On Sunday, February 22, 2015 at 11:45 am, I visited Red Hook, Brooklyn. I started out at the Ikea, which was on Beard Street. This area was at one side of the division point between the two areas that I visited: the commercial on (which included Ikea) and the residential one, a few blocks from the Ikea. The Ikea is probably 10 times the size of the one located near the Broadway Mall in Long Island. I think it is actually the largest Ikea in all of New York. The inside of the Ikea was like that of any other Ikea probably on the rest of this planet. There were quite a few people inside, but not so many that we were crowded. I saw some young people, probably in their mid 20s. One woman was wearing pantsuit pants, so I think she may have been a white-collar worker. Some of the other younger people, however, were just wearing casual jeans. There were also a few families with young children. I also saw some elderly people, probably in their 70s. Some cars were parked outside the shopping complex; none of them were particularly new or clean cars. In fact, most of them were older looking cars.

I say this is the commercial area because I soon as I exited the Ikea, the scenery changed dramatically. There were some trees planted in the sidewalks, but the area was not quite suburban. The sidewalks were cracked and so was the street pavement. I do not think it has been very well maintained for some time considering how large some of the cracks were. The snow had not yet been fully shoveled, but some of it seemed to have been moved. I could see only one set of large footprints. All the other snow was either pushed to the edge of the sidewalk or trampled into a translucent mush. There were a lot of fenced-in lots. Some of them had buildings that seemed to be in use, but others had windows that were boarded up with sheets of wood.

There were buildings with metal garage doors and almost all of them had some sort of graffiti on them, but not the kind with pictures. I saw a lot of haphazardly sprayed words on these garage doors. As I walked around the blocks by the intersection of Dikeman street and Van Brunt street, I saw a large, standard school bus pass by. There could not have been any public school today, so there may have been a Sunday school nearby. I did not see any schools nearby, but I did see two small churches. This area was a sort of mix between residential and semi-commercial buildings. A lot of the buildings had iron grates on their first-floor windows and most of the buildings did not exceed two stories. I did not see many functional buildings other than some housing complexes that were all adjacent to each other. However, I did see a few check cashing facilities. There were some telephone poles and wires above ground and some more old cars parked in the streets.

Overall, I would say that this area is not very affluent and the only really moneyed area is the one side of town where Ikea is. I did not see many people outside in the residential area, so the busiest part of the neighborhood should have also been the Ikea area. The rest of neighborhood feels very run-down and I think this would be a good place to start thinking about what issues Red Hook faces.