Hurricane Sandy – Red Hook Recovery

My husband and I chose this little neighborhood to live and work in 2010. Red Hook is not like any of the other neighborhoods where we have lived. People are smiley, you can smell the salty ocean breeze in the air, there is a little main street where you can find small businesses and from the shore one can see the skyscrapers of Manhattan. When the storm hit, we were in Japan visiting family. Flying back right away was not a possibility. Over four feet of water flooded the inside of our home and workshop. All our furniture, bookshelves, machinery, and tools… everything was soaked in oily sewage water. It was painful and frustrating not to be able to be there. Our incredible friends and landlords jumped in to salvage whatever they could, but I couldn’t help thinking about our workshop and all our iron tools, which were now rusting in the floodwater. I collected my tools gradually over 16 years. Some had a long history and sentimental value. When we returned home and saw the damage for the first time, it froze my head. Familiar things were all moved around, covered with sand and dirt and soaked in storm water. It took me a while to comprehend what was happening to us, and also to the whole neighborhood. It was hard to know where to start. I was scared and anxious about being able to work and create without having the place that I loved working in. I felt that our lives stopped for a while without a home and a place to work. I felt dislocated and lost. We lived out of suitcases for 5 months while we sorted through what was salvageable. Friends, family and even strangers supported us tremendously, both physically and psychologically. Their words, physical labor and donations made us stronger and kept us going. We couldn’t have done it without them. This experience definitely gave me the opportunity to contemplate larger questions and values. Starting from scratch takes a lot of work and patience. The only thing that we could do was keep at it with a positive attitude. One year from Sandy, although we are still salvaging and organizing, I finally feel that I am back on my feet. I hadn’t originally intended to write down my story into words, but after thinking about it in the context of healing together with my community; I wanted to share my story with people who might still be suffering or having similar experiences. The importance of home and a place to work where we function freely is something we all cherish. We still chose to live in Red Hook. We love it here.

I was a full-time working artist until Hurricane Sandy made devastating landfall. On the evening of October 29th, 2012, the first floor of my Brooklyn studio building on the Red Hook Waterfront was swept with seven feet of water. My space on the second floor was untouched, but all of my friends and neighbors below were completely devastated— their artwork, equipment, and livelihood vanished. I was grateful for having not been directly affected, but also traumatized for witnessing devastation all around me. Instantly I was inspired to help others get their lives back on track. I began volunteering full-time in the recovery effort and was quickly hired by NY Cares and later by the organization Respond & Rebuild to run Volunteer Coordination in The Rockaways to clean homes free of mold and debris with the work of volunteers.

These experiences led me to found the nonprofit The Artist Volunteer Center