Red Hook Apocalypse: How Sandy Undid an Up-and-Coming New York Neighborhood Seth Wenig / AP Men dispose of shopping carts full of food damaged by Hurricane Sandy at the Fairway supermarket in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, N.Y., on Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2012. The quirky wooden two-storey storefronts of Red Hook's Van Brunt street are more reminiscent of a Cape Cod fishing town than the cookie-cutter architecture of the brownstone, townhouse and housing-project symmetry of the Brooklyn neighborhoods that surround it. And the area's idiosyncratic separateness from much of the city has long been reinforced by it being bypassed by all of the arterial subways that connect the Brooklyn with Manhattan and Queens. It's that quirkiness, as well as the gorgeous views across New York harbor-Lady Liberty outside your front window and the fresh sea air-that has attracted scores of young hipsters and the associated restaurants, coffee shops, artisanal distilleries and other small businesses of the booming Brooklyn-cuisine scene. It has also lately attracted some major retail destination stores - the Fairway supermarket in a 19th Century coffee warehouse at the water's edge attracting shoppers from throughout the borough on weekends, while the massive IKEA outlet services the whole city - subsidizing the water taxi fees of Manhattanites coming to buy space-saving furniture for their tiny apartments. MORE: Is Your Subway Line Running? A ghostly silence hung over the normally bustling IKEA store on Wednesday, a few security personnel the only humans to be seen as gulls soared overhead in the gray skies. The store was largely spared water damage, but without power, there was no business to be done. The city had disconnected Red Hook's electricity on Monday night, having ordered the neighborhood's residents to evacuate. Tuesday morning, all along Van Brunt Street, however, the air was thick with the steady thrumming of sump-pumps all the way up and down Van Brunt, every building having had its basement flooded, the arriviste businesses and long-time residents finding one another at a kind of clean-up block-party-meets-wake, counting the cost of Sandy's devastation, soldiering on in the knowledge that whatever they've suffered has been suffered by all their neighbors too. Sometimes, it takes a disaster to remind folks that they're part of a single community whether they choose to recognize it or not. Steve Linares, chef at Fort Defiance shows TIME his flooded basement. Our refrigerators are down there, embedded into the concrete. They're ruined. It's going to take a long time to pull them out of there and replace them. He estimates the damage at $100,000, and says FEMA has been meeting with small business owners in the area, although he doesn't know what they've offered. We don't know when we'll be able to open again, but we're here helping the owner. We like him, he's a good guy. And it's in our interests to get him up and running as quickly as possible. There's a similar spirit of cooperation throughout the community: "Everybody is helping one another," says Linares. People are sharing sump pumps, hoses and generators, doing whatever they can to help their neighbors get through this. A couple of doors down, Ben Schneider who runs the Asian-crossover bistro Good Fork, has a table set up on the sidewalk from which he's providing his neighbors and volunteers free coffee and bagels, as well as serving as a clearing house for generators, pumps and other vital equipment being shared along the street. "Red Hook is like a small town," says Schneider. It's natural that we want to help each other and get through this together. The water in his dining room reached near table top height, "but the basement, where pretty much everything happens in these restaurants, is finished." Corey Calabrese leads a group of volunteers from door to door, telling residents and business owners of a planned community meeting later that evening, being organized by the Red Hook Initiative. She worries that businesses seem to have a lot more help at hand than some of the older residents, who need some strong arms and backs to help them move furniture out of flooded basement apartments. MORE: A Guide to Brooklyn's Hottest Local Spirits Every business along Van Brunt and the Pier that juts out into the bay at its end has been devastated, while the water taxis that bring people to and from IKEA and ply the commuter route along the Brooklyn littoral bob uncertainly alongside a pier twisted and mangled like some wire tie. Down the street, in Fairway's parking lot, the store's full fleet of trolleys is being rolled out of the stores, stacked high with goods, which workers in their maroon uniform shirts are cataloging and tossing in a dumpster adjacent to a giant FEMA truck. The security guard who won't give his name won't let anyone enter the grounds, but allows that the store has been pretty much destroyed. Walking around the side of the building, that assessment would be confirmed by the water mark more than seven feet up a wall. The store's pier-side location offers an exquisite view on fresh ocean breeze on a Sunday afternoon, but it also put it directly in the path of what must have been a 15 foot-wave cresting the eight-food breakwater. A stench of meat beginning to rot hangs over the muddied rear entrance and refrigeration trucks are loaded. Around the corner at Sunny's Bar, Mike Horenstein, a 26-year veteran of the neighborhood with a salty grey mustache smiles, is undeterred. "We didn't leave," he says, "because they told us to evacuate for Hurricane Irene, and nothing happened." But he's sardonic: "We'll rebuild it better. One thing we've learned: Sandbags don't make any difference in a storm like this. At the nearby headquarters of Steve's Key Lime Pies, whose tart treats are legend throughout the greater New York area, Samantha Citrin is only just coming to grips with the scale of the damage. "We're all helping each other," she says. We're good like that. She's not sure when Steve's will get baking again. On the ocean side of the same pier, the staff of the production kitchen of Mile End deli, whose smoked-brisket and other Montreal-Jewish fare have made it an instant legend of the Brooklyn new food movement, are in DIY hazmat suits, scrubbing bleach onto the floors and wall of a devastated production facility that has suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. A disconsolate Max Levine shows me around, making sure I see the brand new massive smoking ovens destroyed by the saltwater. One of his partners, Noah Barnamoff is blunt: "The businesses and residents of Red Hook need help. We've come here and invested to help revitalize a historic neighborhood. But after this devastation, everyone should know: We can't rebuild this community without assistance. PHOTOS: Brownsville: Inside One of Brooklyn's Most Dangerous Neighborhoods Residents and business owners aren't sure of what sort of assistance they can expect. So far, what they're hearing is that FEMA will offer low-interest loans. But for many, that's not going to be enough. Outside a flooded duplex apartment on Coffey Street, landlord Gino Vitale is helping his tenants pump out the water. Nor is it only sea water. "There was poo floating in it," says tenant Elizabeth Freund. The sewer backed up. Vitale estimates the damage his 16 buildings have suffered at $600,000. Does he have flood insurance? He laughs. He suffered $80,000 damage from Irene, he says, and his insurance company sent him a check for $4,000. Much of the furniture from Freund's basement apartment, which is still under eight inches of water two days after the storm surge, is stacked disconsolately on the sidewalk. Downstairs, a child's sneaker and a drum stick float by in the murky water. Freund, an artist, and her family evacuated when the surge began, but now she's sleeping on the sofa at her upstairs neighbor. I needed to be here as soon as possible, it's hard to be anywhere else when all you want to do is get started on fixing your place. Mateo Zlatar, who runs a nearby app-design studio that fronts onto the Gowanus Canal, had thought on the eve of the storm to raise his computers off the floor and place them on a long table, which also held a bowl containing a single goldfish. When I came in on Tuesday morning, the fishbowl was there, still full of water, but the fish was gone. The water mark on the adjacent wall that reached almost five feet suggested that the goldfish would have enjoyed an hour or two of unprecedented freedom, albeit in water both salty and toxic before its demise. The Gowanus Canal, after all, is a superfund site. The computers wouldn't have lasted as long. MORE: Brooklyn's All-Volunteer Ambulance Corps