A Brief History Of Red Hook

Red Hook Stories is a collection of 20 short stories and 20 photographs that grasp the desperate beauty of human loss and resiliency in the empty dockyard neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn between the years of 1981 and 1992. Woven throughout the collection are a mix of voices rarely heard, echoes from the edges of poor urban American communities everywhere. Artists, carpenters, squatters, welfare recipients, retired dockyard workers and their families band together at weddings, funerals, civic meetings and demonstrations in a struggle to survive political neglect. Frequently asked questions of Maureen McNeil and Janet Neuhauser, writer and photographer of RED HOOK STORIES You're both from the Seattle area. How did you arrive in NYC? MAUREEN: I fell in love with New York at age seventeen, on my way to Europe after graduating early from high school. I met my dad's cousin Martha, a dancer who lived in a loft at Westbeth, one of the first subsidized artist living spaces in Greenwich Village and watching her company rehearse and the icebergs that floated down the Hudson day after day, I'd never been so cold or so inspired. I didn't get back to NYC though until after college, in 79. I took a leave of absence from an MFA writing program at San Francisco State and moved here with my boyfriend who was starting graduate school. JANET: I had artist friends I grew up with living in Brooklyn at the time but I moved to New York study photography. What about becoming artists when did you start taking pictures? JANET: I came roundabout to photography. As a small child I watched my dad, an army photographer, develop film at home and at age seven I got my first camera. Later I was blown away looking at my grandmother's photos of farm life in South Dakota where she and my grandfather had homesteaded in the early 1900s. I didn't settle on the profession of photography until after graduating with a second B.A. in classics. I took a class from Steven Soltar at the Factory of Visual Arts and never looked back. MAUREEN: I was about twelve when I decided to be a writer. It was during a discussion with my older brother, Rob, who was renovating a 26 foot schooner so he could sail away and become stateless to avoid the Vietnam draft. He finally got it through my young brain that humans wrote the biblical stories. Suddenly, the pillar of Catholicism fell away and my life goals changed. If I died a saint, okay, but I was going to be a poet. How did you meet? And open a restaurant? Whose idea was that? MAUREEN: The restaurant was Jan's idea. She knew how to cook, not me. We wanted to create something and the restaurant really drew us into a community of conservative government workers and "hippie" college students. The Evergreen State College had only opened the year before and there was quite a clash. Olympians, including my grandfather, felt like they'd been invaded. JANET: It was luck that we met. It was 1972, standing in line to get our college ID photos taken. I gave Mo a bowl of home-made soup and she told me stories of hitch hiking through North Africa. I told her about traveling through Greece and Turkey and soon after she moved into my $55 a month apartment in downtown Olympia. The next year we opened a vegetarian restaurant on West 4th Street, cooking between classes with the help of our five male partners. Art, literature and jazz dominated our daily discussions. Laughing, dreaming out loud and moving to New York City were all we needed to be happy. New York City and love. How did you end up in Red Hook in the 1980s? JANET: I bought a building there in 1982. Mo and Paul bought a small house in 81. We heard about Red Hook from Paul's college counselor, Richard Dutton. They ran into him at a jam session at the Eagle Tavern on 14th Street. He introduced us to Jerry Lombardo, a retired longshoreman, the self-appointed realtor of Re

A stunning debut that combines the mystery and action of a first-rate police thriller with a deep and sympathetic picture of one man's futile effort to escape his past. A Minotaur First Edition Selection.

Imagine that Alice had walked into a bar instead of falling down the rabbit hole. In the tradition of J. R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar and the classic reportage of Joseph Mitchell, here is an indelible portrait of what is quite possibly the greatest bar in the world—and the mercurial, magnificent man behind it. The first time he saw Sunny’s Bar, in 1995, Tim Sultan was lost, thirsty for a drink, and intrigued by the single bar sign among the forlorn warehouses lining the Brooklyn waterfront. Inside, he found a dimly lit room crammed with maritime artifacts, a dozen well-seasoned drinkers, and, strangely, a projector playing a classic Martha Graham dance performance. Sultan knew he had stumbled upon someplace special. What he didn’t know was that he had just found his new home. Soon enough, Sultan has quit his office job to bartend full-time for Sunny Balzano, the bar’s owner. A wild-haired Tony Bennett lookalike with a fondness for quoting Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett, Sunny is truly one of a kind. Born next to the saloon that has been in his family for one hundred years, Sunny has over the years partied with Andy Warhol, spent time in India at the feet of a guru, and painted abstract expressionist originals. But his masterpiece is the bar itself, a place where a sublime mix of artists, mobsters, honky-tonk musicians, neighborhood drunks, nuns, longshoremen, and assorted eccentrics rub elbows. Set against the backdrop of a rapidly transforming city, Sunny’s Nights is a loving and singular portrait of the dream experience we’re all searching for every time we walk into a bar, and an enchanting memoir of an unlikely and abiding friendship. Praise for Sunny’s Nights “Fantastic . . . [Sultan takes] material that might seem familiar and [mixes] a perfect, insightful cocktail: full-bodied, multitextured and delicious. . . . Simply beautiful.”—The New York Times Book Review “Sultan’s love of Red Hook shines through, and it’s hard not to be swept along on the ebb and flow of his emotions. . . . Sultan’s book is, among other things, a meditation on the fragility of the moment and the passage of time. . . . Wistful, funny and biting, Sunny’s Nights rewards you with its evocation of a certain place in time and, as Sultan calls him, ‘the most original man I have ever met.’”—Newsday “An affectionate portrait of the idiosyncratic Sunny’s Bar.”—USA Today “Sultan finds Sunny . . . a real character, a poet, a cinephile, a philosopher, bluegrass maestro and (Rheingold) beer server.”—New York Post (“Required Reading”) “Captivating . . . a classic story about a local bar.”—The Buffalo News “An enchanting memoir, a profound meditation on place and a beautiful story of an unlikely and abiding friendship.”—Brooklyn Daily Eagle “[A] polished, affecting look at remarkable barkeep Sunny Balzano . . . In elegant prose, Sultan deploys laconic humor, an instinct for telling details, a taste for eccentricity, and above all, clear-eyed compassion for our all-too-human failings.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Beautifully wrought . . . an indelible portrait of an unusual man and a nearly forgotten part of NYC.”—Booklist “More than an elegy for a bar and a neighborhood—it’s also a vivid and loving portrait of the larger-than-life eccentric who gave the bar its name and its spirit.”—Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers

Traces the lives of the Tetherly and Copaken families in the aftermath of a child's tragic death, which results in a broken marriage, a bonding between bereaved siblings and healing in the form of an adopted girl's prodigious violin talent. By the author of the best-selling Bad Mother.

Winner of the Ringo Award for Best Webcomic 2017, this book collects the first volume of The Red Hook, the tale of a super-thief who is bequeathed the Omni-fist of Altruism and transformed into a hero against his will a year after a sentient Brooklyn's heart is broken and physically secedes from America.

A narrative history of the craft cocktail renaissance, written by a New York Times cocktail writer and one of the foremost experts on the subject. A Proper Drink is the first-ever book to tell the full, unflinching story of the contemporary craft cocktail revival. Award-winning writer Robert Simonson interviewed more than 200 key players from around the world, and the result is a rollicking (if slightly tipsy) story of the characters—bars, bartenders, patrons, and visionaries—who in the last 25 years have changed the course of modern drink-making. The book also features a curated list of about 40 cocktails—25 modern classics, plus an additional 15 to 20 rediscovered classics and classic contenders—to emerge from the movement.

The never-before-told story of Brooklyn’s vibrant and forgotten queer history, from the mid-1850s up to the present day. ***An ALA GLBT Round Table Over the Rainbow 2019 Top Ten Selection*** ***NAMED ONE OF THE BEST LGBTQ BOOKS OF 2019 by Harper's Bazaar*** "A romantic, exquisite history of gay culture." —Kirkus Reviews, starred “[A] boisterous, motley new history...entertaining and insightful.” —The New York Times Book Review Hugh Ryan’s When Brooklyn Was Queer is a groundbreaking exploration of the LGBT history of Brooklyn, from the early days of Walt Whitman in the 1850s up through the queer women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, and beyond. No other book, movie, or exhibition has ever told this sweeping story. Not only has Brooklyn always lived in the shadow of queer Manhattan neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Harlem, but there has also been a systematic erasure of its queer history—a great forgetting. Ryan is here to unearth that history for the first time. In intimate, evocative, moving prose he discusses in new light the fundamental questions of what history is, who tells it, and how we can only make sense of ourselves through its retelling; and shows how the formation of the Brooklyn we know today is inextricably linked to the stories of the incredible people who created its diverse neighborhoods and cultures. Through them, When Brooklyn Was Queer brings Brooklyn’s queer past to life, and claims its place as a modern classic.