Red Hook Stories

Book excerpt: Red Hook Stories is a collection of 20 short stories and 20 photographs that grasp the desperate beauty of human loss and resiliency in the empty dockyard neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn between the years of 1981 and 1992. Woven throughout the collection are a mix of voices rarely heard, echoes from the edges of poor urban American communities everywhere. Artists, carpenters, squatters, welfare recipients, retired dockyard workers and their families band together at weddings, funerals, civic meetings and demonstrations in a struggle to survive political neglect. Frequently asked questions of Maureen McNeil and Janet Neuhauser, writer and photographer of RED HOOK STORIES You're both from the Seattle area. How did you arrive in NYC? MAUREEN: I fell in love with New York at age seventeen, on my way to Europe after graduating early from high school. I met my dad's cousin Martha, a dancer who lived in a loft at Westbeth, one of the first subsidized artist living spaces in Greenwich Village and watching her company rehearse and the icebergs that floated down the Hudson day after day, I'd never been so cold or so inspired. I didn't get back to NYC though until after college, in 79. I took a leave of absence from an MFA writing program at San Francisco State and moved here with my boyfriend who was starting graduate school. JANET: I had artist friends I grew up with living in Brooklyn at the time but I moved to New York study photography. What about becoming artists when did you start taking pictures? JANET: I came roundabout to photography. As a small child I watched my dad, an army photographer, develop film at home and at age seven I got my first camera. Later I was blown away looking at my grandmother's photos of farm life in South Dakota where she and my grandfather had homesteaded in the early 1900s. I didn't settle on the profession of photography until after graduating with a second B.A. in classics. I took a class from Steven Soltar at the Factory of Visual Arts and never looked back. MAUREEN: I was about twelve when I decided to be a writer. It was during a discussion with my older brother, Rob, who was renovating a 26 foot schooner so he could sail away and become stateless to avoid the Vietnam draft. He finally got it through my young brain that humans wrote the biblical stories. Suddenly, the pillar of Catholicism fell away and my life goals changed. If I died a saint, okay, but I was going to be a poet. How did you meet? And open a restaurant? Whose idea was that? MAUREEN: The restaurant was Jan's idea. She knew how to cook, not me. We wanted to create something and the restaurant really drew us into a community of conservative government workers and "hippie" college students. The Evergreen State College had only opened the year before and there was quite a clash. Olympians, including my grandfather, felt like they'd been invaded. JANET: It was luck that we met. It was 1972, standing in line to get our college ID photos taken. I gave Mo a bowl of home-made soup and she told me stories of hitch hiking through North Africa. I told her about traveling through Greece and Turkey and soon after she moved into my $55 a month apartment in downtown Olympia. The next year we opened a vegetarian restaurant on West 4th Street, cooking between classes with the help of our five male partners. Art, literature and jazz dominated our daily discussions. Laughing, dreaming out loud and moving to New York City were all we needed to be happy. New York City and love. How did you end up in Red Hook in the 1980s? JANET: I bought a building there in 1982. Mo and Paul bought a small house in 81. We heard about Red Hook from Paul's college counselor, Richard Dutton. They ran into him at a jam session at the Eagle Tavern on 14th Street. He introduced us to Jerry Lombardo, a retired longshoreman, the self-appointed realtor of Re