Red Hook (Brooklyn)
Coordinates: 40°40′35″N 74°00′41″W / 40.676520°N 74.011373°W
Red Hook is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, New York. The neighborhood is part of Brooklyn Community Board 6.
Red Hook has been part of the Town of Brooklyn since it was organized in the 1600s. It is named for the red clay soil and the point of land projecting into the Upper New York Bay. The village was settled by Dutch colonists of New Amsterdam in 1636, and named Roode Hoek. In Dutch "Hoek" means "point" or "corner" and not the English hook (i.e., not something curved or bent). The actual "hoek" of Red Hook was a point on an island that stuck out into Upper New York Bay at today's Dikeman Street west of Ferris Street. From the 1880s to the present time, people who live in the eastern area of Red Hook have referred to their neighborhood as "The Point". Today, the area is home to about 11,000 people.
Rapelye Street in Red Hook commemorates the beginnings of one of New Amsterdam's earliest families, the Rapelje clan, descended from the first European child born in the new Dutch settlement in the New World, Sarah Rapelje. She was born near Wallabout Bay, which later became the site of the New York (Brooklyn) Naval Shipyard. A couple of decades after the birth of his daughter Sarah, Joris Jansen Rapelje removed to Brooklyn, where he was one of the Council of twelve men, and where he was soon joined by son-in-law Hans Hansen Bergen. Rapelye Street in Red Hook is named for Rapelje and his descendants, who lived in Brooklyn for centuries.
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