Red Hook: A charming nabe that rolls with the punches

The best part of living in Red Hook, according to a long-term resident, is “that it takes 20 minutes to walk from my house down the block to get my morning coffee.”

The worst part is that it takes 20 minutes to make the walk. Since everyone knows each other, local errands require a string of greetings and conversations along the way.

In this nabe, isolated from the rest of the borough by geography and a roaring highway, the pace is slow, the feel is much more small-town than big city, more like a New England fishing village than a New York neighborhood.

Dutch settlers gave Red Hook its name — Roode Hoek — because of its iron-rich red soil and peninsular shape.

Van Brunt Street, the main drag and the heart and soul of 21st century Red Hook, is named after an 18th century descendant of a Dutch family that settled in the marshy area in the mid-1600s.

Red Hook was the pinnacle port in the U.S. after the opening of the Erie Canal in the 1830s. More than a hundred years later, Red Hook houses, the New York City Housing Authority development where most of Red Hook’s 11,000 residents live, was built to house some local workers.

According to Anita McCrae, who grew up in the Red Hook houses in the ’70s and ’80s, “We were the last group of kids there who experienced the good life, the normal life, before crack came along in the late ’80s, early ’90s.”

Since those “bad old days” 20 plus years ago, Red Hook has “undergone radical transformation” according to Craig Hammerman, district manager of Community Board 6. In the ’90s residents created a community development plan. Cheap rents, large studio spaces and the remoteness of the area’s vacant manufacturing buildings attracted artists and craftspeople. Tourists followed. Red Hook’s most recent challenge, Superstorm Sandy, ravaged the neighborhood but also brought the community together in amazing ways.

Diane Fargo, a scenic artist who lives there, thinks it’s because “Here, everyone feels responsible for the success of everyone else.”

Indeed, as spring arrives and warmer weather comes to this waterfront neighborhood, the locals are optimistic about the coming season.

Find it: Red Hook is the peninsula south of Hamilton Street, surrounded on all three sides by Gowanus Bay, the Gowanus Canal and Buttermilk Channel. The construction of the Gowanus Expressway in the 40’s and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in the 1950s lopped Red Hook off from the rest of South Brooklyn.

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You can walk from the F or G train stop at Carroll Street on a nice day or take your bike — there’s not a hill in sight.

The No. 61 and 57 buses are the only public transportation in and out of Red Hook. They connect with subway stops in downtown Brooklyn where you can get to the 2,3,4,5, and R lines. Ikea runs a ferry between Manhattan at Pier 11 and their Red Hook store seven days a week. The store also runs shuttle buses from nearby subway stations every day of the week.

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It will be a while before all of Red Hook is back to where it was pre-Sandy, and residents and merchants are still dealing with FEMA and the city’s Small Business Association.

Some stores are still closed and/or have limited hours while they go about the work of reconstruction.

Also in the works is the highly contentious Gowanus Canal cleanup.

Another local issue is the EPA’s consideration of a plan to put a toxic waste facility behind the Red Hook ballfields.

Just about every storefront on Van Brunt has a sign that says “Tell the EPA No to a Toxic Red Hook.”

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