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By Suzanne Spellen (aka Montrose Morris) The Great Depression was one of the 20th century’s most defining periods. We tend to think it started with the international stock market crash on October 29, 1929, but the industrialized world’s economies were headed for trouble several years before that. By the early 1930s, the effects were …

By Suzanne Spellen (aka Montrose Morris) Housing projects were originally built as a great experiment to house lower income people, one of many to come from the unprecedented poverty and needs of the Great Depression. The economic conditions that brought nationwide misery to this country beginning in 1929 and continuing throughout the 1930s were …

Sailors, food and art: All play a part in the story of 44-46 Beard Street, a utilitarian Italianate-style building overlooking the waterfront and Ikea. It was built as a storefront with residential space above sometime between 1880 and 1886. A lone survivor, and a witness to over 130 years of shipping and industrial history, …

Officially, 76 Van Dyke Street is the Brooklyn Clay Retort and Fire Brick Works Storehouse. That’s quite a mouthful for this sprawling one-story building, beautifully constructed in rough-cut stone. Located near a slip on the Erie Basin, the storehouse is a lone survivor of the fire clay brick industry, once one of the most important …

Photo by Jennifer K. via Yelp When Manhattan’s favorite market Fairway announced that it would be opening a branch in Red Hook in 2006, food lovers from all over Brooklyn waited in anxious anticipation. The market would be housed in the Red Hook Stores, the largest of the brick storage warehouses built by Red Hook’s …

The face of Brooklyn changes almost every day. Come back a few months later, and everything has changed. Even as new buildings appear and disappear, or even the streets themselves, the land underneath tends to stay the same. This has not, however, always been true for Brooklyn’s shoreline. Here, the land itself can change. Nowhere …

Long before Red Hook got its name, when the Lenape people would fish near the entrance to what is now the East River, it was a marshy swamp. This area of what would some day become South Brooklyn looked more like the Mississippi Delta than the defined waterfront we see today. Old maps show all sorts of tidal …

Our neighborhoods all have interesting place names. The streets, thoroughfares and neighborhoods themselves are named for people, landmarks, or natural features that were a part of its history. So it stands to reason that Red Hook, with its storied past, would have some interesting street names. Red Hook The name “Red Hook” goes back …

A trip to the Red Hook Fairway may be your excuse to visit the iconic warehouses of Red Hook, but once you are here, stop for a moment and look around. You are looking at American and international history. It’s a story of how these Red Hook warehouses—or “stores,” as they used to be called—were the conduit …

  Red Hook is known for its warehouses, but the spacious waterfront can make it seem a world away from the rest of Brooklyn. It’s also the ideal spot to indulge in some seafood and relaxation.     In June of 2012, the owners of Brooklyn Mexican restaurant Alma, itself located on a Columbia Street waterfront …