By Cynthia Tu | Published April 28, 2023
On June. 15, 1940, a notice came for residents and business owners living along Hamilton Avenue. In 14 days, their homes, tenaments, and shops would be torn to the ground in order to make way for a new highway.
Since the 1920s, Robert Moses, the head architect of the New York State’s highway system, had been proposing a grand plan to transform the city’s landscape. One of his greatest designs was the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which would allow cars to roam freely from the Queens to South Brooklyn.
The new highway set to be constructed along Hamilton Ave would act as the connector between the BQE and the interstate highway system.
So the time came for Red Hook, a diverse, working-class neighborhood, to make way for the incoming highway.
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In the summer of 1940, about 1,000 residents were evicted and some 400 dwellings were razed along the North side of Hamilton Avenue.
Nowadays, the neighborhood's past glory—and the abrupt demolition that brought its properity to a halt—could only be found in the archive.
Once a vibrant immigrant enclave, the waterfront area of Red Hook was home to fishermen, dockworkers, and shop owners.
But Moses' highway project would later torn the community down to pieces.
Among the demolished lots was the Devoe and Raynolds Company, one of America's oldest paint maker whose origin could be traced back to the 1750s.
Bricks and Debris laid in front of the Devoe and Raynolds Paint Company warehouse.
The area was later converted into the northern sector of the Belt Parkway.
According to the New York Times, the soon-to-be-evicted tenants brought a case to court days after the eveiction notice came.
The court eventually granted them two extra weeks to pack up everything and relocate.
About 400 buildings in the neighborhood were razed to make way for the highway construction to begin.
Along Hamiltion Ave, demolition work stretched a mile long.
The highway displaced an estimate of 1,000 residents in Red Hook.
With the construction splitting through the heart of Red Hook, the area was detached from the rest of the city, leaving the community to become an obsolete "ghost town."
Decades later, the exodus along Hamilton Avenue would be referred to as the "BQE Holocaust" by the children and grangchildren of who remained in the neighborhood—and those who were forced to leave.
In 1956, NYC-born playwright Arthur Miller dedicated wrote a play that took inspiration from the small Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook. Miller wrote in the opening stages note of "A View from the Bridge":
"In the late 1950s and early 60s, because of white-flight, an onerous housing project and the BQE holocaust, Red Hook started to lose its tax base and tilted into decline... within a few years of the crack epidemic, Red Hook claimed the inglorious entitlement: 'the crack capital of America.'"
Red Hook is one of many working-class neighborhoods in New York City that were impacted by Robert Moses' highway and "urban renewal" projects.
Across the city, Moses led the displacement of over 250,000 people during his reign as the city’s “Master Builder” over four decades, according to Robert Caro’s biography of Moses, "The Power Broker."
Today, the concrete-and-metal foundation of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is crumbling, which city officials had warned in 2016. Panels of experts have weighed in to discuss plans to renovate the now the 80-year-old BQE.
However, for neighborhoods like Red Hook, the scars that the expressway left decades ago may never be healed.
METHODLOGY
The buildings, maps and location data presented in this article are based on historical records.
Archival photos of buildings and lots were collected from the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library. The
1939 and 1950 Sanborn Fire Insurance maps were used to identify the location of lots and buildings that were demolished.
Facts about the demolition work are based on articles in the New Yorks Times archive. Read more about the data collection process here.