There is no subway, and most of the streets end at the water.
What Red Hook looks like
The peninsula sits out in the Upper Bay, cut off from the rest of Brooklyn by the Gowanus Expressway and the approaches to the Battery Tunnel. There is no subway station out here, so people arrive on the B61 bus or the passenger ferry that crosses to Lower Manhattan.
Brick warehouses run the length of , five floors of arched windows behind black iron shutters that stay bolted open. The largest of them, , holds a supermarket on the ground floor with apartments and artist studios stacked above. An old PCC streetcar sits out front on a short stretch of track.
Most streets run straight down to the water and stop at a chain link fence or a line of riprap. , at the foot of Ferris Street, opens onto open harbor with the Statue of Liberty and Governors Island across the water. Gantry cranes stand over the container piers to the south, and at the Henry Street Basin the rises twelve stories of blank concrete silos that have stood empty since 1965.
Inland, the cover forty acres of two and six story brick blocks, with ball courts and playgrounds fenced off between the buildings. sits behind a wrought iron fence on Sullivan Street, an elephant mural painted across its end wall. Farther south, keeps a line of old plane trees behind a low chain fence, with the brick fronts of Richards Street visible past the outfield.
Shot in Red Hook
Both of these were shot on location in Red Hook rather than on a stage. Last Exit to Brooklyn built a whole other neighborhood out of one block, and Red Hook Summer stayed close to home.
Last Exit to Brooklyn, 1989
The Beard Street block
Played the Brooklyn Army Terminal, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, 1952
Uli Edel shot almost all of it on one block of Beard Street, 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
Played Red Hook
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.
Fort Point's brick loft warehouses along Melcher and A Streets run five and six stories with the same arched windows and flat cornices as the Beard Street block, built between the 1880s and the 1920s by one company that laid out its own streets. Iron shutters and loading doors survive on many fronts, the same detail Red Hook keeps on 480 Van Brunt Street. Fort Point's warehouses are mostly offices and apartments now, with glass additions and rooftop signage Red Hook does not have, so a tight frame on brick and iron holds the match better than a wide one. Try searching brick loft warehouses block now.
Locust Point's brick rowhouses sit blocks from an active grain and container port on Baltimore's harbor, the same working class scale as the streets behind Red Hook's own terminal. The neighborhood's own grain elevator, Silo Point, has been converted into condominiums. That silhouette no longer matches the derelict one at Red Hook's own terminal. Keep the converted grain elevator and the newer harbor front condos out of frame, and hold on the older brick rowhouse blocks near Hull Street for the period match. Try searching brick rowhouse blocks now.
San Pedro is the working end of the Port of Los Angeles, with gantry cranes lifting containers over the water much as they do at Red Hook's own container terminal, just at a far larger scale. The concrete Municipal Warehouse No. 1 backs onto the piers there, giving the harbor a period industrial silhouette even though its material is concrete rather than Red Hook's brick. Keep the frame tight on one crane and one warehouse front, since a wide shot shows a working port many times the size of Red Hook's own. Try searching gantry cranes over the water now.
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