<P> In 1839, the City of Brooklyn published a plan to create streets, which included filling in all of the ponds and other low - lying areas . </P> <P> In the 1840s, entrepreneurs began to build ports as the "offloading end" of the Erie Canal . These included the Atlantic, Erie and Brooklyn Basins . By the 1920s, they made Red Hook the busiest freight port in the world, but this ended in the 1960s with the advent of containerization . In the 1930s, the area was poor, and the site of the current Red Hook Houses was the site of a shack city for the homeless, called a "Hooverville". </P> <P> From the 1920s on, a lot of poor and unemployed Norwegians, mostly former sailors, were living in the area in what they called Ørkenen Sur ("The Bitter Desert") around places like Hamilton Avenue and Gospel Hill . In 2015 NRK made a documentary about it in Norwegian . There is also an old documentary film about this . </P> <P> In the 1990s Life magazine named Red Hook as one of the "worst" neighborhoods in the United States and as "the crack capital of America ." The principal of P.S. 15 in Red Hook was killed in 1992, in the crossfire of a drug - related shooting while looking for a pupil who had left his school . The school was later renamed the Patrick Daly School after that principal, who was beloved within that school . </P>

Who lived in red hook in the 1950s