Red Hook

Red Hook, Brooklyn was once a bustling, gritty seaport. These days the ports are empty & the area has been severed from the rest of Brooklyn by the BQE. The streets are mournfully quiet. The buildings appear vacant even when they're not. The waterfront provides a picturesque view of lower Manhattan. Some holiday sportsmen were fishing off a pier, despite the sign warning that fish caught here might not be healthy to eat.

This is where HP Lovecraft lived & loathed so much he wrote a horror story about it. This is where Harlan Ellison joined a street gang to give himself something to write about. Red Hook also served as the setting for shady doings of Last Exit to Brooklyn. Not to mention the place just has a great name, like a pirate's claw dipped in blood. These days gentrification is thinking about settling in. Probably too far from the subway for a full-fledged takeover.

Saw the fireworks from a rooftop in Harlem. They were more distant than I expected. Very few people seemed to be taking advantage of the rooftops & maybe that's why. Lots of grilling being done on the streets below though. In Michigan, Fourth of July was more or less known as "hotdog day," not particularly associated with anything historic. Here on the east coast people take their Independence Day a bit more seriously. I felt a lot of tension on the streets and in the subways throughout the day, as though the city was anticipating trouble.