The Müuse Atlas / United States / New York / New York City

Filming in Red Hook, Brooklyn

There is no subway, and most of the streets end at the water.

Hamilton Avenue at Centre Street seen from under the Gowanus Expressway at sunset, with a car wash and a kitchen and bath storefront on the far side.

What Red Hook looks like

Red Hook is a peninsula in the Upper Bay. The Gowanus Expressway and the approaches to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel separate it from Carroll Gardens and everything north of it. There is no subway, so people arrive on the B61 bus or the ferry.

William Beard dug out of the marsh in the 1850s and built the brick warehouses along in 1869 to hold coffee and cotton off the ships. At its busiest the neighborhood was taking as many as 26,000 ships a year. The iron shutters on those warehouses are still bolted to the walls and do nothing now. The largest of them is , which has a supermarket on the ground floor and apartments above it.

Inland from the warehouses are the , finished in November 1939 on forty acres. The blocks are two and six stories of brick. About 6,000 people live in them. on Sullivan Street is named for a principal who was killed here in 1992.

Most streets end at the water. , at the foot of Coffey Street, faces the harbor and the Statue of Liberty. The stands at the Henry Street Basin, twelve stories of concrete silos that have been empty since 1965.

The north end of the peninsula is about to change. The city took over about 120 acres of the working waterfront in 2024. A task force approved a plan for 6,000 apartments and a rebuilt port in September 2025.

Films shot in Red Hook

Both of these were shot in the neighborhood rather than on a stage.

Last Exit to Brooklyn, 1989

One of the Beard Street warehouses, four floors of brick with arched windows and black iron shutters, an old Boston streetcar standing on rails in front of it.

Uli Edel shot almost all of it on one block of , largely between Richards and Van Brunt. Hubert Selby Jr's novel is set in Sunset Park in 1952, and the warehouses along the street stand in for the Brooklyn Army Terminal. The production had two intersections and the stretch between them, lit at all hours, doing the work of a whole neighborhood.

Red Hook Summer, 2012

Clinton Street at Lorraine Street, with the ball courts of Bush-Clinton Playground behind the fence and a six story Red Hook Houses block on the right.

Spike Lee shot it inside a ten block radius in eighteen days. The church in the film is the New Brown Memorial Baptist Church at 609 Clinton Street. James McBride wrote the script with Lee and grew up in that church, which his parents founded. The building at 79 Lorraine Street plays itself, with its number over the entrance.

What Red Hook can double for

Red Hook can stand in for a working waterfront, New York when the docks still worked and a warehouse block with water at the end of it.

Areas like Red Hook

GowanusSunset ParkGreenpoint

Look

WaterfrontWarehouse and loft blocks

“a brick warehouse street with iron shutters ending at the harbor”

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