Note the loop attached to the end. Was someone trying to turn this shell casing into jewelry?

Built in 1873, these two handsome brick warehouses on Pier 41 in Red Hook are known as the Merchant Stores. They once served as "a bottling plant for the Morgan Soda (later White Rock Beverage) Company", according to the AIA Guide to New York City, and are now home to such enterprises as a winery, a glass-bending shop, and a coffee-roasting collective.

Down at the far end, in what was previously used as the residence for the cast of MTV's The Real World: Brooklyn, is an event space called the Liberty Warehouse, presumably named for its proximity to, and view of, the Statue of Liberty. I took a look at the "Information" page of the venue's website and found this absurd claim: "The Liberty Warehouse is the only location in all of New York where the Statue of Liberty is face front as she looks on to France."

1) There is nothing special about the Liberty Warehouse's location in relation to the direction the statue faces. While you can certainly see her face from the warehouse, you're not particularly close to looking at her dead-on: the warehouse is angled more than 23 degrees off the centerline of her gaze. (This fact is conveniently illustrated by the big photo of the statue, presumably taken from the warehouse, that can be found alongside the text on the "Information" page.) If you want a direct look at the statue's face from the waterfront, you'll have to head over to the foot of 42nd Street in Sunset Park, about a mile and a half away as the crow flies.

2) While Lady Liberty was a gift from the French, she was not positioned to look toward France. In fact, she faces more than 90 degrees away from Paris. In search of another way to express how erroneous the website's claim is, I decided to figure out what country she actually is staring at across the ocean. Brazil? South Africa? Whatever it is, it would surely help drive home the fact that she's not looking anywhere near France. So I pulled up a map, plugged some coordinates into these handy tools, and discovered that after crossing the Atlantic, her gaze makes landfall in the nation of... France. Not the mainland in Europe, of course, but the overseas department of French Guiana in South America. So I suppose the "looks on to France" part of the website's claim is technically correct. Damn!

(The "Information" page mentioned above also claims that the warehouse was "constructed in the pre-Civil War 1850’s". I'm no expert on the subject myself, but I'd say the AIA Guide, which provided the 1873 date I gave above and specifically states that the Merchant Stores and other similar warehouses in the area were built after the Civil War, is a far more trustworthy source on the matter than the Liberty Warehouse people.)

As indicated on this 1929 map, these side-by-side structures once supported water tanks. The tanks are visible in the center of this 1966 aerial image, but appear to have been removed by 1980. (I had to stare at those images for a long time before I was able to understand what I was seeing.)

Old, exposed Belgian block pavement is a fairly common sight in this part of western Red Hook. The stones are usually laid out simply in straight lines, but a more elaborate pattern of intersecting arcs (seen much more clearly in Street View) can be found here on Van Dyke Street. This is apparently known as a bogen layout.

One of three on the block

You can check out the entire block-long painting in Street View.

I'd never seen a manhole cover labeled "FIRE" before, but there are at least three in the immediate vicinity of the former Lidgerwood factory in Red Hook. As this 1916 map shows (look for the 12-inch high pressure line on Dikeman Street between Ferris Street and the water), the manholes are remnants of an old network of high-pressure water mains and hydrants installed in the early 1900s to improve firefighting capabilities in and around Downtown Brooklyn. Similar systems were also built in Coney Island and Manhattan.

Pumper trucks eventually eliminated the need for the high-pressure hydrants, which spent their last couple of decades operating like standard hydrants before being taken out of service altogether around 1980. Even though they were just useless relics from that point on, the city continued issuing tickets to vehicles parked in front of them.

Finally, in the mid-1990s, the city began getting rid of the old high-pressure hydrants. The associated manhole covers were removed as well, which explains why I've never noticed one before. I imagine the cover pictured above and the neighboring one — as well as the F handhole cover pictured above — were left in place because the block they're on is now a private street. (I don't know why the third, newer-looking FIRE cover a block away on Coffey Street wouldn't have been removed, however.)

This is the northwestern facade of the old Lidgerwood Manufacturing Company factory complex. A major builder of cableways and hoisting machinery, Lidgerwood supplied cableways for the construction of the Panama Canal, the Hoover Dam, and many other large infrastructure projects. The company was founded in Brooklyn in 1873 and lives on today as the Superior-Lidgerwood-Mundy Corporation of Superior, Wisconsin.

The Brooklyn Edison electric company purchased this property from Lidgerwood in 1926, and by 1937 had painted over this wall (which at that time was fully visible from the harbor) with a big "COOK ELECTRICALLY" ad featuring Reddy Kilowatt. If you look closely (zoom in), you can still make out faint traces of the word "COOK" on the left side of the wall, on top of the older Lidgerwood lettering.

Gazing out across the Atlantic Basin, we get a good look at the Lower Manhattan skyline and the cranes of the Red Hook Container Terminal.

The anchor motif reflects the neighborhood's maritime identity, past and present.

Gun cartridges on the front license plate...



Hood locks



Please Don't TOUCH!



In Loving Memory of Mom



...and gun cartridges on the rear

This old factory is now an apartment building.

Since before I was born, a big red R has loomed mysteriously over the streets of Red Hook, leaving decades of perplexed passersby to wonder why such a prominent sign would be used to display such a nonsensical message.

There was a time, many years ago, when the R was just one of several 30-foot-tall letters perched atop that cream-colored building. In those days, the sign read "E.J. TRUM", the name of the paper box manufacturer that owned the place.

After John Turano & Sons, a furniture wholesaler, acquired the building in 1978, the Turanos wanted to put their own name up on the sign. But as Frank Turano told New York magazine in 2001:

We went on the roof and started pulling down these giant letters. The E, the J, the T. But the R got stuck. We couldn't move it. Someone almost fell off the building trying. It put a scare into us. It seemed better to leave it up there. It's been like that for 22 years. Recently a lot of people looking for billboards have come around asking about the space. But we'll leave it like that: just R.

Irv Gordon, a retired science teacher from Long Island, has put a world-record 3 million miles and counting on his red 1966 Volvo 1800S (not pictured).