Historic Red Hook looks to the future

Real Estate Weekly, April 21, 2004 by Elaine Misonzhnik

It is one of the oldest neighborhoods in New York City, but for the past fifty years or so Red Hook has been getting the short shrift.

Dating back to 17th-century Dutch settlements, the stretch of waterfront land bordering Park Slope, Carroll Gardens and Brooklyn Heights has served as the city's last remaining container port and a heaven for manufacturing companies being priced out of other areas.

But the area also witnessed an exodus of middle-class residents and has been used as a dumping ground for waste.

Today, its future depends on what the city's Economic Development Corporation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey will decide to do with its piers and its outdated zoning laws.

At the moment, most of Red Hook is intended for industrial use and some public officials feel that it should stay that way. A revival of New York's manufacturing sector is one of the Industrial Development Corporation's long-term goals and Red Hook serves as home to a lot of manufacturing companies, including woodworking shops and glassblowing factories.

"I think a lot of it is successful now," says Adam Friedman, head of the New York Industrial Retention Network. "If you go to Pier 41 on Brunt Street, we have a glassblowing company that does absolutely beautiful glass work, a company that makes very high technology parachutes, a lot of small food companies that are making very good gourmet products."

"In addition, this is an area that desperately needs new jobs. It has high unemployment rates [and the manufacturing companies provide jobs]. Some of it could be successful mixed-use, but we need a new type of zoning that preserves a balance. The challenge is to create protections, so that no one use pushes out the other."

At the same time, there are those who would like to see Red Hook return to its former glory as a vibrant mixed-use neighborhood. Right now, its mostly working-class residents are cut off from the rest of the city by lack of adequate transportation and have to go out of the area for even the most basic of services.

"For 150 years, Red Hook thrived as a mixed-use community and we are attempting to see if that can be brought back," says John McGettrick, of the Red Hook Civic Association. "We have some of the most extraordinary views in all of New York, we have streets going back to the Dutch settlements, we have [one of the largest] ports in New York. But Red Hook lost half of its population since the 1960's and lost thousands of jobs as well. We need changes in the zoning to allow for more residential use, on top of the industrial buildings."

According to McGettrick, more residents would probably mean improvements to the neighborhood's infrastructure and an influx of small retailers.

"It's imperative that any developers that are given permission to build by the waterfront would be required to provide mixed development," he says. "We don't have a lot of services that other neighborhoods take for granted. We don't have a bakery or a hardware store, we have only one pharmacy. We desperately need small retail establishments that we can get if we had more residents."

This could only be achieved if Red Hook's zoning laws are modified to allow for more residential developments. A group called Fifth Avenue Committee is currently working on 61 new housing units in the neighborhood and there are loft conversions here and there, but nothing of the scale that would dramatically change Red Hook's image as an out-of-the-way industrial wasteland.

Of course, not everyone sees that as a problem.

"Red Hook is not the proper place for residential developments," says Rob Gottheim, the Brooklyn director in Congressman Jerrold Nader's office. "There is a thriving manufacturing community here and the city should everything it can to help [it grow]. Industrial and residential uses are just not compatible. A good example would be Greenpoint, where people moved into a manufacturing area, lived next to a coffee factory and complained about the smell. That's to be expected. We don't want to drive manufacturers further and farther from the city, we want to encourage them."

Brooklyn brokers, of course, have another view on the matter.

"There is a great opportunity in Red Hook because a lot of the properties are underutilized and a number of them have vacant lots," says Barry Fishback, a retail specialist with Robert K. Futterman & Associates. "It's in close proximity to Manhattan, to Brooklyn Heights, to Carroll Gardens, to Park Slope, all up-and-coming neighborhoods. But there hasn't been an influx of new residential construction or new retail. If additional housing was built, I think there would be additional retailers interested in going to Red Hook to service the local community."

"The amenities aren't that great--it's the same way as DUMBO was five or six years ago--but people are coming," says Chris Dugan, a residential broker with William B. May Realty's Brooklyn Heights office. "Especially the artists--you have these huge loft spaces in Red Hook and they are affordable. There is no place left for people to go, they are priced out of other neighborhoods. So if they get some kind of better transportation and places to eat, [the area would thrive.]" Fishback also brings up another controversial issue for Red Hook--IKEA Furniture's proposal to bring one of its stores there. In theory, a big box store of IKEA's scale would create hundreds of new jobs and attract other retailers to the area. According to McGettrick and a number of other community activists, in practice it would create so much traffic and pollution that the costs would outweigh the benefits.