Divide One Neighborhood,
Connect the Others

“Redlining and highway building are often ways to devalue property based on who lives there,” said Adam Paul Susaneck, a New York City-based architect. Susaneck runs “Segregation by Design,” a project that documents the destruction of communities of color due to redlining, urban renewal, and freeway construction.

“The ‘urban renewal’ movement, and the construction of highways are proxies to draw financial lines between neighborhoods.” Susaneck said, “What we see is the search for new tools for continuing the old ways.”

Gentrification and real estate development could be new proxies to perpetuate the racial lines into the future, he added.

Shannon Geis, an oral historian who produced an oral history project on Red Hook, explained that Red Hook was once a larger area than it is today.

Red Hook, also called “South Brooklyn,” used to include parts of neighborhoods that are today called Columbia Waterfront District and Carroll Gardens.

“When the highway was put in, these neighborhoods north of the highway wanted to distinguish themselves from the bad reputation of Red Hook. And that's part of where you get some of those other neighborhood names,” she said.

“It's interesting that the BQE really separated and made the situation potentially worse for a lot of people in Red Hook,” Geis added.

The highway not only splits Red Hook geographically from neighborhoods north of Hamilton Avenue but also enhances racial segregation in the area.

For Vanessa McKnight and many young folks of color living in Red Hook back in the 1970s, crossing over to the North side of BQE meant being exposed to racially-incentivized violence. On her morning commute to school on the other side of Hamilton Avenue, she recalled that a group of white young men, carrying bats and chains, would wait at the end of the overpass to beat up students coming from Red Hook.

“When we got to the top of the bridge, we would lower our voices, whisper, and listen. We could hear the bats and chains clanking… They would beat, especially on the black young men, they would beat them,” McKnight shared her experience with a community-led project on Red Hook residents’ interactions with the BQE. “We were forced to choose between getting beat up with bats or dropping out.”

RED HOOK TODAY

Some residents in Red Hook, however, feel that the isolation has helped preserve some of Red Hook’s unique characteristics. David Sharps is the caption of the Brooklyn Waterfront Museum. He has been living on a barge that anchors off the coast of Red Hook since 1994.

“Being isolated, one could argue, has been a good thing for Red Hook,” Sharps said, “because of the difficulty of getting here, its isolation has kept high rises out for many years…So some of those disadvantages helped keep us with some other historic charm, cobblestones that you still find here.”

But some of Red Hook’s “historic charm” is in danger now as commercial developers set sight on the neighborhood.

In 2008, IKEA opened its first New York City location in Red Hook, which sits on 22 acres of land on Red Hook’s waterfront. Before its construction, the Swedish furniture store’s proposal attracted locals’ opposition, as IKEA planned to fill the drydock on the Erin basin for parking space–a fight that IKEA won eventually. Delivery giants like Amazon and UPS also bought land in Red Hook to build last-mile delivery hubs. With more delivery trucks appearing in the area, residents raised concerns over pedestrian safety and air pollution concerns.

In recent years, Red Hook has attracted an influx of higher-earning populations, who came to the neighborhood seeking cheaper renting options. Walking through blocks along Van Brunt Street, one could easily see newly developed living units and art studios transformed from old warehouses.

Sharps said some of his friends who had been long-time residents of Red Hook were pushed out of the neighborhood due to rent hikes. “Now that the real estate people and landlords are doubling tripling their rent of what it was 10, 15 years ago.”