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Brownstoner takes on Brooklyn history in Nabe Names, a series of briefs on the origins and surprising stories of neighborhood nomenclature.

160 Imlay. Photo via Adjmi & Andreoli’s design presentation

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.

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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.”

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Rendering and map of proposed streetcar system from Friends of the Brooklyn-Queens Connector via Daily News

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?

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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.

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NYCHA Farm at Red Hook Houses. Photo via Added Value

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.

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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.

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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.