Celebrating Community
The Parks Department came to Red Hook in August for a community update regarding the long-closed Red Hook ballfields. Brooklyn Parks Commissioner Marty Maher led the sparsely attended proceedings, held at the Rec Center on Bay Street. “The good news is that none of the time frames are affected,” Maher said. “We started construction; the completion times are the same. […]
The mystery of the desolate Red Hook ballfields was solved on March 11, as the Parks Department, along with the EPA, swooped upon the Rec Center for one of their infrequent community updates. They evidently waited until they had something to say, which was that, after years of planning, and a lot of false promises, their contractors were about to […]
Red Hook’s baseball fields adjacent to the Rec Center have been closed for many years. Red Hook was told last year by the Parks Department that work would be started to clean up and reopen the fields starting last fall. Of course, any sane person walking by the fields, on either the Bay or Lorraine Street sides, will tell you […]
Key updates from the Red Hook Recreation Area Ballfields community update meeting, held on October 25: The eight existing handball courts, located nearby the corner of Bay and Columbia Streets, will remain and be reconstructed. This follows community suggestions made at Community Board 6’s Parks & Recreation/Environmental Protection committee meeting in mid-September. The proposed plan was to originally keep and […]
The Parks Department came to the Red Hook Library to gave two important updates about the construction and remediation of the Red Hook Ball Field complex. Brooklyn Parks Commissioner Marty Maher said that construction of phase one–ball fields 5-8–will now be starting at the end of this summer instead of in the spring of 2019. “We encountered some challenges in […]
On a particularly hot Saturday in July, braving the 95 degree heat, Marlene Pantin walks up to a group of volunteers with a smile on her face and a cooler of water in hand. It’s a scene you could expect to find most Saturdays during the warmer months of the year. As she enters the scene, Marlene’s volunteers weed a […]
The saga of the Red Hook ballfields began in March 2012, when the NYC Parks Department hurriedly shut fields 5-8 because of suspected lead contamination. Topsoil was replaced and the fields were back in operation in time for an abbreviated little league and softball schedule. This was the direct result of an extensive USA Today report that identified hundreds of […]