A slide down a forgotten Red Hook water tower
There is no design.
There is no team. There is no funding. There is no site control, because ownership and zoning for the parcel are not yet confirmed. There has been no structural assessment of the frame and no market research of any kind.
I am putting that at the top rather than in a section near the bottom, which is where documents like this normally hide it, because the gaps are the honest content and everything after them is easier to read once you know what you are reading.
What exists is a thought-through concept, a clear reference set, and a willingness to do the work of recruiting the right people. This is not a fundraising document. It is a recruitment document, and its only job is to find the next three or four people who think the idea is worth taking seriously -- ideally including one who can explain why it is not.
At the corner of Van Dyke Street and the unmapped alley known locally as Barnell Street, there is a white-painted steel lattice tower three stories high. The framework at the top suggests something once sat there, almost certainly a water tank, and is now gone. Its origin is not well documented. It appears in no landmark register.
From the top: the Statue of Liberty due west, the Manhattan skyline to the north. Within a ten-minute walk: the Pier 41 warehouses, Valentino Pier, Pioneer Works, the Red Hook Winery and Cidery, Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pie, the Waterfront Museum barge, IKEA.
It is one of the best unclaimed views in New York and there is no way for anyone to get to it.
What it could be
An observation deck built atop the original frame, reached by stair and by elevator, with a small menu of ways back down. A fast tube slide. A gentler spiral. An energy-harvesting helical platform that visibly converts the descent into electricity for the site’s own lighting. And the elevator, for anyone who wants the view without the nerve.
At the base, a small public plaza with seating, interpretive signage on Red Hook’s industrial history, and a partner café.
The experience is a climb, a view, and a choice about how to come back down, and it should work for every age and every level of nerve.
The reference is Governors Island’s Slide Alley, not Hudson Yards’ Vessel. Civic infrastructure that is unironically fun, free at its core, and sized to serve neighbors and day-trippers rather than to extract revenue from a tourist queue. Aesthetically it sits in the folly tradition, alongside Tatzu Nishi’s Discovering Columbus, the giant roadside attraction, and the public-space ambition of the High Line and Brooklyn Bridge Park. The historic ironwork stays visible as the frame, with new code-compliant structure attached inside it.
Why the timing is unusually good
Red Hook has lost a great deal of its industrial fabric and the demolition of the Lidgerwood building is still raw in community memory. Adaptive reuse is the rare path that holds a coalition together, because preservationists, developers, and residents all prefer it to another teardown. A tower with no landmark protection and no current use is precisely the kind of object that disappears quietly while everyone agrees something ought to be done about it.
The surrounding cluster of small businesses and cultural institutions is dense, distinctive, and badly served by transit. A new public destination with a coherent visitor experience channels foot traffic into existing operators rather than competing with them. Pier 41 tenants, Pioneer Works, IKEA, the Winery, and the Columbia Street corridor all benefit from visitors who arrive without requiring more parking.
And the Brooklyn Marine Terminal Vision Plan and the Red Hook Coastal Resiliency project are reshaping this neighborhood right now, with real public open space and circulation investment in the pipeline. The tower sits adjacent to but outside the BMT footprint, which means it can reinforce the public-space ambitions of the larger plan without competing for its land.
The operating model, written before the design
A 501(c)(3), modeled on the Trust for Governors Island and the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy.
Plaza access, the viewing deck, and the elevator route are free. The slides and the energy-harvesting platform are modestly priced, something like Belle Isle’s dollar-per-ride model, priced to manage throughput and fund operations rather than to maximize revenue. Sunset hours, after-hours events, and school programs cross-subsidize, with a foundation arm raising philanthropic capital.
Visitors arrive by extending the existing IKEA shuttle into a small Red Hook attractions loop, stopping at the tower, Pioneer Works, and the Pier 41 cluster, connecting at Carroll Street and Smith-9th on the F and G and at the NYC Ferry at Atlantic Basin. A simple mobile app handles slide reservations, shuttle times, and partner offers.
Order-of-magnitude capital cost is $5 to $15 million across structural assessment, frame restoration, slide engineering, plaza, infrastructure, and accessibility. Sources to be developed: city capital, potentially folded into the larger BMT and resiliency packages, philanthropic foundations, partner contributions from beneficiary businesses and developers, and public fundraising.
Writing the capital stack and the operating model before there is a design is deliberate. A concept that cannot say how it would run is a daydream, and a concept that can only say how it would run is a spreadsheet. The argument here is that both belong in the same document -- that you can propose a slide down a hundred-year-old water tower and also be specific about the accessibility requirement, the revenue model, and the six things you do not yet know.
What happens next, in order
A small group of advisors who know Red Hook and civic infrastructure well enough to stress-test this. Confirmed ownership and zoning. A preliminary structural assessment. A feasibility study, ideally foundation-funded and produced by a design partner with adaptive reuse experience. Formation of the operating nonprofit. Early conversations with neighbors, the community board, and whoever turns out to own the parcel.
Critique and correction are the point. If you know why this will not work, that is the most useful thing anyone can send me.
Trevor MacDermid · trevor@tenmississippi.com · (917) 796-1184