Imagined Futures - Red Hook - with Holes in the Wall Collective

/

PortSide is part of the Red Hook scavenger hunt that kicks off Saturday, 10/14/23 and runs the rest of the month. Our ship deck will be open for TankerTime on Saturday from 10am to 6pm. This is part of the Red Hook Weekend organized by Holes in the Wall Collective which launches a year-long effort. Imagined Future is about addressing climate issues and creating a more sustainable future. Here are related PortSide efforts:

  • Our advocacy calls for greater and more sustainable use of the waterways, the BLUEspace.

  • A subest of that is getting last mile, ecommerce shippers to use the waterways (marine highway), the greenest form of transportation. This would reduce fuel use, air pollution, traffic, and in Red Hook, reduce subsidence (sinking of the streets), a growing problem due to increasingly heavy rains due to climate change.

  • See our work on resiliency (related to water, PortSide’s mission space). This started with our Sandy recovery work which earned us a White House award. NYC flooding is getting worse due to climate change and involves groundwater, sewage, rain, and harbor water.

  • The U.S. Army Corps (USACE) created a draft flood protection plan (HATS) for the NYC-NJ region which only addressed flooding from the harbor. PortSide educated Red Hook and mobilized the community to push back and submit comments, and we helped get the comment period extended for NYC. See that work here.

  • #rethinkEDC, our campaign to reform the NYC Economic Development Corporation (NYC EDC), a quasi-governmental organization that is PortSide’s landlord and NYC’s largest landlord and does many projects that City agencies used to do. The EDC does NOT fulfill promises to Red Hook (including space for a fully-realized PortSide). The EDC is also NOT doing economic development for Red Hook; they are extractive (keeping all the money they earn here and not investing any back into Red Hook). The EDC runs the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, Atlantic Basin with the boats on Pier 11 (including our MARY A. WHALEN), the huge Pier 11 warehouse, all the bus and truck parking on the east side of that warehouse, and the NYC Ferry system. The EDC earned money off the Formula E car race.

  • our historic ship MARY A. WHALEN, last of her kind in the USA, on the National Register of historic places, a beloved floating cultural center, and home world-famous shipcat Chiclet.

  • youth education programs - educating the next generation

  • African American Maritime Heritage - inspiring people today by recovering erased history

You can help by getting involved! Please see our webpage volunteer.

Holes in the Wall Collective is putting together a weekend of Red Hook programming about the realities and hopes for a thrivable climate future October 13th-15th as part of our Imagined Futures. Imagined Futures is a year-long, city-wide initiative working in 5 NYC neighborhoods, partnering with 5 local breweries to raise money and elevate the stores of 5 New Yorkers and bring issues out of academic and think tank spaces. It begins in Red Hook, with Karen Blondel, recent winner of The David Prize and President of the Red Hook Houses West Residents Association at a Friday, 5pm event at Strong Rope. The effort will also raise awareness of endeavors in the 5 communities that work to create the future we want to see “Imagined Futures.” They say:

“Red Hook is an extraordinary microcosm of a neighborhood both uniquely vulnerable to climate change and an example of creative resilience and resourcefulness… We're putting together a walking tour, talks and interactive installations to get us in the big questions of housing/ new economies/ community resilience/ displacement, creative adaptations.”