Red Hook Grain Terminal

The Red Hook Grain Terminal is an abandoned grain elevator in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City, adjacent to the mouth of the Gowanus Canal. It is 12 stories tall, 70 feet (21 m) wide, and 429 feet (131 m) long, containing fifty-four 120-foot-tall (37 m) cement silos. As the neighborhood's tallest structure, it is highly visible from the elevated Gowanus Expressway and New York City Subway IND Culver Line viaducts over the Gowanus Canal.

Built in 1922, it was immediately redundant upon its completion, failed to generate profit and transferred hands to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 1944, which decommissioned it in 1965 after continued financial difficulty. There are current plans by its current owner, Gowanus Industrial Park, Inc., to redevelop the site. A recycling plant, a concrete storage facility and a movie studio have all been discussed, although no plans have made significant headway and the building remains abandoned.

The terminal was built in 1922 to serve the New York State Canal System. At the turn of the century, a new idea came into play to build a new system of canals as a replacement of the old, narrow Erie Canal. The plan gained wide support, and 524 miles of canals connected several bodies of water in the area, including Lake Erie, Lake Champlain and the Hudson River.

The investment in new canals was largely a failure, as the usage of canals declined over the next quarter-century. By 1918, the canal system was being utilized at 10 percent of its capacity. It carried only 1 million bushels of grain in 1918, in comparison to 30 million bushels of grain in 1880.

One reason for this dramatic drop was that the two grain elevators in New York City were owned by railroads, which denied storage privileges to barge operators. The barges then had to wait, fully loaded, until the vessel destined to receive their grain arrived, instead of having a grain terminal store the grain in this time. In 1920, Scientific American magazine supported the idea of a huge grain elevator in New York City largely to preserve the state's investment in the barge canal on which $150 million has been spent and others agreed.

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