loosie: words: The Loosie Guide to Red Hook

The Loosie Guide to Red Hook

Artists confront the wharf’s crack-slinging canines.

by grimy | 2004.02.19

Walking Red Hook’s shit-stained streets on a nut-biting February morning, it’s hard to imagine the neighborhood a media darling. It’s much easier to envision the homeless smack addicts from the neighborhood’s methadone clinic tunneling down the chimney pipes of the wholesale Chinese food buildings that speckle Red Hook’s barren streets. But over the past year, Red Hook has been repeatedly featured in the New York Times, reviewed by New York Newsday, and even mentioned in the cock-sucking and jet-setting bible, Wallpaper. The boom in media coverage reflects the transformation of Red Hook over the past decade, from a dying wharf plump with killings and penniless Brooklynites to a kitschy and photogenic industrial neighborhood rife with hundreds of potential lofts for rich artists whose eternal struggle is “to find that next loft.”

Red Hook is perched on Brooklyn’s coast, a five-minute bike ride to downtown Brooklyn and a ten-minute breaststroke to the Statue of Liberty. It is a ritual for local craggy-faced historians to lose a load when describing the neighborhood’s rich history: George Washington battled the British where Ming’s Egg Roll Distributor now sits, trolleys packed with red-faced wharfmen once rolled down Van Brunt Street, hulking steel ships from all around the globe docked where the roaming packs of wild dogs now scavenge and tenements of working class immigrants bustled where the towering brick projects now loom.

In the late 1960s, it took the notorious developer Robert Moses only a dozen lanes of highway to slice off Red Hook from Brooklyn’s mainland, effectively isolating it from civilization and ushering in a new chapter of its history know too many as, “Chapter Hopelessness”. Wandering Red Hook, its wild history is still visible in the burned-out warehouses, cobblestone streets, and a hunchback street dweller known as Old Man River.

Despite its media rockstar status and a consensus among hipsters and real estate developers that Red Hook is currently drafting a more uplifting chapter, the neighborhood has retained its foul demeanor and isn’t quite ready to welcome the tepid winds of a sellout. First, lets address the wild canine epidemic. Converting the abandoned Domino sugar factory into a makeshift fortress in the late 1990s, packs of stray dogs now use the dilapidated building as a hub for dragging back small girls from the projects, chopping and bagging up coke, and running glocks to the few remaining feuding wharfmen. It is common to hear howls and yelps from the hordes of yellow-eyed and yellow-toothed hounds as they celebrate their latest drug deal by sliding down old conveyor tubes and licking at old sugar cubes like newborn mares.

The city, unconvinced that the neighborhood’s mammoth project complex was producing an adequate number of drug-addicts and violent crimes, injected the local economy with one of the area’s largest methadone clinics. The result, a roving band of rag tag heroine addicts that can be spotted at all hours shooting up on the steps of the local elementary school, shitting on sidewalks and screeching at passing cars. Many of the addicts navigate the deserted streets on broken dirt bikes and old wheel barrels.

The majority of Red Hook’s population resides in a ten-block radius consisting of monstrous low income housing buildings. Its inhabitants, an exclusive network of poverty-entrenched Black and Hispanics, may have drawn the worst lot out of all poor New Yorkers. Devoid of any real source of transportation, boxed in by a defunct wharf and Moses’ concrete wall of highway, and supported only by bodegas, liquor stores, laundry mats, Red Hook’s native inhabitants are relegated to wasting away afternoons heaving rocks at old warehouse windows and looking terribly poor.

While a heavy cloud of human despair still rolls thick over an average weekday, a small active group of artists has made a permanent foothold in the community. A few galleries presently dot Van Brunt Street, community gardens offer the occasional break from the treeless terrain, and Red Hook’s community board spends time debating economic measures like the merits of a new Ikea and the closing of remaining piers. These artists are older, braver and arguable more talented than their younger counterparts dwelling in Northern Brooklyn.

Thanks to these pioneers, Red Hook now boasts a handful of exceptional bars and restaurants to quench all drinking and dining requirements. On a typical Friday evening, young drinkers can easily hire a smack-ravaged homeless woman to wheel their ass around in the back of wheel barrel from bar to bar. Between the legendary Sonny’s Bar, the zeitgeist of Red Hook’s warfness, Lilly’s, owned by Lilly who is a past recipient of Timeout New York’s Best Bartender award, and The Hook, a live music venue, a triangle of stellar suds servers awaits. And for Redhook’s culinary expression, the working class Defonte’s Submarine Shop, the chic French restaurant, 360, and The Diner satisfy everybody from the artist to the crack-slinging dog to the hunchback we know as Old Man River.