Falconworks Artists Group will present new work in the ongoing ”Off the Hook” performance series. Off the Hook consists of original plays written by young people age 12-16 from Red Hook, and performed by the workshop participants alongside professional actors from throughout New York City. The shows are the culmination of a three-month workshop in playwriting and acting.

The performances will take place on Friday, December 14 at 7 p.m. and Saturday, December 15 at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. in the auditorium of PS 15-The Patrick F. Daly School on Sullivan Street (between Van Brunt and Richards Streets) in Red Hook. Admission is free. Call 718-395-3218 for reservations and information. Also, visit www.falconworks.com.

This week’s New York Magazine offers their 2 cents (or 4,600 words) on the present state of Red Hook. The article is the latest follow-up on last summer’s Timeout article which declared that the neighborhood had “Arrived.”

Since then, Red Hook’s buzz has waned while two bars and a restaurant have closed—prompting the New York Post to write “Call it ‘Dead Hook’”.

New York Magazine’s Adam Sternbergh took a more in-depth approach in the article entitled, “The Embers of Gentrification.” Sternbergh quotes many residents as he pops into local bars, restaurants and last month’s “A Taste of Red Hook” fundraiser for the Red Hook Initiative. While eulogizing the neighborhood’s “It”-status, he summarizes that a failure to gentrify Red Hook could have positive implications beyond Hamilton Ave.

In that sense, Red Hook is lucky to be Dead Hook: on the firebreak of super-gentrification, the neighborhood was spared, rather than consumed. And in the future, when we look back at these gold-rush years, we might remember Red Hook not as the Wild West outpost that was the last hot neighborhood to gentrify, but as more like the Alamo—the first hot neighborhood that didn’t.