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New Page! Mary Whalen history fact sheet tours  with video by Bill Desjardins our YouTube page  Guide to nautical nomenclature is below the photos.

The Mary Whalen celebrated her 70th birthday party in Atlantic Basin the first Saturday of December 2008.  Some 500 attended.

New York City’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) arranged access for PortSide to hold this, the first public event, in Atlantic Basin.  Venetia Lannon, Senior Vice President of Maritime/Transportation Policy of the EDC said, “Public access to Atlantic Basin is one of the demands that we have heard clearly from the Red Hook community and is key in formulating new development plans.  The Mary Whalen's birthday party showed that PortSide, with its ambitious vision for public programming and inherent links to the community's maritime past and present, is a perfect partner to facilitate public access at the Atlantic Basin."   Press release  more photos

Where to find her:
She moves.  Currently she is in the Red Hook containerport, north side of Pier 9B.  You can see her from the IKEA ferry and Governor's Island.  Thank you American Stevedoring for the free berth, electricity, labor and frequent loan of tools! 

The long term Plan:
The Whalen is envisioned as part of PortSide's home base and a physical attraction and event location.  More at page ABOUT.

The tanker will be respectfully repurposed and enlivened by changing activities.  She will hold many of the activities researched in our business plan; however, not all of them fit aboard. We need space ashore to launch other programs, especially the Flotsam Project.

The long tanker shape provides a big deck for a stage, audience area, patio or outdoor café.  The 2,800sq ft of cargo tanks below the main deck will be converted to exhibit, classroom and function space.  The vintage cabins, wheelhouse and galley will be restored.

We have installed spudwells, (huge steel sleeves through the hull) so we can use spuds (internal pilings).   Having spuds will enable The Whalen to visit communities that lack a pier or piers with tie-up infrastructure. Many new waterfront parks have no cleats or bollards on their piers, and many communities lack a formal waterfront park at all. Though she is quite long, The Whalen is shallow draft (8’ in the stern) and can therefore visit the many shallow areas of  New York's shoreline. All she has to do is drop spuds and lower a gangway.

The Whalen made history: 
All mariners in the USA today benefit from a legal case involving the the Mary A. Whalen.  More

Physical condition:
The Whalen is a handsome workboat in weary condition - volunteer and help us paint! - but she is in better shape than a lot of Red Hook real estate ashore.  She is adorned with lots of brass.  Though she is built of steel, she has a lot of wood trim and the lines of a wood boat, meaning she has sheer (or a concave longitudinal curve) to her decks, camber (a convex transverse curve) to her pilothouse, and she has "shape" or tumblehome to the sides of her house (as if the walls leaned inward).  She was built before Americans wasted so much electricity meaning she makes great use of natural light and ventilation. In comparison, many modern tugboats have cabins or galleys with no portholes at all; they depend on electric lights and air conditioning.

Galley:  The floor is ceramic tile; the fridge and freezer are in a paneled, wood cabinet.  The galley stove burns diesel and was patented in 1918.  We used it to cook breakfast during this family visit. PortSide looks forward to hosting SeaScouts and other groups aboard in this kind of atmosphere.		Wheelhouse:  The doors and windows are teak. The windows open down so the captain could yell out to the crew.  (This boat was built before there were PA systems.)  By fall 2009, much of this has been repainted. New foto coming soon!
Fiddley deck: the level over the engine. A massive engine, probably bigger than your bedroom, lurks under the grating. It is a 1938 Fairbanks Morse direct-reversing diesel engine.  It has been cannibalized, but the Whalen can provide programs without a running engine. When she needs to move, we call a tug. Thank you K-Sea for all those tows!		Captain's cabin:  We've begun stripping paint off the brass of the portholes and the silver metal porthole surrounds. The rainy weather of summer 2009 forced us to work a lot indoors.
Progress! a BEFORE photo of half the PortSide office:  two cabins that were combined into one by the former owners.  Only the hanging lockers remain from the original built-in fixtures.  All bunks, lockers and shelves were built in as furniture would slide or crash around.		AFTER photo of same half of PortSide office:  The office holds two work stations and a lot of files.  One more cabin was stripped of  bunks and is in the process of becoming an office and multimedia space.

View from the wheelhouse (left).  The long rectangle is the deck over the cargo tanks. There are eight of them, four either side of a centerline bulkhead.  They are 104' long and the width of the boat 31.5' for a total of 2,800 square feet below deck.  The raised area up forward (the foredeck) covers the pump room, the pump engine room, and a space way up forward called the forepeak.  The pumps were used to empty and fill the cargo tanks with the fuel products the tanker delivered.  We will remove them so these spaces can be re-purposed.  The cargo boom was used to move the fuel hoses. We will use it to move all sorts of stuff.  The center of the deck is raised (the ullage trunk); this will be the public-access patio.  We need to put up railings so little ones don't fall over the edge. Overtime, as the tanks get renovated, the tank hatches will be removed, a cargo hatch will be cut in the deck near the boom, two staircases will be installed (we salvaged two from the old Todd Shipyard) cowl vents will be installed for air. The lower decks either side will be "work decks" primarily reserved for PortSide staff, boat stuff, and landing area for boats that tie-up alongside. cargo tank P4 (right) photo by Claudia Steinberg

Nautical nomenclature:

Ship parts:
beam: width of the boat
bow: front end
bulkhead: wall
bunk: bed
cabin: bedroom
cowl vent: chimney to catch the wind and funnel air into the boat, shaped like an empty cowlneck sweater. They can be turned to catch wind or avoid rain.
galley: kitchen
hatch: a specific sort of door.  Generally speaking hatches are on horizontal surfaces (decks) whereas "doors" are vertical. Some doors (cabin doors) look like house doors are called doors. Other "doors" are watertight doors and have spinning handles (dogs) that seal them tightly.  Hatches are also constructed to be watertight and are "dogged down" to seal them. 
head: bathroom, and sometimes specifically the toilet
locker: a storage area. A hanging locker is a clothes closet with hangers.
overhead: the ceiling
porthole:  the round windows characteristic of boats. Their small size, shape and stout construction prevents their being smashed by waves. In this day and age, wheelhouse windows are rarely round as the person steering needs to see in a wide arc, but the Whalen's large rectangular wheelhouse windows are protected by being higher up on the vessel than you ever want to have waves hit.  The Whalen's wheelhouse windows are effectively three stories high.
spuds: essentially pilings that pierce the vessel, usually barges.  They pin a vessel in place while allowing it to float up and down with the tide. (New York Water Taxi docks are spud barges.) The spud fits in a spudwell (a sleeve) that prevents the water from entering the main body of the vessel. In comparison, an anchor allows the vessel to swing in an arc. We are being spudded since many neighborhoods lack piers, or have piers without cleats and bollards (things to tie ships to).
stern: back end of the boat.
wheelhouse/pilothouse: the driver's seat; where the boat is steered
zincs:  or "sacrificial anodes" are attached to the hull and other important metal pieces (rudder, shaft) to protect the metal from corrosion that results from electrical action in the water. The zinc is a weaker metal than the steel or bronze of the boat you are trying to protect, hence it is  consumed by the electrical, corrosive energies first and is "sacrified" as a way to save your necessary metal stuff.  The Whalen will need about 32 twenty-five pound zincs.

Spatial orientation:
aft: in the back (the galley is aft) or behind something (aft of that porthole)
abeam: off the boat and opposite the middle of the boat (the rock was abeam us when we saw it.)  Compare to midships.
astern: behind the boat
forward: in front (life rafts are forward) or in front of something (forward of that porthole)
heel: when a boat leans over on its side (as sailboats do most of the time). Boats all rotate in space, unlike houses; and there is an extensive vocabulary (heel, trim, pitch, roll, yaw, heave) to describe their movements along different axis, but we won't tackle that all now.
midships: in the middle of the boat (your cabin is amidships). Compare to abeam.
port: left (as in left or right side; or port and starboard on boats).
starboard: right (as in left or right side; or port and starboard on boats).

Thank You's:
Thanks to our friends and volunteers who have helped so far: the three mighty scrubbers Patti Kelly, Jayme Keenan, and Debbie Romano; muckmaid Erica Reynolds, Richard Brandt, Gary Baum and Amy Sisti, Captain Tom Teague, Captain Mark McDonnell, Julie Nadel of North River Historic Ships, Huntley Gill of the Fireboat Harvey.  Thanks for abundant advice and material from both Captain Pam Hepburn of the Tug Pegasus Preservation Project and David Sharps from Red Hook's own Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge.

Thanks for research by Captain Dick Forster, Ed Drury, Thomas Rinaldi (who told us about the Supreme Court case involving The Whalen) and thanks to the folks at K-SEA Transportation, especially Rick Falcinelli, for history and documents, free towing, generous advice and donations.  K-SEA, under the name Eklof, was the last company to run The Whalen as a tanker.  To Jan Andrusky at Weeks Marine, thanks for great networking and connecting us to the right people.

Thanks too for special services provided by our contractors and suppliers:  Charles Deroko, Surveyor; the pump out folks at Clean Water of New York; Independent Testing; John Tretout of Amorica Paint.  Thanks much to Bernie Mellies, the marine engineer who drew up the spudwell plan pro bono.

Thanks to American Stevedoring, Inc. for providing us a free home, electricity and labor for almost two years.  Thanks to GMD Shipyard who provided us a free home during the winter months of 2008!  Pier D is a great sunny berth and we miss it!

Thanks to our supportive friends at Hughes Marine and Reinauer Transportation in Erie Basin who were so patient over eighteen months while we considered buying the boat, looked for a berth, insurance and a shipyard. They could have sent The Whalen to the scrapyard; but they gave us the time to find a way to save her.  Thanks to them too for advice, material support and equipment storage, especially Bob Hughes, Brian Hughes, Phil Marion and Tommy George.

And thanks to all of you who have sent historic photos of the Whalen at work:  Steve Cryan; Barry Masterson; Bob Mattson; Dave Boone, and for newer photos and video thanks to Helen Tschudi, Blake McDowell, Jenny Kane, Bernie Ente, Frank Lynch.

Thanks to the Red Hook businesses who have sponsored our events or made in-kind donations:  Atlantis, LeNell's, Liberty Sunset Garden Center, Tini Winebar, Steve's Key Lime Pie.

And thanks to our dozens of volunteers! Your enthusiasm keeps us inspired. Your work keeps us advancing the ball!

Thanks to our friends and volunteers who have helped so far: the three mighty scrubbers Patti Kelly, Jamye Keenan, and Debbie Romano; muckmaid Erica Reynolds, Richard Brandt, Gary Baum and Amy Sisti, Captain Tom Teague, Captain Mark McDonnell, Julie Nadel of North River Historic Ships, Huntley Gill of the Fireboat Harvey.  Thanks for abundant advice and material from both Captain Pam Hepburn of the Tug Pegasus Preservation Project and David Sharps from Red Hook's own Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge.

Thanks for research by Captain Dick Forster, Ed Drury, Thomas Rinaldi (who told us about the Supreme Court case involving The Whalen) and thanks to the folks at K-SEA Transportation, especially Rick Falcinelli, for history and documents.  K-SEA, under the name Eklof, was the last company to run The Whalen as a tanker.  To Jan Andrusky at Weeks Marine, thanks for great networking and connecting us to the right people.

Thanks too for special services provided by our contractors and suppliers:  Charles Deroko, Surveyor; the pump out folks at Clean Water of New York; Independent Testing; John Tretout of Amorica Paint.  Thanks much to the marine engineer who drew up the spudwell plan pro bono but wishes to remain anonymous; you know who you are!

Thanks to American Stevedoring, Inc. for providing us a free home, electricity and labor for almost two years.  Thanks two to GMD Shipyard who provided us a free home during the winter months of 2008!  Pier D is a great sunny berth and we miss it!

Thanks to our supportive friends at Hughes Marine and Reinauer Transportation in Erie Basin who were so patient over eighteen months while we considered buying the boat, looked for a berth, insurance and a shipyard. They could have sent The Whalen to the scrapyard; but they gave us the time to find a way to save her.  Thanks to them too for advice, material support and equipment storage, especially Bob Hughes, Brian Hughes, Phil Marion and Tommy George.

And thanks to all of you who have sent historic photos of the Whalen at work:  Steve Cryan; Barry Masterson; Bob Mattson; and for newer photos and video thanks to Helen Tschudi, Blake McDowell, Jenny Kane, Bernie Ente, Frank Lynch.

Thanks to the Red Hook businesses who have sponsored our events or made in-kind donations:  Atlantis, LeNell's, Liberty Sunset Garden Center, Tini Winebar, Steve's Key Lime Pie,

And thanks to our dozens of volunteers! Your enthusiasm keeps us inspired. Your work keeps us advancing the ball!