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   08 August 2010 · 08:45 PM ·

   Why Red Hook?

   by Michael

   I thought I would write a few words for those followers of this blog who are not from Red Hook on why we love Red Hook enough to hunt for a building here.  After all, Red Hook is a relatively small contained (some would say isolated) neighborhood with real-estate prices that are kept high because of a vanishingly small inventory of real estate.

    

   I had these thoughts as I was walking home on Van Brunt Street with my wife on Saturday morning after picking up our vegetables at Added Value and looking for vacant lots near the water front.  There are a lot of them, mysterious in a city so dense as to defy belief, but there nonetheless, weedy, fenced off and available.  The Added Value Farm started as one of these lots, and is now a full fledged local food source, growing an amazing variety of vegetables in 18 inches of trucked in topsoil.  All this in a 3 acre abandoned lot and atop a cracked field of asphalt.  

    

   If they can grow food in a blighted lot, why can’t we grow ourselves a home in another such place? 

   

   (photo from Red Hook CSA)

   A person could be forgiven for devaluing our neighborhood for it’s weedy lots and mysteriously boarded buildings, but to enough of us, these places have represented not blight, but opportunity.  The six of us have lived here long enough to have seen what is possible here for those with some imagination and grit.  Added Value turned a parking lot into a verdant food basket, Fairway turned a rotting pier building into thriving store used by people from miles around.  Along Van Brunt Street there are many stores, galleries and restaurants owned by locals and serving up well crafted food, goods and art that reflect and express what can only be called a Red Hook Culture.

    

   I mean, who wouldn’t want to be a part of something like this? This is a chance for us to not only be passive consumers of real estate and local culture, but to have a chance at shaping and contributing to a unique community in way very few New Yorkers ever a get a chance at doing.  This privilege is usually reserved for people with either a lot of money and influence, of which we have next to none, or people who live primarily in small towns.  

    

   So for me the attraction to Red Hook is a way to be a genuine part of a community, not in a fantasy if won the lottery way, or when I get my giant paintings sold at Christie’s way, but in a way that can be accomplished right here, right now, using the means at our disposal.

   Red Hook
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