Red Hook's IKEA is one of the neighborhood's local landmarks. The store's giant blue and yellow letters are visible for blocks around, and its free ferry service provides a vital link to Wall Street. But did you know that beneath IKEA's parking lot, and still outlined in cobblestones that trace its former edges, lies the first graving dock in the United States?
A graving dock is a type of dry dock where ships go for repairs, without having to be hauled onto land. These docks function like giant bathtubs; ships maneuver in, the gates are closed and the water is drained, leaving the ship exposed to the air and easily accessible for exterior repairs. New York City still has a working dry dock in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but the Erie Basin dry dock in Red Hook was the city’s, and the country's, first.
In 1864, William Beard—for whom Red Hook’s Beard Street is named—bought land along the Red Hook waterfront and built the Erie Basin. This was one of the first European-style, artificially-enclosed harbors in the city. The Erie Basin was originally built to capitalize on the storage and shipment of grain that flowed into New York from the Erie Canal.
The canal opened in 1825 and transformed the New York City into the nation’s most important port. Along with building dozens of grain warehouses, Beard also invested in the construction of two graving docks. These opened in 1866 and were in use for almost 150 years.
Soon after its construction, William Beard sold the graving docks to the Robins family, who operated it as the Robins Dry Dock and Repair Company for the rest of the 19th century. In 1916, the docks were sold to William Todd, an employee at the Robins docks who ended up forming a small shipbuilding empire as demand for shipyards and repair docks spiked during the First and Second World Wars.
Abandoned pier looking toward the Erie Basin
The World Wars were the high-water mark of the shipbuilding and repair industry in New York, and nowhere was that felt more strongly than in Red Hook’s Erie Basin. In a 1920 Port of New York Annual report on the state of New York’s waterfront industry, the Todd Shipyards are described as being places of intense industry and round-the-clock work during World War I:
"No night nor day was known there, the twenty-four hours passed being met by the twenty-four coming with large forces of employees. Some great work was done there, such as lengthening some steamers and rebuilding others which were war damaged.”
After the end of World War II, Todd Shipyards continued to operate its graving dock on the Red Hook waterfront, but a changing local economy and new marine technologies meant that by the 1980s, business was drying up. Todd Shipyards closed its Red Hook docks in 1986. The docks were then sold to another owner, who leased it to different operators. All operations at the docks and adjacent piers finally ceased in 2005.
In 2006, IKEA proposed a flagship store on the site of the derelict Todd Shipyards. The plan included demolition of the piers and buildings adjacent to the old graving dock, replacing them with IKEA, and filling in the graving dock for a large surface parking lot. Despite attempts from the Municipal Arts Society, local preservationists, and even the comptroller to preserve the Civil War-era docks, the plan was approved and construction started in 2007. By 2008, the graving dock was filled in and paved over with a parking lot.
As a small gesture to the history of the site, the outline of the edges of the graving dock were preserved by a line of cobblestones that, when viewed from above, make the shape of a ship.
Max Scott is a recent graduate of The New School with a BA in Liberal Arts and a double-minor in Urban Studies and Capitalism Studies. He is an urbanist and community organizer with four years of expe
