About this contentTue 16 May 2023 05.00 EDT
On a drizzly Friday night, Rosana Zapata was mapping out a changing neighborhood.
Using Sharpie and pencil, the 18-year-old sketched her world on printer paper: a street intersection, a small parking lot, a lit-up sign for fried chicken. “I have a lot of memories there,” Zapata told a small group of young artists seated at school desks, who had each drawn their own favorite neighborhood spots.
These treasured locations stand against an increasingly difficult-to-ignore backdrop: truck traffic, driven partly by an e-commerce boom.
In the last decade, Red Hook – a Brooklyn neighborhood whose waterfront faces the upper New York harbor – has undergone cataclysmic flooding from Hurricane Sandy as well as years of construction in the neighborhood’s large public housing complex, the Red Hook Houses. Now, residents face a sudden buildup of last-mile warehouse facilities.
Since late 2021, Amazon has opened two facilities in the neighborhood, and it’s set to open a third later this year. Together, the three structures will comprise more than 800,000 sq feet of warehousing space and parking, with one facility’s 90ft walls casting shadows across a community garden.
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