I still remember being intrigued by a news report the week before Sandy saying that the late season hurricane could also incorporate a snowstorm. They called it a Frankenstorm, and coming the week before Halloween, it was mildly intriguing. But like with most impending weather disasters, you kind of go on with your normal life at the same time paying attention to the weather reports.
It turned out the storm showed up on Monday the 29th. The week before, the big news was a Community Board meeting held at PS 58. The topic was a halfway house for men planned for 165 West 9th Street, on the Carroll Gardens side of Hamilton Avenue. The auditorium was packed with people speaking against the proposal, which ended up not happening. That would have been the cover story for the November issue.
On Saturday I went to Prospect Park for their annual Halloween celebration. There were lots of activities that busy weekend. But Sunday night was spent barricading the office at 101 Union Street, in anticipation of the hurricane.
I don’t really remembered what I did during the next day – I guess mostly listening to the news as the storm made its way up the Eastern coast. My next memory is in the early evening walking up Van Brunt Street around 7 pm, to see what was going on. I parked on Dikeman Street, across from Fort Defiance.
I could see water coming down the street, and watched somebody desperately trying to get their car out of there. What I remember most is how fast the water got higher and higher, and further down the street. I got scared about my own car and hustled back to it. My old Taurus escaped just in time.
I met another Star-Revuer and her friend at the Chase Bank, at Hamilton and Van Brunt, where you could still see sidewalk. We took a walk down to the Golten building (now Tesla), and the water got deeper and deeper. By Conover Street you would have had to be swimming.
The next day, I looked at the waterline and it had gotten up to my chest (That’s me below in the red jacket pointing to it).
I retreated home to Bay Ridge, with plans to get up at sunup to see what the light revealed.
My biggest memory that morning was walking around Fairway (now Food Bazaar). There was lots of garbage along the promenade in back, and the glass door leading into the apartments above Fairway was smashed. I went to investigate when someone starting screaming at telling us we were on private property. It was Jerry Armer, a longtime fixture at Community Board 6, someone who I had known forever. I yelled to him that it was me, not a looter, but he didn’t seem to know me and said we had to evacuate the area. I didn’t at that time know that he worked for Greg O’Connell and was protecting Greg’s property.
The daylight revealed downed trees and waterlogged worms at Coffey Park, and what is now called ‘ponding’ at various places. While most of the walty water left with the tide, there were still little lakes left in places like the end of Van Brunt Street and at Valentino Pier park. The pier at the end of Van Brunt was stained with lots of red, which I found out later came from the red paint from an artist’s studio that had gotten mixed in with the floodwaters.
After sundown the streets were left pitch black, with the sole exception of a police spotlight shining up Van Brunt from Pioneer. I took the iconic photo of a darkened Van Brunt that we used for the cover of the next issue of the Star-Revue, and which is on again on the cover of this issue.
The next day, Wednesday, we regrouped at the paper’s Union Street office, which was left untouched despite being five minutes from the disaster area, and my assignment was to walk up Van Brunt and talk to the store owners.
My first stop was Uhuru Design, at that time housed in the building where Tesla is now. They were ripping down wet sheetrock—something many places were doing to avoid mold. They were also trying to rescue a pallet full of a special kind wood that they used to create their award winning chairs.
Friends of Firefighters showed me their brand new refrigerator ruined by the salt water. Next door, a woodworking shop actually had a good story to tell. They were working on an expensive counter for a new Stumptown location in Manhattan. They left it on a bench and went home. But one of them thought about it and came back and lifted it on top of the highest table, which turned out to be above the flood waters. The brand new counter was undamaged. As I got there they were drying out all their power tools, some of which I found out they could save.
I passed by local artist Scott Pfaffman who was dumping most of his waterlogged art book collection onto the curb. He was taking a last look at a book of Picasso drawings. All the books were spoiled by the salt water. He wasn’t upset, telling me it was simply a chance to restart his book collection. That scene stayed with me and become a key part of a spoof I wrote later for an April Fool’s issue, which maintained that Van Gogh’s ear had made it’s way to Red Hook and had been left in Scott’s basement.
Tony, owner of Mark’s Pizza, took me to his backyard to show me how his electrical boxes were damaged, both by the flood and by Con Ed afterwards. In addition, the basement, where he stores all the food supplies, was still full of water which was somewhat orange-colored due to tomato sauce spillage.
Baked was actually open – the floodwaters spared everything on the first floor, they were pumping out the basement. Across the street, Nate’s Pharmacy was similarly spared. It was Halloween, and the woman I spoke with was dressed as a nun. Evidently that block of Van Brunt has some hydrological feature that kept water from rising there.
In the middle of the day, Van Brunt’s restaurant owners, led by the Good Fork and Fort Defiance, fired up a big barbecue and fed the neighborhood, using all the perishable food they had in these days of no electricity and no refrigeration.
It was an early sign of the neighborhood uniting after the disaster. After dark I remembering visiting both the Ice House and neighboring Bait and Tackle. Bait and Tackle managed to hook up a generator, and Spencer was orchestrating a disco dance party. A woman walked up to me, put a drink in my hands and gave me a big kiss on the mouth, saying she lost $15,000 that day, but didn’t really care, because everybody she knew was all right. The Ice House was quieter, Maddy was tending bar in the candle-lit place, kind of a circle of people drinking quietly.
One of the big things to remember about Red Hook right after the storm was the huge piles of garbage at the curbs. The flood waters, which rushed through town due to a combination of hurricane rain and wind plus a very high tide, swamped most first floors and all basements. Stuff was ruined and had to be thrown out. Sanitation workers were the unsung heros. They worked overtime to take away any garbage that was put on curbs, basically commercial service for everyone.
Anybody who could do plumbing and electrical work had more business than they could handle. Lynette and Geoff at Jalopy got a call from someone upstate that had lots of generators and wanted to bring them down. They did, and Geoff was all over the place giving out generators.
Something that got interrupted by the storm was the opening of Billy Durney’s Hometown Bar-B-Q. While he had to postpone the restaurant’s opening, he was all over the place with his portable smoker, helping to feed the neighborhood, using meat donated by Fairway.
Food came to Red Hook en masse. Nobody in the Red Hook Houses could cook a warm meal, but you could get lunch and dinner at all the area churches and the Red Hook Initiative. I remember that some of the meals looked absolutely scrumptious, and the reason for that was that some fancy Manhattan restaurants were sending their food and chefs to us.
The Army wanted to come to town right away with supplies, including self heating meals, but Mayor Bloomberg was not keen on soldiers bearing guns helping out. They finally came to some sort of agreement and on early Thursday a lot of army vehicles descended upon Coffey Park. Men in fatigues came out and dropped of lots of bottled water and the army rations. I took a meal and it really did heat itself up, but it wasn’t a gourmet treat, as I recall.
Grassroots recovery organizing began forming. A business group, led by Monica Byrne of Home/Made, a Van Brunt caterer, was created to turn grant money into direct payments to local businesses. I remember that there were three rounds of payments.
Pfaffman donated his Van Brunt storefront at 360 Van Brunt to a group of carpentry enabled people who started a group of volunteers. They were from all over the country—many came to Red Hook wanting to help, and ended up finding shelter at what became known as the Red Hook Volunteers.
In addition to helping rebuild people’s homes, friendships were made and music happened there on a regular basis, something which ended up morphing into the record store it is today.
When it comes to tenant organizations, the Red Hook Houses is divided in half, for some reason. Each has it’s own meetings, administrators, and activities. Everything is duplicated.
After Sandy, I remember a meeting at the Miccio Center. It was heavily attended, and I think people from NYCHA were there. One thing I definitely remember is Wally Bazemore standing up and telling the gathering that this is the first time that both associations were able to get together and hold a joint meeting. He hoped it wouldn’t be the last time. Unfortunately, it was.
NYCHA was forced to actually confront their tenants and did send some higher uppers to sit at panels. A big issues was whether tenants were required to pay their full rents despite the fact that full services weren’t provided for months. Maybe there was a rebate for a month, but I couldn’t swear on it.
The meetings offered a platform for a newcomer in the neighborhood. Carlos Menchaca was sent to Red Hook by the City Council President as a liaison to make sure that services were properly sent. I didn’t see it for myself, because my beat was the Van Brunt Street side of town, but I kept hearing that somebody named Carlos was everywhere, helping everyone. During this period, he made friends and alliances, and used those relationships to mount a campaign against Sara Gonzalez, the incumbent office holder, the next November. And as most of us know, he ended up serving eight years. It’s not easy to beat an incumbent in the Council, but Sandy helped him do it.
Another winner was the Red Hook Initiative. In the years before Sandy, they would average under a million dollars in grants and contributions, which more than doubled after Sandy. They were put in the spotlight and able to continue growing.
It might have happened anyway, but my friend there, Sheryl Nash-Chisholm, who recently passed away way too soon, told me this: When she came to work the morning after the storm, she found everything normal at RHI, which is located on Hicks and West 9th. No flooding, electricity normal. Her immediate task was to see if her son’s car got flooded, which I don’t think it did.
All of a sudden the phone rang, and Sheryl picked it up. It was from somebody in Baltimore who heard about Red Hook in the news and wanted to know whether they could help.
Nobody had thought about this, so Sheryl called her boss, Jill Eisenhard, who was at home. Jill thought about it for a second and told her sure. Sheryl called back and that was the beginning of a new era for RHI. They became a clearing house for hurricane aid. Their notoriety because of Sandy has enabled them to grow and expand their services over the past ten years.
After a few weeks of exhausting recovery work, musician Jan Bell, decided that the locals needed some relief. On the second Sunday following Sandy, November 19, Red Hook was treated to something akin to a New Orleans funeral march, where mourning is accompanied by joy as the parade would make periodic stops and serenade both paradegoers and bystanders alike. I believe it was both Fort Defiance and the Good Fork who distributed some excellent liquid refreshments. The long line meandered it’s way to Sunny’s, where Billy Durney and his mobile smoker was there to distribute victuals.
Sunny himself was outside wearing a bright red shirt and suspenders, and was genuinely touched by all the love displayed by the neighborhood. It wasn’t just love, a number of locals had been spending long hours restoring the bar, which had suffered huge damage. Tone, Sunny’s wife and current owner, and a musician herself, had almost been electrocuted in the basement that first night of water flooding in.
In the middle of the gathering, Sunny came outside and with arms outstretched, thanked everyone for caring so much about his little bar. I kind of wish I had recorded it, because Sunny was an artist and had such a great way of expressing himself.
By Christmas, all the electricity was back, and John McGettrick’s Civic Association was able to string across the traditional Red Hook Christmas lights across Red Hook.
Things were getting back to normal, but were forever changed.
Editors note: In case my memories are somewhat faulty, I apologize in advance.
