To the Brooklyn Docks and Back

I’ve been to Red Hook three times, and each time, I’ve used a different route.
On my first trip, I ran across the Brooklyn Bridge south through Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill, past the Red Hook projects, and finally onto Van Brunt Street, the main drag leading straight toward the waterfront piers by Fairway Market. The second time, I walked down Smith Street in Carroll Gardens underneath a massive train bridge, and followed a path that took me into Red Hook Park, where the area’s renowned Mexican vendors sell the best tacos in the entire city. On my third adventure to Red Hook, I hopped aboard the free water taxi to Ikea from Pier 11 on the East River, and relished the best free boat ride in town (with the possible exception of the Staten Island Ferry), then disembarked at the newly opened Erie Basin Park at Ikea’s waterfront edge. Each time, I’ve seen the area from a different angle, in different weather, and under different circumstances—but, without fail, I always leave with a sense that I missed the main attraction.

Bound by an expressway and the Gowanus Canal in a southwestern corner of Brooklyn, Red Hook derives its name from the Dutch “Roode Hoek,” meaning “red point,” referring to the area’s reddish soils. In the mid 1800s, Red Hook built a port facility for unloading arriving shipments from the Erie Canal. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the area epitomized industrial New York. Dockhands, like Marlon Brando’s character in On the Waterfront, unloaded cargo from the bounty of ships that poured into New York harbor. While the shipping and container industries have largely departed for New Jersey and other states with larger facilities, Red Hook’s landscape still attests to a great industrial past. Old brick warehouses, many since converted to lofts and artists’ studios, line the waterfront facing south. Along the piers jutting into the harbor, cranes, pulleys, and lifts—many rusted beyond repair—give Red Hook a skeletal skyline of steel and girders.

Though it is perhaps a bit off the map for many New Yorkers (and even Brooklynites), few spots in New York offer a scene that, while fundamentally incomplete, can be so fulfilling. Indeed, for many who frequent Ikea or Fairway, Red Hook represents little more than a nice place by the water to spend the day shopping. While this image of Red Hook undoubtedly offers some compliment to the landscape, the area’s attraction goes well beyond its shopping destinations. The area’s main street—Van Brunt Street—has less activity than one might expect for a primary thoroughfare, but the few pleasant shops and cafés that do dot the street reflect a landscape characterized by welcome interludes all too rare in the congested streetscapes of the city. Of course, the number of these shops has been growing steadily, and though the prices may not yet rival many of the borough’s more chic districts, the tide of gentrification spares no Brooklyn neighborhood.

That tide, of course, has been flowing more than ebbing for some time now. The arrival of Ikea, and earlier Fairway, marks a key transition for the district, as retail boxes supersede lingering dock activity. A banner for waterfront living by Thor Equities (think Nordic thunder god destroying Astroland) adds a nauseating element to the scene. In fact, what has maintained Red Hook’s relative tranquility perhaps until now has been the failure—or at least the rather gradual—pace of development there. A lack of convenient subway access, in addition to its relative isolation from the rest of Brooklyn, has made the waterfront property less desirable, despite its unobstructed, picture-perfect views of Lady Liberty.

Though Fairway and Ikea may hail the onset of change, the parks and landscaped piers built around these behemoths are what truly make the trip worth it. Along the water’s edge by Fairway, a crafts fair lines a warehouse pier of artists’ studios jutting into the harbor. Alongside a trio of old trolley cars (strangely, from Boston) on outdoor benches, Fairway customers devour the city’s cheapest lobster rolls and watch container ships move lazily toward the ports at Elizabeth, N.J. At times, the area emits the air of some quaint artist’s retreat in Vermont, the kind of place where people only buy organic cheese and you’d be hard-pressed not to find somebody selling glass-blown ornaments or knitted headwear. Community gardens, not surprisingly, exist in abundance here. Though I saw no farmer’s market, I’m near positive at least one was going on. Maybe that’s what I missed.

I always leave Red Hook the same way. I walk along Van Brunt Street, peer through the window of Atlantis...Found (a bit-too-pricey antique store), and then wander past the clapboard houses that line Red Hook’s treeless side streets up to the expressway. The streets usually seem quite empty, except for a few neighborhood boys lazily riding trick bikes along the sidewalk. I once got a sidelong glance from an Irishman who had decorated his house with fishing paraphernalia, likely in some attempt to restore the neighborhood’s sea-tossed grit. Unfortunately, his working-class decor had played right into the tastes and sensibilities of the very “yupsters” (as he put it) he had tried to drive out of his portside precinct: Alas, to no avail. The perils of gentrification strike yet again.

So what did I keep missing in Red Hook? I now think that whatever it must be has yet to arrive. But once it does, I’m not sure I’ll want to return—this landscape, like a 19th-century Romantic painting—may best be left in unfinished hues, rusty skeletons and all