RED HOOK

Cut off by a highway and better for it

Red Hook, the piers and the grain terminal.

A vast concrete grain elevator on a derelict waterfront — The grain terminal on the Erie Basin, built for a trade that had gone.Red Hook grain terminal · Wikimedia Commons

2 pieces in this section

A highway severed it and the isolation preserved itThe Gowanus Expressway and the BQT cut Red Hook off from the rest of Brooklyn, which is why its nineteenth-century street pattern survived.
A concrete terminal that never really workedThe Red Hook grain terminal was built for a canal trade that had already moved. It has stood empty for most of its life.

A cobbled Red Hook street beneath a raised expressway deck, warehouse brick alongside — The expressway deck is why the nineteenth-century street pattern is still here.

The other four, and everything else