Yesterday, we hosted the Brooklyn Real Estate Roundtable. I wasn’t there, but according to the Brooklyn Paper this morning, Red Hook developer Greg O’Connell (who built the Fairway) is proposing a high-end wedding hall near the end of Van Dyke Street.
The funny thing is, while this announcement was being discussed downstairs, I was upstairs interviewing Frank Palescandolo (b. 1917), a writer who grew up in Coney Island and whose most famous book Rumble on the Docks (1953) is set in Red Hook. It’s about longshoremen and teenage gangs, it’s got a classic pulp cover, and in 1956 it was made into a movie starring James Darren.
