The Valentino Pier, completed summer after much wrangling and pressure from the neighborhood, does command one of the best views of New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty in the city. In another transaction, the Port Authority in 1992 sold developer Greg O’Connell 28 acres, 10 of them on the waterfront, for the bargain price of $500,000. O’Connell redeveloped the Beard Street Pier into space for small manufacturing and has helped bring several businesses into the neighborhood and to provide a half-mile of waterfront public esplanade.
This first phase of the public waterfront access plan is constructed as an open pier where O’Connell hosts to the annual Red Hook waterfront arts festival, the Young People’s Performance Festival and the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition exhibits. Red Hook is also home to the largest concentration of Civil War-era warehouses in the city. In 1995 the Port Authority finally sold the Grain Terminal, built in 1922 off Halleck Street to receive grain shipments coming through the Erie Canal.
O’Connell’s Beard Street Pier was once home to the Trolley Museum. Red Hook resident Bob Diamond started the small museum in the 1990s with the intention of linking the neighborhood to Carroll Gardens once again. He received $210,000 through the federal Intermodal Surface Transportation Equity Act (ISTEA), in 1996, and started constructing the project but he experienced financial troubles and the project's future is uncertain.
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Waterfront Museum History	Red Hook History	Brooklyn Books