Red Hook is a small peninsular neighborhood in South Brooklyn demarcated from those adjacent to it by two major interborough roads: the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. I started making my way out there about four years ago, when I was a junior in high school. Initially, Roots n’ Ruckus was the draw, a free weekly show held at The Jalopy Theatre and hosted by Feral Foster, a smug but talented man. Counter-intuitively, what kept me coming back was the lack of subway service to the area. When I graduated high school I decided against college and went instead to work on a farm in rural Virginia, which is how I eventually hope to spend a good portion of my life. So, the slight isolation Red Hook offers helped satiate my ultimate and lingering desire of “getting off the grid.”
When I first got back to New York after the farm I rejected the painful thought of moving back in with my parents so I made it of prime concern not to. I now live with friends in Park Slope, a neighborhood I feel lucky to live in but have trouble identifying with. Thus, a favorite trek of mine brings me down-hill: through industrial Gowanus, by the Old American Can Factory, the Batcave (or, the former, now abandoned, central power station of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company), and the canal itself (home to, in all its superfund glory, the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club). I pick up the pace approaching Smith Street on account of my inherently contradictory, hypocritical disdain for niche businesses (i.e. the Momofuku Milk Bar) and the gentrification they both foster and depend on. But no harm done for it’s not too long before the slate green steeple of Sacred Hearts Church rises up, marking my closing in on the boundary line; a small footbridge the gateway, and my passing through to Red Hook.
–Sophia Curran
