Only the Dogs Know Red Hook
A dangling bit of coastline at the bottom of Brooklyn.
This is , a monthly column by Adrian Shirk on the history of buildings in New York.
At the far south edge of Brooklyn, there was once this weird bit of industrial architecture: the Revere Sugar Refinery. Built in 1910, it had been grafted onto every decade as manufacturing modernized. The refinery was, thus, a sort of palimpsest, surrounded by concrete tunnels, steel tracks, rickety transoms, brick storehouses, equipment from a variety of decades, and at its center a giant metal dome rising up like a pyramid, victorious, above the Erie Canal Basin.
Straight Outta Brooklyn
On the Waterfront
I coulda been a contender!
On the Waterfront
Life
Adrian Shirk is the author of And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, a hybrid-memoir exploring the lives of American women prophets and mystics, named an NPR ‘Best Book’ of 2017. She's currently working on a manuscript about utopian communities. Shirk was raised in Portland, Oregon, and has since lived in New York and Wyoming. She's a frequent contributor to Catapult, and her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, among others. Currently, she teaches in Pratt Institute’s BFA Creative Writing Program, and lives on the border of the Bronx and Yonkers with her husband Sweeney and Quentin the cat.
Enter your email address to receive notifications for author Adrian Shirk
Success!
Confirmation link sent to your email to add you to notification list for author Adrian Shirk
More by this author
Spice Girls and the Rise and Fall of Girl Power
Girl power was the freedom to make a scene, make no sense, join together and make something irresistible, spectacular, unproductive, joyful, and to radically claim one another.
Joan of Arc: The Girl Who Saves Cities
Statues and monuments tell us about ourselves mostly, what we hope to remember and be remembered by.
A Brief History of American Utopian Communities
“Utopian communities are inherently tragic because they are always, every single time, doomed to failure.”
More in this series
Heart of the Empire
“People kept saying no more roads, but Robert Moses didn’t listen.”