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“We have 10,000 residents and no decent park here,” Judith Dailey, a Red Hook Houses tenant association leader told a City Limits’ reporter in February 1994. “There was no one there to represent that interest.”
City Limits Archives/Vincent Cianni
Judith Dailey and Beatrice Byrd, tenant association leaders at NYCHA’s Red Hook Houses, pictured here in 1994.Each Friday, City Limits—founded in 1976—highlights a story from our archives.
In early 1993, when Brooklyn Community Board 6 formed a subcommittee tasked with crafting a “master plan” on the district’s needs, it failed to include even a single tenant of the Red Hook Houses—despite it being the second largest NYCHA complex in the city, with 30 buildings and more than 2,000 apartments.
“We have 10,000 residents and no decent park here,” Judith Dailey, a tenant association leader for the public housing complex, told a City Limits’ reporter in February 1994. “There was no one there to represent that interest.”
This and other injustices at the time—including the death two years earlier of Patrick Daly, the beloved principal of a nearby elementary school who’d been killed in a drug-related shootout—spurred a new organizing movement among Red Hook Houses tenants.
Residents said they’d been ignored by city leaders and political interests for decades, cut off from the rest of the borough by the Gowanus Expressway and used as a “dumping ground” for services that other neighborhoods didn’t want.
“Red Hook has become home to 22 garbage transfer stations, where commercial garbage is dumped and reloaded onto tractor trailers for shipment out of state, as well as cement factories, warehouses for petroleum-based products, and other industrial facilities—all within a few blocks of the housing project,” City Limits’ author Steve Mitra described at the time.
But tenant leaders were fed up, and ready to fight. After successfully organizing to halt the city’s opening of sewage sludge processing facility in their neighborhood, residents set their sights on other fixes, including the complex’s many broken door locks and dim lighting.
“For the first time people saw they could get together and win,” Dailey said. “They felt…I guess ’empowered’ is the word.”
Read the full article from the February 1994 issue of City Limits below (the piece starts on page 6).
