Abandoned Red Hook Grain Terminal 🌾
The Magnificent Mistake

This place has been a bit of mission for me. The old Red Hook Grain Terminal–a massive 12-story grain elevator with fifty-four silos 120-feet up in the air. Intrepid explorers have made it in… but trespassing arrests are rumored to be enforced. With the days of easier access seemingly gone, I’ve been asking anyone with even the slightest City connection to help me get in. No luck… yet.

But now, scoping it out from afar I see it is even more difficult to access. The fields about the Red Hook Recreation Area that surround it are fenced up, filled with overgrowth… the very fields I visited annually to support my elementary students’ field day not too long ago. They are addressing a lead contamination… but rather slowly I suppose given the baseball fields now look like a bird sanctuary.

Even from afar, it’s impressive. Once dubbed the Magnificent Mistake, it was opened in 1922… when the the grain trade was already on the decline. Its tremendous size and its location on the Gowanus Canal, which was not a very active waterway at the time, emphasized its uselessness. (source)

To be continued….