Coffey Street

 

A garage-turned-residence in Red Hook, Brooklyn

Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

 

Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary was founded in 1855 to serve the needs of the burgeoning Irish and German Catholic population of Red Hook, Brooklyn, The name of the parish refers to a story in the Gospel of Luke in which the pregnant Virgin Mary visits with her cousin Elizabeth, who is also pregnant, with the future John the Baptist. According to the story, Fetus John the Baptist sense Fetus Jesus within Mary, and starts to leap around Betsy's womb.

Anyway . . . This is the third building for the parish. The congregation quickly outgrew the original building, and the second, larger church was destroyed by fire. The third church, this one, was consecrated in 1898. The Romanesque and Gothic Revival stone church is constructed of Manhattan schist, the native bedrock stone of New York City. The architect is not identified in any church history, but is possibly the work of Thomas Houghton.

Red Hook Pentecostal

Red Hook Pentecostal Holiness Church at 110 Wolcott St. in Red Hook, Brooklyn. This building was originally built in 1900 by the Episcopalian Christ Church for its Red Hook Mission. It was designed by Scottish architect brothers William James Audsley and George Ashdown Audsley. In the 1970s, the building was sold to the Pentecostal Church.

The Mary A Whalen

The Mary A Whalen is a decommissioned oil tanker docked at Pier 11 in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Built in 1938, she was originally called the S.T. Kiddoo, after Solomon Thomas Kiddoo, the Vice President of the company that manufacturing its engines. The ship was built for Ira S. Bushey & Sons, a Red Hook business that operated a combination shipyard and fuel terminal. She is 172' (52m) long and 31.5' (9.6m) wide, with a gross tonnage of 613 and a capacity of 8.019 barrels of fuel.

The ship delivered fuel up and down the east coast between 1938 and 1968. In 1962, she was purchased by the Eklof Marine Corporation of Staten Island and re-christend the Mary A. Whalen. I'm not entirely sure who that is. She went out of service in 1994, due to a damaged engine crankshaft.

The ship is the last of its kind. It's an early example of lap-welding, a technique in which one steel plate overlaps the other, and is also one of the few surviving examples of a bell boat. On a bell boat, the captain or mate steering has no control over the throttle or direction of the boat, and uses a manual system of bells to signal instructions to an engineer in the lower levels to determine speed and direction. She is also significant for being the subject of the 1975 Supreme Court case U.S. v Reliable Transfer Co., and important maritime law case.

Currently, she is owned by PortSide NewYork, a non-profit advocacy group for waterfront development, and serves as their headquarters and museum. In 2012, she was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Mary A Whalen History at PortSide NewYork