By Midtown Times Staff
BROOKLYN, N.Y. (Midtown Times) — On summer Saturdays, Carolina Salguero can look out from the historic tanker she calls home and see hundreds of visitors pouring into Red Hook from the NYC Ferry.
Salguero lives aboard the Mary A. Whalen, a red oil tanker built in the 1930s and permanently docked at Atlantic Basin. The vessel also serves as the headquarters of PortSide NewYork, a maritime nonprofit organization.
Each arriving ferry can deliver another large group of day-trippers, many of them young Manhattan residents eager to explore the South Brooklyn waterfront.
For Red Hook’s restaurants, bars, galleries and small businesses, those visitors have become an important source of revenue. The neighborhood continues to recover from the destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, as well as two significant fires during the past year.
The ferry is helping fuel a local revival by bringing customers to a community that has long been difficult to reach by public transportation.
Red Hook has no nearby subway station. Its relative isolation has traditionally separated it from the faster pace of surrounding Brooklyn neighborhoods, but residents say that distance is also central to its appeal.
The historic waterfront community is home to Brooklyn’s largest public housing development, hundreds of artists’ studios, expensive restaurants, small boutiques and New York City’s only IKEA. Old warehouses and cobblestone streets coexist with newer entertainment venues and fashionable dining destinations.
NYC Ferry service to Red Hook began in 2017. Since then, summer weekend ridership has nearly tripled from its first-season level, approaching 1,000 passengers on a typical day, according to figures cited in the original report. Business owners say the number of visitors appears to be growing.
With ferry connections from Wall Street, the Lower East Side and Midtown, Red Hook has become an accessible “daycation” for Manhattan residents. The ride across New York Harbor offers striking skyline views before passengers arrive in a neighborhood that feels more like a small coastal town than part of the city.
Gordon Taylor, a bartender at Strong Rope Brewery who moved to Red Hook during the pandemic, said the neighborhood’s seaside atmosphere makes it easy to forget that Manhattan is only a short distance away.
The ferry ride, however, is only the beginning. Social media has introduced a new generation of visitors to Red Hook’s mixture of established institutions and newer attractions.
After leaving Atlantic Basin, many passengers follow Van Brunt Street toward the waterfront. Along the way, they encounter boutiques, galleries and popular restaurants, including Red Hook Tavern, widely known for its burger and frequent line of waiting customers.
Visitors can also stop at a museum filled with functioning vintage pinball machines, which are available to play in exchange for a suggested donation.
Businesses located away from the busiest routes must work harder to attract the crowds. Drew Villano, a Red Hook native who operates a vintage pop-up shop, uses colorful sidewalk-chalk messages and arrows to direct ferry passengers from the dock to her business.
Still, much of the weekend traffic remains concentrated around a handful of popular waterfront destinations. Brooklyn Crab, a three-level seafood restaurant and recreation space, often becomes so crowded that customers spill onto the street with frozen drinks while waiting or playing cornhole.
For longtime residents, the scene represents a dramatic transformation.
When Salguero arrived in Red Hook during the late 1990s, the neighborhood’s streets were often nearly empty. Residents could stop their cars in the middle of the road to talk without creating a traffic problem. She remembers the area feeling more like a quiet country community than a neighborhood within America’s largest city.
Today, summer weekends bring a completely different rhythm. Young visitors in fashionable clothes fill the sidewalks, crowd the waterfront and line up outside the neighborhood’s best-known businesses.
The influx can feel overwhelming to people who live and work in Red Hook. Yet many also recognize that the neighborhood’s restaurants, cultural spaces and independent businesses increasingly depend on seasonal tourism.
For a community shaped by maritime history, physical isolation and repeated disasters, the ferry has become more than transportation. It is now an economic lifeline—and the gateway to one of New York City’s most distinctive summer destinations.
