Elia Kazan's 1954 film On the Waterfront was based on the world of Red Hook longshoremen. I just read that originally the film was going to be written by Arthur Miller and called The Hook, but the House Un-American Activities Commission pressured the studio to change Miller's script. Miller refused and dropped the project. With the new writer, Budd Schulberg, the title was changed.

As I get ready to move, I know the proximity the the water is one of the things I'll miss most, hence my posting another picture of fishing and the piers. In the foreground is my old friend Elijah Miller. Elijah is a songwriter who works at B61, a bar on Red Hook's northern border with Carroll Gardens. In the background, that faint point on the horizon is the Statue of Liberty.

It was swings and a mask on this August day after a rain storm in Coffey Park. I was glad I had b&w film in my camera because I think it makes the mask something more mysterious and the swing more timeless. Some of their friends were more cautious about being photographed by a stranger, but these two insisted on getting their moment in front of the camera and I appreciate that they did. (Tip of the hat to Ralph Eugene Meatyard- a photographer with a great name, who used masks in some of his photos of his family in the rural south 40 years ago.)

This one you really have to see big- so click on the photo. Big dump trucks were crisscrossing this mountain of salt or gravel (in the north of Red Hook) against the backdrop of downtown Manhattan. I'd seen this of salt before, but thought it was a minor pile until the day the trucks were there and looked tiny on top of it. The only way to get the shot was to pull down the plastic covering this chain link fence and shoot through it... and I only had my little old Olympus camera loaded with long expired Kodak film. The result is a mostly obscured photo with an extra graininess and a strange hue, but I kind of love it.

This strip of sidewalk runs between West 9th Street and Mill Street, past the Police Athletic League building. I've been fascinated by it because it's almost always fenced off by a tall wrought iron gate, chained shut. (I had to stick my camera through it to get this picture.) Maybe it's blocked off to prevent people from from taking these barricades, which are collected there- themselves blocking nothing.

My mother was just visiting from Massachusetts and complaining that they hadn't gotten any snow up there this winter. That made me recall that we had, so I went back into my winter images. The photo lab I've been using recently, Accurate Photo, is a real mom and pop place in Park Slope, owned and run by a Chinese family. When she was scanning these negatives, the mother in the family was excited about this photo, saying she liked the even composition. I guess I agree. This is Center Street, running through the Red Hook West Houses. (Blogger limits the height of your pictures, so these 35mm verticals show up really small. Click on the image to see it bigger.)

(You can see it bigger if you click on it.) Every photo I've posted on this blog for the past year has been taken on medium format film with my Hasselblad camera. But a month ago I got an Olympus XA, an old Japanese rangefinder that fits in my pocket. This picture and the next one are taken with it. It doesn't capture quite as much detail as the Hasselblad, but I can keep it with me and pull it out when something in the neighborhood catches my eye... like this caution tape on Mill Street.

I was watching some boys play baseball on Verona Street and someone hit it over the church yard fence. While the pitcher went after it, this guy showed off how he could climb those wires on the right (which was impressive but the landing on the jump down interested me more photographically).