76 Van Dyke Street, One of Red Hook’s Most Important Buildings
Suzanne Spellen, aka Montrose Morris, takes a look at this lone survivor of the fire clay brick industry, part of Red Hook’s first wave of industrial development.
Wallpaper Fanatics Go Wild With the Walls of Their Red Hook Loft
Cofounders of Calico Wallpaper, Rachel and Nick Cope naturally gravitated toward their favorite wall covering when designing their refined Red Hook rental.
Still Hard to Get To, but No Longer Red: How Red Hook Got Its Name
Brownstoner takes on Brooklyn history in Nabe Names, a series of briefs on the origins and surprising stories of neighborhood nomenclature.
One of Brooklyn’s many former industrial hubs, Red Hook’s long-underused and abandoned waterfront warehouses are now seeing a transformation into luxury apartments.
Brooklyn’s First Tesla Showroom Is Coming to Transit-Starved Slice of Red Hook
Electric cars are scarce in Brooklyn, but Tesla Motors may change that. The luxury electric car maker plans to open a showroom in Red Hook — yes, that transit-starved area that has become a destination.
The Insider: Historic Red Hook Shell Revived as Family Home Plus Rental
=
Four brick walls with some remnants of floor joists and staircases — that’s all that was left of a 25-by-50-foot three-story building on Coffey Street, erected in the 1860s by the Atlantic Dock Company as workers’ housing.
“You couldn’t even walk around in most of it,” recalled architect Rafe Churchill, who was hired to help the building’s new owners convert the two upper floors into a home for their family of four, with a rental unit beneath. “We had to use a ladder to get up to the second floor.”
Would You Ride This $1.7 Billion Brooklyn-Queens Streetcar?
Talk of a streetcar system connecting Brooklyn and Queens has been in the air for years — the subway is Manhattan-centric, and Citi Bike isn’t optimal when you’re trying to get from Red Hook to Long Island City.
To reignite interest in the plan for a streetcar running along the waterfront from Sunset Park to Astoria, a booster group called Friends of the Brooklyn-Queens Connector have released glossy new renderings of our possible streetcar-filled future.
Would you ride?
The Sweet Life of Ample Hills, a Brooklyn Ice Cream Empire Expanding to an Aisle Near You
The path to success isn’t always obvious. When Brian Smith reached 40 years of age, he quit his job writing low-budget monster movies, took a weeklong ice cream chemistry course at Penn State, and co-founded — with his wife, Jackie Cuscuna — what has grown into the Ample Hills Creamery empire.
It was, to say the least, a very profitable midlife crisis.
Multimillion-Dollar Farm Program Aims to Feed Underserved Brooklyn Communities
Crown Heights resident Sade Bennett is just one of many Brooklynites benefiting from a growing initiative to create gardens in Brooklyn’s food deserts. Through her work on a single-acre farm, the 25-year-old has learned how to grow and cook produce, bringing her closer to goals of bettering her health and community.
The Insider: Architectural Ingenuity Abounds in Red Hook Row House Reno
This month marks Brownstoner’s Steel Anniversary. We’re taking some time to look back at our past, even as we design a new future.
A sunken living room with a fireplace. A bathtub with a view. A secret garden. Balconies and roof decks. Even a 40-foot-tall fluorescent light installation running from basement to roof.
In designing his home in Red Hook, a circa-1900 brick row house on a cobbled street one block from the water, and carrying out a near-total renovation of what was little more than a shell, Thomas Warnke put in pretty much everything he ever wanted.
Past and Present: How a Red Hook Company Pioneered Steel-Frame Construction
This month marks Brownstoner’s Steel Anniversary. We’re taking some time to look back at our past, even as we design a new future.
A look at Brooklyn, then and now.
Modern steel-frame construction dates back to the 1880s. The idea of using iron or steel to support a building had been around for a while, but prior to 1885 it was only used for small elements, such as in the framework of an oriel or bay, and only used in structures of only a few stories.