Tourist Productions 2007

RED HOOK SOUNDWALK

Based on “The Transoms of Red Hook,” a text and photo essay (http://www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET%20SCENES/redhook/redhook.html) and “A Look at the Hook: Forgottentour 13.” I adapted the text and recorded the soundwalk, some local soundscapes, both exterior and interior. I've have had some technical difficulties in editing the sound files (maintaining the audio quality, you can listen to the attached draft audiofile if you like), but by the end of the week I should have a seamless edit. meanwhile, here's my script:

Track 1: Van Brunt Street
Red Hook is a small penninsula that juts off Brooklyn, across from Governor’s Island, where the East River meets the Erie Basin. If you are taking this tour, chances are you already know how to get there.

My name is Amalia Cordova, and I have been living here for six years. Known for its lack of trains, many residents of this industrial neighborhood rely on the faithful B61 bus, which rumbles down Van Brunt Street, where trolley lines are still visible between the cobblestones and cement.

We’ll stroll through perhaps the last days of gritty Red Hook before it becomes a destination for frantic shoppers and trendy hipsters.

We'll concentrate on the more desolate areas of the Hook, starting at the heart of the neighborhood, on the corner of Van Brunt and Pioneer Street, where we find the only bustling corner of the neighborhood with a few stores, the local pizza place, and on the northwest corner, the Red Hook Bait & Tackle Shop (at 320 Van Brunt), which used to service neighborhood fishermen.

If you peek through the glass, you’ll see it’s now a bar overflowing with "found" objects: a mermaid, strings of dangling fish, two mounted harpoons from a Long Island basement and a stuffed bear from Indiana. Strings of glowing bobbers barely light the ample space. Old-timers who remember when that tree fell in the church garden now set their drinks on its planks that serve as the bar, where they're joined by the neighborhood's younger set.

Walking down Van Brunt Street, we near the cobblestoned Coffey Street, where the buildings are low and tiny townhouses are interspersed with yards and beat up warehouses. Walking west to the end of the street, you will see the waterfront and a new curving pier. You may also encounter fishermen, and in the summer, an interpid swimmer.

In the early-to-mid 1990s, Pier 39 at the foot of Coffey Street was renovated and renamed for Louis Valentino Jr., a hero fireman who sustained fatal injuries in a Canarsie blaze in 1996.

The green area between the pier and Coffey Street is named for Fort Defiance, a Red Hook encampment during the Revolutionary War; shots fired from the fort, which was located a few blocks away at Dwight and Beard Streets, delayed the British fleet enough to help allow Washington to escape the Battle of Brooklyn with fewer casualties than he would have had.

The building on the SW corner of Coffey and Conover streets lay empty for 20 years before a parachute manufacturer bought and renovated the old place, which may date to the 1840s. The hoist used to lift hay bales or whatever is still in place. This building has an old sign showing Coffey Street's old name.

From the pier, taking a left on Conover and walking one block south, we spot an unlit neon sign on the left side of the street that says BAR. For decades, longshoremen drank their lunch at 253 Conover, now run by Sunny Balzano, whose family has owned the place since the early 1930s. Just a few feet away, catenary wire, tracks and canvas-covered cars mark the spot where trolley aficionado Bob Diamond once hoped to return trolley service to Brooklyn.

By 2006, in the spot where Diamond hoped to open his trolley museum, the landscape changed dramatically and a giant Fairway supermarket has opened in the old Van Brunt Stores complex, built during the Civil War.

And in 2006, the old trolley cars, which had been left to the elements for years, had been removed and a waterside park is under construction. But where have the cars gone? Only Diamond's trolley poles are wires remain.

In contrast, on the corner of Conover and Beard stands the Time Warner Cable relay station with its huge dishes.

Across the street from Sunny’s, a new park constructed between Pier 41 and the Waterfront Museum barge allows excellent views of Upper New York Bay. Once a rocky wasteland crumbling into the water, as of 2006 the park is fully landscaped and blooming. The barge sometimes relocated to the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, so it may not be in sight.

If we walk north one block up the waterfront, we’ll find an area called Pier 41, on Van Dyke Street between Conover and Ferris, formerly off limits to pedestrians and now offering delicacies such as key lime pie.

During the day, you can get a "piesicle" at Steve Turpin's Key Lime Pie palace at this 1850s-era warehouse. The piesicle is a mini-key lime pie on top of a graham crust, covered in chocolate.

Returning to Conover, the last street before the waterfront, we walk north one block. Here, between Dikeman and Wolcott, we observe sturdy brick buildings with unusual wood insulation and renovated warehouses now split into fashionable lofts.

Turning right on Wolcott, and walking back to Van Brunt, we can stop at the diner on the corner called Hope & Anchor; the owners are probably aware of London's Hope & Anchor, a music venue. At night, you may find locals engaged in karaoke here.

Furniture crowds the sidewalk just south of Hope and Anchor, from an antique store called Atlantis. On the same side of the street is Baked, coffee shop famous for its rich cupcakes. There is wireless at baked, should you need to check your email. Further down, the flea market seasonally props open its fence for the passerbys to peruse a truly eclectic assortment of trinkets, furniture and on occasion, provides equally unpredictable live music.

You may have perceived a constant hum in this area, it’s the Ahava factory on the corner of Van Brunt and Van Dyke. There are signs posted on storefronts and on corner posts opposing the noise this 24 business produces, but the factory stays open year after year. Curiously, right across the street from the factory stand two vacant, sleek, six-story condos right across the street, waiting for the Red Hook boom to happen. Will their occupants put up with this backgound drone?

At the end of Van Brunt are the Van Brunt (or Red Hook) Stores, from 480 to 500 Van Brunt Street, stretching along an arm of the Erie Basin. Both this building and the nearby Beard Street warehouse feature heavy arched and shuttered windows.

Entering the driveway at the end of the street, we find ourselves on a long dock.

To the left we see a channel and Beard Street Pier. Acroos the waterway is a dilapidated metal structure. The Revere Sugar Refinery, once owned by Antonio Floriendo, a Marcos family confidant known as the "Banana King of the Philippines", declared bankruptcy in 1985. The refinery has been in magnificent ruins since then. A fire some years ago devastated it. The property has been recently purchased, so the refinery may soon be a memory.

On the edge of the water you may spot Lightship 84, one of a few dozen remaining in the USA and one of 4 remaining in NYC, that sank into Erie Basin in 1997, where it has remained. In its near-century of history, it has been a lightship, training vessel, restaurant, and now it's quite rusty. NYPD uses it as a training venue for the scuba patrol.

We see the unused docks of the Todd Shipyards, including the Beard Street waterfront, from Erie Basin, once so busy that B77 buses once carried "Erie Basin" in the destination roll over the front windows.

The Todd Shipyards, also known as New York Shipyards, have now been closed and, in 2006, were demolished for a masive Ikea store. Philip Lopate in his book "Waterfront" describes an incident in which the crew of a damaged Central American freighter were detained here for 6 months until its owner could pay for repairs. Its crew was too afraid to venture into the Red Hook streets for provisions. The owner had to get food for them.

The Monitor, the first ironclad vessel from the Civil War era, was once repaired here. Within, the yards feature brick structures with heavy timber posts and machines that have 1920s-era Bauhaus industrial design highlights with skylights and 20-foot-tall windows. Without, peeling paper cutout art decorates the exterior and surrounding area.

The Todd Shipyards is a dry dock. Most of what you see here will be torn down soon, with an Ikea shopping center due to take its place. The administration buildings were razed in 2006, replaced by the blue plywood fence and some street art. Community activitsts are trying to preserve the actual dry dock as part of the Ikea complex; we'll see how successful that is.

To the west you can see the New York Water Taxi, which calls the Beard Street Pier its home base. This taxi parks here but the actual taxi stop is across the pier, by the Faiway terrace.

Will the recently opened Fairway Supermarket and possible Ikea furniture store turn Red Hook into a big parking lot with its narrow roads crammed with Cobble Hillers and Sunset Parkers looking for lettuce and night tables?

From this lookout point, you can see the Statue of Liberty, which realtors attempt to invoke by calling the neighborhood “Liberty Heights.”

Red Hook has several developers salivating as they hope to turn the waterfront into retail space. Many Red Hookers oppose the building of the Ikea, but some residents of Red Hook houses applaud the developments, since they will supply jobs.

The new trend in Brooklyn is to plop giant developments in the midst of residential neighborhoods without investing in the overall infrastructure. Ikeas, in particular, tend to be in football field-size parking lots that are served by pedal-to-the-metal state highways and interstates. How traffic will get to this particular Ikea over Red Hook's rutted, Belgian-blocked roads, well, that will be an experiment all Red Hookers will be participating in.

It seems certain that "old" Red Hook, with its dusty streets, neighborhood dives, and residential pockets will soon be changing in some way.

It’s likely Red Hook's blunt ambience will survive though.