Red Hook Waterfront History and Pictures

P I E R 4 1 / M E R C H A N T S T O R E S 204-207 Van Dyke St.

The Merchant Stores (also known as the Dock Warehouse & Bottling Center) and now simply referred to as Pier 41, was built by Col. Daniel Richards in 1873. Richards is also credited with developing plans for both the Atlantic Docks (site of today’s Red Hook Container Terminal) and Erie Basin, the two waterfront improvements that brought about the emergence of Red Hook as a major shipping and warehousing center in the mid-19th century.

Pier 41 consists of two brick warehouses, a 3-story section to the west and a 2-story section to the east. In the early 20th century it was home to one of Red Hook’s largest employers, the Morgan Soda Co., later known as White Rock Beverage. There are still Red Hook old-timers who recall the lazy summers of their youth when they would swim up Buttermilk Channel to the pier, pinch a case of soda and float it back on an inner tube to Edison Beach at the foot of Dikeman St.



"On the Docks," an exerpt from Phillip Lopate's *Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan* William Beard and the Beard St. Pier Historic Warehouses
		In Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (Crown, February 2004) Brooklyn-born Phillip Lopate, author and essayist – not to mention brother of WNYC radio’s Lenny Lopate – explores the island’s shores. But he couldn’t resist a dip in the waters of Brooklyn.
On the Docks To get a true feeling of New York’s industrial, 19th-century waterfront, you really have to go out to Brooklyn – specifically, Red Hook. There’s something soaring about the way the space opens out there, both to the sea and within the streets themselves, the way the 150-year-old warehouses extend all the way to the wharf, and there’s no highway to cut you off or pinch you into a concrete walking strip. You breathe in an amazing silence there which, come to think of it, may not be at all like the hurly-burly 19th-century waterfront, but which is conducive, at any rate, to the peaceful contemplation of history. I like to start at the very tip of Red Hook, where the magnificent Van Brunt’s and Beard Street Stores, arched brick warehouses from 1869, line both sides of the street heading to the water. (In appearance, they’re cousins to the Empire Stores near the Brooklyn Bridge, also built in the post-Civil-War era – if anything, more impressive.) The windows of the Van Brunt Stores buildings on the western side are mostly boarded-up and look possibly derelict, though a sign informs you of their hours of operation. It’s a curious thing about old warehouses that even when they’re still functioning, they often look abandoned, their mute, under-fenestrated concrete or brick facades giving no clue either way. Across the way, at Beard Street, the very same brick facades have been spiffed up and rented out to a variety of businesses, including a woodworking shop and a movie stage. If you keep on past the warehouses you come to a little public space, a lip of a park at the water’s edge across the harbor from Liberty Island, that lets you look the Statue of Liberty straight in the eye. For once, you are facing her head-on. Nearer to shore, there’s an odd, crescent-shaped breakwater, the Erie Basin, ugly with parked cars, impounded by the Police Department, though how they drove onto it is a mystery, since from this angle the spit of land seems attached to nothing. Going back along the Stores to a side street, lined with trolley tracks, that bisect the endless warehouses, you will come upon a magical little inlet with police boats and other small craft docked on either side. By the way, somewhere in the Beard Street Stores, used to be the Trolley Museum; on certain occasions the objects of its collection were wheeled out and set on these self-same tracks. It makes me feel like Methuselah to remember that I rode trolleys as a boy, growing up in Brooklyn, and now they are trotted out as exotica, like barouches. There is also, moored nearby, something called the Waterfront Museum & Showboat Barge, painted a deep brick red, open on weekends and rentable for children’s parties; it was transported to Red Hook to show 21st-century Brooklynites what 19th-century barges were like. Verging toward a melancholy realization that everything may someday end up entombed in its own curatorial institution (the Museum of Dental Floss, the Museum of Mid-List Writers), I am distracted from it by the happier thought that the vista before me is remarkably untrammeled. One is privileged to see the little canal, the fishing boats, the warehouses, all as it must have been forever, or at least the past hundred years. The factories and warehouses on the canal have that brilliantly additive, piece-by-piece, higgledy-piggledy look of tropical green stucco alongside corrugated aluminum that Frank Gehry works so hard to achieve. You can also look out, a block away, toward a most remarkable wreck of factory transformed into melted cheese. This was a suite of buildings connected by chutes, owned by the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, which had been an immensely profitable enterprise for importing and refining much of the sugar in North America. After his regime collapsed, the whole complex caught fire – some suspect arson, though the watchman assured me the conflagration was started by machinery – leaving the beams and floor structure irretrievably dripping, pendulous, like a modernist sculpture on an apocalyptic theme. Sometimes I think I can only relax in a site that has not been specifically earmarked for leisure, but where there is still some commercial or industrial activity, or the ghost of same, to contemplate: docks or factories or the like. At least that’s my preference. Surrounded by the intermingling currents of river and ocean estuary, crisscrossed by tugs and barges, you get an unobstructed view of the Statue of Liberty to your left, the brick officers’ quarters of Governor’s Island to your right, while across the harbor are the cranes and forklifts of Port Jersey and, beyond this, Newark and Elizabeth, New Jersey, where most of the Port of New York ended up. Just beyond the steel jetty, a bit south, you can see that mixture of rotting timbers, tall grass, jagged rocks, and wharfside warehouses that constitute the 1970s-to-‘80s New York waterfront, after it had been given up as a port but before it had begun to be “rehabilitated.” If you go along Beard Street, you pass a walled-in shipyard, with a dry-dock and skilled Greeks still repairing the bottoms of boats, though now they grumble about the lack of work. (Newport News gets most of the ship-repair business these days.) An Argentine freighter, abandoned by its bankrupt owner, rusts in the harbor, waiting patiently to be rescued by some adventurous entrepreneurs. In this very same shipyard, some years back, a damaged freighter was stashed for six months by its owner, while he tried to raise the money to pay for repairs. Its Central American crew, most of whom spoke no English, was afraid to venture out past the gamy Red Hook projects into the city; and since the owner had stopped paying them, though he still brought them food, they had essentially become slaves pinioned to the ship. (This episode formed the subject of Francisco Goldman’s fine novel, The Ordinary Seaman.) Nowadays, they would merely have to venture a few blocks inland and they would come across a soccer park used heavily by Central Americans, with some the of best weekend street food to be had in New York City.
T H E B E A R D S T R E E T W A R E H O U S E 499 Van Brunt St. The Beard Street Warehouse, which occupies 7.5 acres, was built by William Beard in 1869 during a surge in dockside warehousing after the Civil War. By the mid-1800s, the smaller warehouses on the crowded shores of lower Manhattan were no longer able to accommodate the volume of goods flowing into the Port of New York, and Brooklyn’s spacious waterfront offered a clear advantage. In fact, so many enormous brick warehouses were constructed along the waterfront from Greenpoint to Red Hook during this period that Brooklyn soon became known as “The Walled City.”
The Beard St. Warehouse actually consists of 21 smaller attached warehouses that extend a 1/4 mile south along Van Brunt St. from Beard St. to the bulkhead. It then continues onto a pier that forms the western edge of the Erie Basin breakwater. (In the 1950’s one of the middle sections was removed to improve access to the Erie Basin side of the building.)
Today, the Beard Street Warehouse (originally called the W. Beard & Robinson Stores) is one of only two remaining warehouse piers in New York Harbor and is eligible for listing as a New York City Landmark. (The other is Pier 41 at 204-207 Van Dyke St.) Both buildings stand as a reminder of an era when Red Hook provided the most modern shipping facilities of the day, and Brooklyn was the leader in handling raw sugar, grain, cotton, coffee, spices, flax, hemp, jute, medicinal bark, wood, indigo, India rubber, leather, dried fruit, paint, seeds, tobacco and cocoa. (Coffee and cocoa beans can still be found in the cracks of the original floorboards of the warehouse.)
			Much of the credit for the boom on the Brooklyn docks goes to William Beard, an Irish immigrant and successful builder and railroad contractor. It was Beard’s vision and enterprise that transformed a million square feet of submerged marshland in remote Red Hook, into Erie Basin, the largest man-made harbor and storage depot on the eastern seaboard. Far from the farms of the Midwest, the Beard St. Warehouse was part of a complex of grain terminals, warehouses, wharfs and shipyards constructed by Beard to accommodate goods and materials bound for New York Harbor via the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal. (Beard also built the 5-story Red Hook Stores warehouse--and future home of the Fairway Market--on the west side of Van Brunt St.)
The consummate “recycler”, William Beard built the warehouse from rough-cut Manhattan schist salvaged from other jobs like the construction of the Harlem Railroad, the excavation of the LIRR tunnel under Atlantic Avenue or the grading and paving of Montague St. in Brooklyn Heights. He even took advantage of “empty” European vessels arriving in the Harbor laden with rocks for ballast. Beard reputedly charged ship owners 50 cents a cubic yard to empty their holds into the basin before taking on cargo for the return trip. The Beard St. Warehouse still rests upon this foundation of stones brought from around the world. Gregory O’Connell purchased the Beard St. Warehouse from the Port Authority of NY and NJ in 1992. Long abandoned and derelict, great care was taken to preserve its historic character, including the restoration of 250 arched iron shutters and the retention of the original beams and massive supporting timbers. Today, it is home to over 40 businesses (among them an auction house, set and costume designers, artist and glass studios, a parachute design firm, magazine publishers, medical supply distributors and an apple processor) and numerous educational and cultural organizations including Red Hook Rise, the Brooklyn Waterfront Artist’s Coalition, The Waterfront Museum & Showboat Barge and Floating-the-Apple. The Beard St. Warehouse and the harbor-side promenade along its western edge are open from dawn to dusk. Visitors are always welcome.
R E D H O O K S T O R E S / FA I R W A Y M A R K E T 480-500 Van Brunt St. The Red Hook Stores (located on the right at the end of Van Brunt St.) was built by William Beard at the same time he was constructing the Beard St. Warehouse and was part of the major expansion of storage and warehousing inside Erie Basin and along the Red Hook waterfront after the Civil War. Current plans for the 250,000 sq. ft. building, which was purchased from the City of NY in May of 2002, include office space, artists’ studios, space for community-based not for profit organizations, apartments and the NY-based specialty and wholesale food store, Fairway Market.
Red Hook Stores c. 1880, Joseph Hall, photographer. Courtesy Brooklyn Historical Society.
Red Hook Stores c. 1948. Courtesy Cowhey & Sons.				The 5-story Red Hook Stores, originally known as the New York Warehouse Co.’s Stores, is largely inmjtact despite decades of neglect. Like many warehouses of its kind, the building was set back from the bulkhead with the long façade facing the water so that ships could unload goods for storage directly onto the adjacent docks. The building’s dramatic brick façade features row upon row of arched windows with iron shutters. It’s heavy timber mill construction was typical of mid- to late 19th-century industrial buildings; massive square yellow pine columns fitted into cast iron “shoes” support heavy girders over 20 feet long. Today, only a few of these large warehouses survive in Brooklyn, among them the Empire Stores in the Fulton Ferry area under the Manhattan Bridge.
P I E R 4 1 / M E R C H A N T S T O R E S 204-207 Van Dyke St. The Merchant Stores (also known as the Dock Warehouse & Bottling Center) and now simply referred to as Pier 41, was built by Col. Daniel Richards in 1873. Richards is also credited with developing plans for both the Atlantic Docks (site of today’s Red Hook Container Terminal) and Erie Basin, the two waterfront improvements that brought about the emergence of Red Hook as a major shipping and warehousing center in the mid-19th century. Pier 41 consists of two brick warehouses, a 3-story section to the west and a 2-story section to the east. In the early 20th century it was home to one of Red Hook’s largest employers, the Morgan Soda Co., later known as White Rock Beverage. There are still Red Hook old-timers who recall the lazy summers of their youth when they would swim up Buttermilk Channel to the pier, pinch a case of soda and float it back on an inner tube to Edison Beach at the foot of Dikeman St.
	The space now occupied by Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pie bakery, one of Pier 41’s current tenants, still bears signs of this earlier era -- these words stenciled in milk paint across the overhead beams: LEMON LIME, ROOT BEER and CREAM.
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