We didn’t know that Red Hook “until recently wasn’t a neighborhood” until a GL reader pointed us in the direction of Time Out New York’s 2007 Eat Out Awards. And, there in the “Readers’ Choices section,” in the entry about Good Fork in Red Hook, appears the following curious–well, utterly freaking bizarre–statement: “It’s significant that this double winner is in Red Hook, which until recently wasn’t a neighborhood, much less a dining destination.”

So, we looked at the sentence over and over and over and each time we read it, it still said the same thing. To which all we can says is: WTF?

Did the writer mean to say that or is it a vanished adjective or phrase? It is, frankly, hard to think of any good possibilities here. Did it originally read “Red Hook wasn’t a nice neighborhood” or “Red Hook wasn’t a safe neighborhood” or “Red Hook wasn’t a neighborhood you’d want to visit“? Looks to us like someone cut something out, but forgot to cut the rest of the sentence. Our reader writes:

I wonder what the long-time residents of that not-neighborhood would say. So it’s only a neighborhood if trendy and often rich white people move in? As a long time resident (25 years) of Sunset Park (and, no, there really ISN’T a neighborhood called “Greenwood Heights” — it’s Sunset Park), I’m a little tired of the whole “I just DISCOVERED this precious little neighborhood” thing…I think Time Out owes the ‘hood a BIG apology.

Time Out actually ran an excellent story on Red Hook by Gabriel Cohen last year. For the record, Red Hook was settled in 1636 and was a village before being annexed to Brooklyn. (See image above, which is Red Hook in 1875.) It is, in point of fact, one of the oldest neighborhoods in all of New York City. Hey, we all make mistakes–there’s probably an idiotic typo in this item. But there are boo boos and, then, there are bigger ones and this is certainly an interesting one.