back of the big blue ikea in red hook, brooklyn you can find cranes. not the birds, although they are likely nearby, but the machines, standing on towering legs like giraffes in windbent high grass. 
they are scattered all over, on piers, in parking lots, up among the ships. they are the remnants of the demolished todd shipyards, unrescuable but still very much present in the park ikea finally agreed to in order to appease the city they wanted to build in. and there is plenty to say about a store like that but if you walk right past it instead you are staring at 
the cranes and this is where brooklyn was glorious. the shipyards. huge steaming monsters carting off all the things brooklyn was making back when that's what brooklyn did. if you are proud of the history of a place it is hard to watch the physical evidence of that history disappear bit by bit. but the 
cranes, having been surrounded by this park of sorts, are here even after what was around them has succumbed, cogs and belts and chains stilled, just for looking at. but looking at them is something else, to be sure. 
i am not from red hook and i do not remember the shipyard in its heyday or the graving dock where the big ships came for repairs or the sugar factory. and i am not such a fool that i think our history is a history of prettiness and light or that this place was beautiful when people worked in those cranes. i am sure it was dangerous and terrifying and miserably sweltering in 
summer, then bitterly icy in winter. i am sure those machines i stand under maimed folks, maybe killed some. i would not have wanted to stand on these docks, climb the bare ladders to the cabs of the cranes, try to duck the heavy metal hooks swinging across that narrow space. i can imagine cables snapping and slicing through hands or legs or faces. our early industrial history was as bloody as war. but there is something about the technology of our ancestors, the work they had to do to get us all here, that seems to amaze more than a few of us. and so no matter how this small space got itself roped off from the rest of time and progress in a city hurting for space, it is here. seeing these cranes still standing up where they have always lived helps us understand who we were that long ago. maybe it helps us understand where we are now a little. or maybe they're just pretty to look at.
but there are shipping terminals still. huge ships move in and out of the docks and fat tugs scoot up alongside barges. i don't know where they go or what they carry but they go. there are ships you can't be sure about. maybe they leave this still water and go out to sea and maybe they don't. probably they don't. they are dark like old houses in scooby-do. there is paint but it's mostly gone, revealing bloated wood or rusting metal. it's not clear why they
sit there but there they sit anyway. seeing them is like seeing wild animals on your street. you know there are ships and you know they go from port to port but you never think about them cutting through the water right there where you can see them. when you consider how fast everything else moves through the world it seems so unlikely something floating on water would still be so important. you try to imagine them roaming over tall waves where there is nothing in sight but the place where the water and sky touch. 
what happens when you walk back behind the blue ikea in red hook, though, is that you see them. you see one and then another and you keep seeing them when you turn, when you walk past a tree or around a corner. you would not think things so large would keep popping up from behind things. but they do. you will look at the cogs and gears and the rail lines that made these 
seem like living things. you will hear what you have always heard. how this place was something magnificent back in the day and how it is nothing now, destroyed, a sad shell. you will hear how this place has been an eyesore for too long, how it needs cleaning up. whatever the argument, you will hear how ugly it is now. right now. but you know that is not true. you are looking out at it and you see what is there, the cranes and everything else.
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