The Brooklyn Waterfront Research Center cancelled its annual conference due to the Coronavirus lockdown. What is sad and deeply ironic is that the focus for that year’s conference was “A Good Drink, A Good Meal, and a Good Night’s Sleep: Hospitality along the Brooklyn Waterfront.”  The conference was meant to look back on the history of hospitality along the waterfront and then to examine what was—until that year—a burgeoning industry. The pandemic continues to makes us wait in trepidation, anticipating how hospitality along the Brooklyn waterfront will be affected by Covid 19, a most inhospitable intruder.

Instead, you can check out the White Paper commissioned by BWRC for the conference. Entitled, “From Brooklyn to ‘Brooklyn:’ The Cultural Transformation of Leisure, Pleasure, and Taste,” the paper offers a history of hospitality along the Brooklyn waterfront by looking back at the industry’s glory days during Brooklyn’s industrial past and tracing its decline and ultimate resurrection.