These have been mostly replaced, or caused to be carted away, by the aforementioned Fairway and IKEA stores. John’s Lightship (that had always been partially sunk, anyway) and the Todd Shipyards and its massive dry dock. What have been pushed out of Red Hook are several of the highlights that appeared in the Red Hook section of the ForgottenBook in 2006, such as the Revere Sugar refinery, the St. They may have been mostly pushed out of Smith Street, but not Van Brunt and Richards. However, the neighborhood has become more of a place for the yuppies to get their Fairway groceries, their (to me at least, unbuildable) IKEA furniture, and lunch from the Latin summer food stands set up along Red Hook Park soccer fields, and then skee-daddle back to Cobble Hill or Park Slope, leaving the Hook to the ethnics who’ve been there for the last couple of decades. There are, of course the trappings of gentrification along Van Brunt, such as the knickknack, ice cream and clothing stores along that row. The gentrifiers, I’m now confident, will never completely convert Red Hook. In the 1970s and 1980s there were no gentrifiers to speak of in Red Hook, and your webmaster pedaled gingerly to the waterfront and back, noting the shabby, yet genteel housing and Belgian-blocked Coffey and Van Dyke Streets. The yuppie gentrifiers of Brooklyn have found that the only thing keeping neighborhoods from completely going ‘one-percent’ is the presence of low-income housing in otherwise completely converted regions such as Cobble Hill, Fort Greene, and Williamsburg. There was also the Red Hook Houses to contend with. For decades, it was a land occupied by gangsters and ruffians, but also by the only honest denizens who could compete with them and survive under their reign: the union workers and longshoremen who busied themselves in the great ports and docks that ringed the waterfront along the Erie Basin and Buttermilk Channel (so named because the channel was so choppy that a churner was unnecessary to render milk carried in vessels that used the strait between Red Hook and Governors Island). Red Hook was considered dangerous ground for lone intruders from Bay Ridge until the very early 2000s. It was easily demarcated by Hamilton Avenue from the regions to its north, now known as Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill (but not until real estate men and developers of the mid-20th Century bestowed those names - it was all “South Brooklyn” till the mid-20th Century) and then by the BQE. Red Hook, known as South Brooklyn when, in the 1800s, it was indeed Brooklyn’s southern redoubt, has always been an animal all its own. When I lived in Bay Ridge I would sometimes bicycle in, but not that often, because it was ringed by a nearly impenetrable barrier of slums, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel entrance. I’m in Red Hook about once every 4 years or so.
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