In memoriam: Greg O'Connell, Sr.

photos (c) Scott Baker of www.scottwbaker.com

The renovation and revitalization dynamo of Greg O’Connell, Sr is now at rest. He passed away on August 2, 2025, at the age of 83, surrounded by loved ones.

If you love Red Hook as it is now, you owe him a lot.

Greg, the towering 6’ 4” ex-cop, salt of the earth in overalls and a battered pick-up truck, was a major force who revived Red Hook and kept it from becoming another glitzy like-everywhere-else.

When I met him in 1997, the SW corner of the Hook near his waterfront empire was still so sleepy that wild dogs charged out of the abandoned sugar refinery to attack those of us biking by, and people had conversations with him window to window as he sat in that pickup while they sat in their car headed the other direction on Van Brunt. There were no parked cars on either side on Van Brunt, and the rare vehicle moving south of Wolcott Street was just waved around the conversation in the stopped cars.

I had my conversations from a bike, or in the cab. Greg would often have an extra fried egg sandwich and would invite me to join him for breakfast.

His rolling office was the pickup’s front seat outfitted with a cardboard box full of yellow, lined note pads standing up in it, and more lined pads scattered across the dashboard.

He fit no pigeon hole. Ex-teacher, ex-cop, he was buying utterly bedraggled properties, houses and warehouses, in a Red Hook considered a no-go area by many and managing the renovation while running some kind of urban planning school, both teaching and learning, from flocks of professors and grad students doing visioning projects in the neighborhood. You’d run into clusters of them clutching clipboards, standing around on Greg’s property, staring at buildings around the hook, or talking to residents and workers.

For years, at the foot of Van Brunt there was a regular open-air urban planning salon by the water. At those, you might find Ray Hall, a Red Hook leader who grew up in NYCHA, artists, welders, old-timers, and whoever ambled, biked or drove into the conversation. The genesis of PortSide was conversations with Greg out there and in his truck.

Greg’s empire was a magnet for people pursuing a vision and outright characters. There was the “trolley king” and a retired cop who came every day at dusk to feed the seagulls and the feral cats in what’s now called the Fairway building; but note that the guy had to put a ladder up against the southern wall and climb up to the 2nd floor to do that. Some old-timers had a rag-tag marina on the east side of the Beard Street pier. I joined them in 2000, keeping a jonboat and powerboat there.

Greg offered space to nonprofits and artists. He entertained ideas too outlandish or risky for most: sure you can bring that old barge here. Yes, you can store your huge architectural remnants on the waterfront. Sure you can build an eccentric outdoor garden on the pier. Yes, use the boat ramp for a duck boat start-up. For years, many deals were done with a handshake.

He built an ecosystem of involved parties. It was community development not real estate development like elsewhere in NYC that’s about rehabbing buildings and pushing out the community. And it sure wasn’t about slick. He brought the Fairway Market to Red Hook recognizing that this was a food desert after visiting their new Harlem store.

Greg bought many buildings inland, including the former Brooklyn Clay Retort Storehouse, the only privately-owend landmarked building in Red Hook, and it’s landmarked thanks to him. (The City owned Pool and Rec Center is also landmarked.) His most famous and beloved purchases are the crescent of 19th century waterfront buildings that he saved, Brooklyn’s last 2 warehouse piers, the Beard Street Pier and Pier 41, and the huge brick cube in between them, the “Fairway Building.” The Red Hook you now see on Instagram he saved; but as a New York Times story reported “many credit him with keeping Red Hook from becoming a voluptuous horror of luxury condominiums.”

There were many stories. There always are in contentious Red Hook. There was the dilly in 2002 when our then-Councilman Angel Rodriguez tried to extort Greg over his plans to bring the Fairway to Red Hook (now replaced by Food Bazaar). You have to be some kind of stupid to try and extort a cop who did undercover work on white collar crime in the Wall Street area. Streetwise Greg moved slowly, played along, wore a wire, recorded the conversations; and the badly named Angel went to jail.

If you moved to Red Hook in the past 15 years and don’t know Greg O’Connell or the name, that’s likely because his towering self disappeared when he shifted focus to Mount Morris upstate, and his son Gregory runs the family firm with less media attention.

Mount Morris was a tattered town with a smaller population than Red Hook’s near Greg’s alma mater SUNY Geneseo. He revitalized that too - and in less time. His focus so shifted upstate that his funeral mass and burial will be up there.

According to the funeral home website: Greg’s funeral mass “will be held on Wednesday at 10 AM at St. Mary's Church, 4 Avon Road in Geneseo, officiated by Father John Hayes. Burial will follow at St. Mary's Cemetery in Geneseo. A Memorial Service in Brooklyn will be announced at a later date. “

Red Hook is eternally in the debt of Greg O’Connell. His memory IS a blessing.

Deepest condolences to all family and all who knew him.

Sincerely, Carolina Salguero

We corrected the original version which said: “the only landmarked building in Red Hook” to add mention of the Red Hook pool being landmarked.