustling with commerce and noise?

The remaining waterfront is being closed off to the public, with owners waiting for their moment to sell upon the greenlight from the current mayoral administration. No great change is coming soon, as a controversial plan to convert the remaining working waterfront into residential and industrial site lost steam and appearance dead…in the water, at least for the next five years.

But, the controversial Swedish furniture outlet Ikea, or Ikevil, as some clever wordsmiths have named it, has put on its blue skin. Plywood furniture heaven awaits visiting consumers from outside of Red Hook and the city has even extended bus service to accommodate them.

At the same time there are many in this neighborhood with intense and passionate feelings about their place.

Change is upon us, slowly but surely, but no one seems to know where its going.

We will try to report on this change.