Celebrating Community
Inspired by the Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg, students around the world left school on September 20 to protest for dramatic political action to address the climate crisis – including elementary school kids from all the Red Hook schools and the Brooklyn New School. The PS 676 fourth and fifth grades attended a local rally at Coffey Park, and there […]
Community Board 6’s transportation and public safety committee agreed, on September 19, to table a proposal that involves constructing an additional entrance at the R train’s Union Street stop – that is, until more information regarding the potential Gowanus rezoning is released. Real estate development firm Avery Hall is in the process of buying the Speedway gas station at 4th […]
Summit Academy got good news from the New York State Board of Regents in May. Earlier in the spring, the future of Red Hook’s Summit Academy Charter School (grades six through 12) was unknown, but a new partnership with the Center for Education Innovation (CEI), a self-described “non-profit education organization and recognized leader in advancing meaningful reforms in public education,” […]
The Parks Department came to Red Hook in August for a community update regarding the long-closed Red Hook ballfields. Brooklyn Parks Commissioner Marty Maher led the sparsely attended proceedings, held at the Rec Center on Bay Street. “The good news is that none of the time frames are affected,” Maher said. “We started construction; the completion times are the same. […]
In June, the Gowanus Landmarking Coalition, an advocacy group for historic preservation, earned a significant victory – albeit an incomplete one – when the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) agreed to calendar five buildings in Gowanus. This decision increased the likelihood that, in the form of longstanding anchors like the American Can Factory and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Powerhouse, some of […]
PS 32, the Samuel Mills Sprole School, on a stretch of Hoyt Street that is sometimes called Gowanus and other times Carroll Gardens, has a new building sitting next to their schoolyard. It was built to address a growing shortage of educational space in what is defined as District 15, and will be open for business in a year. In […]
The trucks are coming, and Red Hook may not be ready for them. The good news is that the city could help, but it would require serious action by the City Planning Commission (CPC) and City Council. The increasing popularity of e-commerce, led by Amazon, has generated a new industry, “last-mile distribution,” which seeks to resolve the challenges that sellers […]
Megan Suttles’ sculptures have a way of seeming to transform as you look at them, a bit like how you can find different shapes in a passing cloud. The found objects that make up her sculptures (bobby pins, metal hose clamps, squiggly scraps of vinyl left r. The components form either great chaotic tangles or orderly fractal shapes. We talked […]
When Deborah Ugoretz first came to Red Hook, in the year 2000, the neighborhood and its artists charmed her immediately. “I was just inspired by this whole environment,” she says. “This neighborhood exudes creativity and production.” It took some time, but Ugoretz eventually moved her own studio here in 2011 and has become a huge booster of Red Hook’s artist […]
John Pinamonti and his band have been performing as a regular combo at Sunny’s Bar on Conover Street, Red Hook, since the year 2000. The history of Sunny’s Bar is wonderfully told in Tim Sultan’s book Sunny’s Nights: Lost and Found at a Bar on the Edge of the World (2016). I have no intention of competing with that; indeed […]