Comments on Bowery Boys Red Hook history podcast

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Pier 9B, Red Hook, Brooklyn
Posted by Carolina Salguero

A recent podcast on the site THE BOWERY BOYS covers Red Hook history with a strong focus on gangs and crime. 

There is much good about the piece, but it also has some errors, and in dwelling on crime so much, it skews the area's history.  I wrote the creators; and in order to facilitate getting the word out, I post my email to them below.  


In an idea world, I'd have time to upload supporting data, but I don't. I did add a link about the Carnegie Library in the version below.

You can write them yourself at the following email addresses boweryboysnyc@earthlink.net; tom@boweryboyspodcast.com, and/or post a comment here.



Dear Greg and Tom:

I am glad that you love Red Hook and chose to dedicate time to the place, your piece reflects that love; but your history has considerable errors. 

I'm the Founder and Director of PortSide NewYork a waterfront-themed non-profit here in Red Hook.  We are based on the oil tanker MARY A. WHALEN docked in the Red Hook Container Terminal.   

One of our missions has been to research Red Hook history on a water theme and produce related cultural tourism products.  More here. 

I don't have the time to write out a detailed correction of all the errors in your podcast and so will just rattle off some observations.
 
It was Norwegians first, not Irish.  Planners did lay out grid for the streets in the early mid 1800's, but large parts of eastern Red Hook remained watery through the late 1880s.  
Though Red Hook had gangs, as you describe; well before Red Hook was known as the crack capital of the USA, the neighborhood was also home to huge industry and many lower middle class and middle class residents and a booming retail corridor.   

There was a Carnegie library, wealthy people using the Hamilton Avenue Ferry, built to facilitate access to Green-Wood Cemetary and soon used by commuters from what we now call Carroll Gardens to go to work in lower Manhattan's business district.  

In short, Red Hook housed great poverty, but for decades was more mixed economically than your focus on gangland stories describes.  Personally, I find what is most distinctive about Red Hook over the years is the capacity of this small place to hold AT THE SAME TIME a striking economic range in its residents and a striking range of land use from major industry to residences.

Also, residents of Carroll Gardens did not drive the name change of their area, it was real estate brokers who changed the name, my mother being one of them. It was a technique to attract buyers (and lenders) for brownstones who might be dissuaded by the name of Red Hook, which by the 1960s was associated with things dark.  

Your most significant error is to say that the movie "On the Waterfront" is based on Red Hook. That is an easy error to make as that is oft repeated here. I myself made the mistake of writing so in one of our early Red Hook guides.
After additional research, I can confirm that this is not so, nor was Elia Kazan's movie of that name based on Arthur Miller's script.  

In a zeigeist way, a number of people were likely focusing on dockland stories at that time, the issues having been recently been outed by a long expose series in the press. 

"On the Waterfront" is based on another script by Budd Schulberg and based an actual person Father Pete Corridan who was facing issues on the docks on the westside of Manhattan and Union County, New Jersey, not Red Hook.  Note that the Red Hook docks were by then controlled by ethnic Italians and not Irish.  

A full length book, based on in-depth academic research, was recently published about the dockworker issues and the movie.  The book is called "On the Irish Waterfront."  It is a corrective to much popular misunderstand about how the famous movie came to be and the conventional interpretation of the movie as being an Elia Kazan apologia for testifying before HUAC.  

I can put you in touch with the professor Jim Fisher of Fordham who wrote the book. His blog has information about the book, though lately it has veered into more personal terrain, so try this post.  

The book's Amazon listing is here. 

If you do follow ups or corrections, feel free to get in touch.

I may publish the content of this email in some form as a blogpost to facilitate these corrections being available to a wider audience which may be misled by your history.

Regards,
Carolina


Carolina Salguero
Founder + Director

PortSide NewYorkBringing NYC's BlueSpace to life

Report from Waterfront Sunday 6/19 in Red Hook

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PortSide assembled a Power Team to man our set-up at the Red Hook sidewalk sale organized by RHED.  Fresh off the Mermaid Parade, we had Will Van Dorp Tugster; and Frank Hanavan, the creative omnicompetent and maker of the Schooner Pioneer and Admiral Nelson costumes; from PortSide, Stephanie Ortiz, one of our interns, Dan Goncharoff and Carolina Salguero, and Michele Kogon, copy editor, ensuring that all our written emissions were spot on.

Smitty played the guitar for a while.

Will Van Dorp aka Tugster

We engaged in some family-friendly, maritime street theatre to raise awareness of our programs (so hard to do while locked behind the port fence!) and money for our teen Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP).  



Most of us took turns being Admiral Nelson to the amusement of passersby.

Frank, who also believes a good prop is key, used the kiddie pool to flag cars.





Suited up as the traffic schooner for the first time since the Bar Tini move, Carolina slowed traffic with a flamboyant leaf-letting technique and got cars to stop, talk, donate and/or take information on PortSide's fundraising drive for the teen Summer Youth Employment Program.


Frank - creating maritime awareness one knot at a time - left one of his Turks Head Tags on the bus stop pole.

 
One new storekeeper of the Fulla T-shirt shop liked our hubbub so much he asked if we'd be out every weekend. He said if we were, he'd open up on weekends - even though we looked pretty strong in the t-shirt department ourselves!

Waterfront Sunday 6/19 in Red Hook

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Admiral Nelson, kayaking, seafood, circus on a barge, Red Hook-wide sidewalk sale & more...

Red Hook Sidewalk Sale 11am-4pm:
Enjoy hunting for treasures and discounts along Van Brunt Street. Or SELL. Set up your own table along Van Brunt.

PortSide will be in front of 281 Van Brunt Street (just north of Pioneer) selling t-shirts, talking about our programs and raising money for our Summer Youth Employment Program. 
 
If you can't see us in person, please donate here.    

Smitty will play guitar for an hour, we will have a kiddie pool with ducks and boats, a DIY photo booth with industrial objects such as our super-sized wrench (far right), and we will be joined by Admiral Nelson.


We'll be next to Kevin's Restaurant who will be selling smoothies outside and seafood inside.  Eggs Chesapeake (eggs benedict with a crabcake instead of ham) is a favorite.

Across the street and just up the block is the famed Red Hook Lobster Pound

Around the corner to the west on Pioneer is the new Filipino eatery Philly Pinoy  This hole-in-the-wall centers around a sidewalk tikki hut and is targeted at the Filipino crews of the cruise ships. They're hoping that the Brooklyn foodie scene finds them*** update, they are currently only open when a cruise ship is in. Schedule here. Hot food is made on the spot, and imported bagged and canned goods are inside.

Waterfront Museum Barge is running their annual Showboat Shazzam of family entertainment and circus artistry. $10 in advance, $15 at door. Shows 1pm, 4pm

Red Hook Boaters free kayaking Valentino Pier Park 1-5pm

For last minute shoppers, father's day gifts can be found at our three garden centers or Red Hook's unusual boutiques which include Metal & Thread selling lamps made from blowfish and curious, antique hardware.

Dads can end the day listening to live music at Bait & Tackle surrounded by taxidermy.

Summer friends return

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from www.richard-seaman.com/Birds/USA/VoloBog/index.html
Returned to port 1145 tonight.

Another of the larger container ships on Pier 10, fueling barge already alongside. The port is ever busier.

Heard first croak of a night heron this calendar year.  Had it just returned from migration? I look forward to the cheerful chuffling of the swallows. They live under the pier. Clearly, they haven't read the DEC policy on shading, otherwise they would know they couldn't live there.

Fun fact: A group of herons has many collective nouns, including a "battery", "hedge", "pose", "rookery", and "scattering" of herons.

Irish Waterfront, Then+Now

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Gabriel Cohen, with whom PortSide did the Graving Dock book reading at GMD shipyard, runs a great book reading series at Sunny's Bar in Red Hook. First Sunday of every month at 3pm.

January 3, he had an author in the roster who brought me back to town earlier than I would have come otherwise. That was James T. Fisher, author of "On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York"

The title is one heckuva mouthful, but the book promises to explain the story of Father Corridan, the priest, and his fight against corruption on the docks upon which the movie “On the Waterfront” is based. The reading was the bomb. All three readers were good. Fisher turns out to be a professor of Theology and American Studies at Fordham. My ears perk up at the AmStud label; that was one of my two majors at Yale and shaped the lens through which I view the world.


Listening to Fisher, it occurred to me that Corridan in the 50s was inventing here at home what was called liberation theology and so associated with Latin America. Hearing the degree to which senior people in Manhattan’s Catholic church were complicit in corruption on the docks, corruption that led to the killing and disappearance of many men, impressed me and my seat companions, Seth Goodwin and Meg Fellerath, two beloved water rats I was happy to find in the bar.


I introduced myself to Fisher and soon thereafter a torrential exchange of emails began, excerpted here [links added during blog creation]:


Jim:

Carolina it was only later heading home I remembered that my great friend/former student Adam Davis was cast member in that Puccini Opera you hosted out in Bklyn. Adam was touting the setting to the skies. … I love the 'blue space' concept and amazed by the vision behind this; thanks from Jim now the NYT has promoted the write up of Sunny's event from City Room blog to book page, just below Warren Beatty and Joan Collins

all the best to you from Jim


Carolina:

….Glad you like the Bluespace concept. The waterfront is so sorely overlooked and misunderstood that we had to work to find language to get people aware of the water part of the waterfront. Clearly, that was not the case in the era of your book Irish Waterfront.


I overheard the Times journalist remarking to you that your reading contained some important history in rebutting the idea that "On the Waterfront" was a Budd Schulberg justification for HUAC testimony. THANKS for sending the link. I was afraid I'd miss his follow-up column.


I just read his piece. Such a shame that he did not mention, as you did, that the Times itself for weeks carried many pages of stevedoring testimony. You strongly made the point that the stevedoring testimony was a major issue of the day. In neglecting to include that Jim avoids being too self-referential to Times' prior coverage but slights the importance of a maritime issue to a general audience, eg, he continues the forgetting of the Bluespace. While listening to you at Sunny's, I felt that the whole HUAC slant to interpreting the movie was only possible because the world had forgotten the importance of the docks at the time. Similarly, another line of criticism of the movie is that the priest is just too much, is implausible, and that the morality message is too melodramatic, but that line of criticism also depends on not understanding the documentary basis of the film.


Jim:

… why did the Port come to be romanticized nostalgically even as it remained a vital element of the local political economy? SNIP

So I treat some the issues that engage you but until we met I had yet to really dig in to the contemporary issues: tho I take every class every semester (some more than once) to hold class on west side piers it's nearly always historically-oriented. You don't need me tell you what a richly anomalous position you occupy since everything about Red Hook reads from a superficial perspective as "post-industrial," "post-modern etc' and indeed not long after yr time in Am. Studies at Yale the program became engulfed in just such 'discourses.' So part of your vocation as I see it is to teach a wholly different way of seeing what it means to work in a working port when the conditioned impulse is to respond: not so working port, least not like the old days… SNIP


As you know the waterfront commission was nearly dismantled last year once it was alleged to be as complicit in corruption as the hiring system it was designed to supplant in 1953.


Then I read that the new exec. director was inspired to achieve reform after reading my book! I had no idea what to make of this, having overlooked contemporary scene SNIP


Rocky Sullivan's on Feb 3 I plan to talk real directly about Columbia St and about the divisions between irish and italian waterfronts.

P.S. the crime commission stories are on any data base the offers NY Times: the public hearings covered Dec 1952-Jan 1953. Yet for a vivid education on life in the port at that time there is no substitute for the 5 volumes the NY State crime commission released in 53: these are at many local college libraries, NYPL etc.. At least one of the vols is heavy Bklyn-oriented.



Photo at left: 1953 Strike in Erie Basin, Red Hook, from collection of Brooklyn Public Library

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Well! I can’t wait to sit down and talk at length with this guy. I hope to interest him in PortSide’s historical research. Since the death of the researcher Henry Silka, the pace of our research has slowed. An interim product is the Red Hook Visitor Guide we did Sept 2009. I’m definitely headed to Rocky Sullivan’s on Feb 3, 7pm to hear about the split between Italian and Irish waterfronts on Columbia Street.


PS If you want to read the Pulitzer Prize-winning articles that also inspired the movie see this book