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NYC needs more #piers4boats! PortSide’s blog covers our WaterStories programs, urban waterways issues, the BLUEspace, development plans for the NYC waterfront, our ship MARY A. WHALEN, other historic vessels, and boats and ships of all sizes.
REPOSTING: PortSide NewYork Sandy Story Part 1: saving MARY WHALEN
/10/27/19 We are reposting this 2013 blogpost to foster flood preparation. The post describes four days of preparing for Sandy. Today’s gale and the approaching date of 10/29 is reminding us of Sandy - and we want you to know about PortSide’s event on 10/29/19 at 3:15pm, the unveiling of a Sandy High Water Mark sign at the pedestrian entrance to Atlantic Basin, Red Hook, Brooklyn, corner of Pioneer and Conover Streets. At 4pm, the Barnacle Parade kicks off up the block. The parade is the way Red Hook commemorates Sandy since the one-year anniversary of the devastating storm.
This is PortSide NewYork's hurricane Sandy story, installment one.
Installment one is a personal report by Carolina Salguero, Director of PortSide, speaking as Shipkeeper of the MARY A. WHALEN. This installment covers PortSide's time in port preparing for Sandy, riding out the storm on the tanker, assessing our damage. We think the ship-related segment of our Sandy story is important because it shows how the maritime community in the port of NY-NJ spent days preparing for Sandy. The maritime community has something to offer inland neighbors in terms of understanding how to assess flood risks and prepare for them.
The second installment of our Sandy story will cover PortSide's effort to help inland Red Hook, Brooklyn recover from the storm.
The third installment will cover lessons learned and ideas for the future.
What a difference four days can make
Thursday, 10/25/12, Sandy minus four, the PortSide crew is excited to be hosting an elementary school class aboard the tanker MARY A. WHALEN. After finishing a TankerTour and jolly lunch for 30 on deck with the City + Country School and waving goodbye to their coach bus, Dan Goncharoff says “have you been looking at this storm coming up the coast?”
C + C School visit, Thursday morning
I check the weather websites. This looks like hurricane Irene plus some.
We convene a crew meeting and start hurricane preparations. School docents become a Sandy prep squad. By end of day, the deck was cleared of anything that could blow, and I am calling and emailing around for crew to help prepare and to ride out the storm on the ship.
Friday morning, after more info about the storm, I am trying to find a protected berth for the tanker MARY A. WHALEN. Just days before, we received word that our application had been accepted; the ship was on the National Register of Historic Places! Since the MARY is not fully restored, she lacks some equipment that would help her in a big storm: a working engine (eg, the ability to run away), machinery to raise her anchors if dropped to hold us in place, and a winch to haul in docklines under load. Compensating for that involves some extra forethought.
Despite our efforts, we can’t find a good alternate berth for the MARY outside of the Red Hook Container Terminal. Hughes Marine says “We’re out of space. You’ll be able to walk across Erie Basin by the time this is over; it will be so full of vessels.” A contact at a shipyard says “we flooded during Irene, and this one looks to be worse, you sure you want to be over here?” “No and good luck,” is my answer.
After more checking of the weather, I decide to move the MARY where she rode out Irene, on the other side, the north side, of our current Pier 9B. (The south side lines up with the end of Degraw Street). For non-sailors, here’s how this kind of calculation goes:
Winds were expected to start from NE, swing around to the East and end up SW, but this could always change. If rough weather were coming from anything west to southwest, our current position has us exposed to the wind from the southwest and the fetch (long stretch of water over which wind can build up waves) from Staten Island up the Buttermilk Channel.
The fendering (the wooden cribbing protecting ship and pier) is not robust on this side. A big advantage to the north side are some pilings at the inshore end that stand much taller than the pier and which would help prevent the tanker from riding up onto the pier if the surge were really high.
The north side would have us more exposed from winds at the start of the storm, but the hill of Brooklyn Heights and the pier to the north of us (even though it has no shed) would provide a compensating wind break.
As the wind clocked around to the south, a wall of containers near the bulkhead would provide a windbreak to the east, and the pier shed would be an enormous windbreak once the wind went south of east.
A final consideration was that in the extreme case of docklines failing while we were on the northside, the tanker had a chance of bouncing around inside the space between the two piers for a while, maybe long enough for us to get other lines out or call for help; whereas, on the southside of the pier, if our docklines broke, tide or wind could shove the ship up on the rocks nearby to the south (surely the death of the tanker) or shoot us down the Buttermilk Channel towards unknown risks.
I began calling tugboat companies to request a tow. Everyone is busy with storm prep so getting a tug takes a while. I have the tug turn the MARY around so her stern faces east, putting her heavier end towards the expected wind direction. Her light bow is my worry.
The tug’s crew helps us put out storm lines, more lines than we would normally use, and double and triple parted lines. (Instead of a line just going from boat to dock, a triple-parted line goes from dock to boat to dock to boat). The lines are set with a lot of slack to allow the boat to rise during the expected surge. During Sandy, Peter Rothenberg and I will go out in the wind and rain to ease the lines as necessary
From Thursday until Monday, a changing array of volunteers bang through a punch list: gangway lashed to the deck. Gas generator moved near entry hatch and tested. Gasoline, food, and water bought. Weepy portholes caulked. PortaSan moved inside the pier shed so it can't blow away.
More calls to look for crew... Commercial boats have paid crew, but most historic vessels rely on a corps of volunteers and; with so many boats to protect, available bodies were scarce. Compounding that, due to the danger, some spouses do not allow their partners to volunteer on the historic ships during the storm. Danger is one thing for paid crew; as a volunteer, it's another.
I ask Peter Rothenberg, our volunteer museum curator, if he wants to be crew. Peter makes a speedy calculation, “I hesitated for a moment, thinking this may be really unwise, and then said yes, probably being more reckless (brave?) than normally, because I had just lost my mother, and thus she was unable to question my judgment.”
Peter Rothenberg
The harbor is abuzz with chatter on phone, email, and texts sharing weather info, plans, moral support. Mike Cohen has info on the South Street Seaport ships. Mike Abegg is dealing with the Harbor School boats. I talk to tug captains and ask Jan Andrusky, Logistics Manager of Weeks Marine, if she can share weather and Coast Guard updates as she had during Irene. Answer, “yes!” Jan is responsible for floating equipment on the eastern seaboard, the Gulf of Mexico, and more, and has lots of experience and access to weather data.
Bobby Silva, captain of a Reinauer barge up in Albany sends a text: “wish I gave you my keys to move my truck. My baby will be a goner.” Other Reinauer crew who have not been sent out of town on vessels moved their vehicles from Erie Basin to the second floor of the garage at the Gowanus Home Depot and all their vehicles survived.
About a day before Sandy hit, the word comes that the surge would be at least 8 feet. Time to lengthen docklines.
A sign that things will be worse than Irene is that the port moves the stack of containers along the bulkhead. My windbreak to the east is gone. We also hear that the Port Authority will evacuate the port and lock the gates at midday before the surge, so there would be no new help getting to us. I ask the Port Authority Police officer if he will leave port if it gets really bad, “no, I will just drive a dump truck on patrol” is his stalwart answer.
Somewhere in all this, there is an announcement that subways would stop running in advance of the storm, and Mayor Bloomberg declares evacuation for Zone A areas, which include our neighborhood of Red Hook. An evacuation order is not changing my plans, though it could limit my getting help.
My mother calls “you’re not staying on the boat during this are you?” My responsibility is to protect the MARY A. WHALEN and to protect her from doing damage to the property of others. AT 172’ long and 613 gross tons, she is big enough to cause a lot of destruction if she breaks loose.
Sandy is due Monday night. Sunday night, I am one of many recipients of an email telling Red Hook people which bars will be open and what movies are being screened. This makes me wonder: Is the community ashore prepping for Sandy? Has anyone evacuated? After that email, PortSide’s maritime world feels separated from our shoreside neighbors by more than six blocks and a fence.
Monday day, the weather rachets up. My weather station is set up in the galley. A laptop, a clipboard with regular print-outs of NOAA marine weather, updates from Jan, the worst news highlighted in yellow. Peter nabs the ship's cat Chiclet and locks her in. As the weather rises, Chiclet cleans herself incessantly.
I read the shocking news that the HMS BOUNTY has sunk in the storm, at sea. I hear from Paul Amico, a dockbuilder advising us, “I just saw a Don Jon tug heading up the North River with waves breaking over the wheelhouse.” That means 18’ waves in the Hudson.
HMS BOUNTY sinks. Photo courtesy of U.S. Coast Guard
It gets colder and damper. I fire up the galley’s diesel stove, patented in 1918, as much to dry the air as to heat it. As winds rise, Peter and out go out to add extra lines to the tarp covering the wheelhouse windows. After warming up over tea, I get word that the surge would be at least 12’ and would hit in about 5 hours, right at high tide.
12’ is NOT good news. I am keen to keep the ship’s light bow from blowing or floating up onto the pier, my big worry during Irene, a risk to both boat and pier. The MARY’s stern is heavy and sits about 8’ in the water whereas her bow is actually up out of the water -- the forward engine room has been stripped, the forepeak has no ballast water, and she is carrying no cargo. Paul Amico calls, “have you considered a preventer line?” Yes. I turn to Peter, “time to go back out, time for a preventer line.”
We run a line to Pier 9A, the pier 265 feet to the north of us. We have a large collection of lightly-used docklines from tugboat friends. I bend together (that means tie together in mariner speak) two heavy eight-braid tug hawsers, and then add all our other dock lines. To drag this through the water, we tie together an agglomeration of light line (rope) and hand-haul the collection around to the other pier.
We are making the line off to a cleat on Pier 9A as the waters start to rise fast. While heading back to the tanker, the waters crest the bulkhead and pool into the port.
The string piece of the pier is several feet higher than the port landmass, which gives us about 5 minutes to disconnect our shorepower cord, pull it up onto the boat, haul in the ladder, and start the generator.
Somehow, between unplugging the shorepower from the shed and getting the cord onto the shed, our electrical system develops a short. This means the generator turns off every time I plug in the shorepower cord. Peter then runs an extension cord to the generator to keep the laptop and mini fridge running.
So begins 35 nights, of relying on flashlights and one 15-amp extension cord, until our shorepower connection can be repaired.
The waters rise. The port’s exterior lights go out. A container lifts and bobs our way. Humps appear in the water along the pier, like a long Loch Ness monster. I realize I am looking at all the tire fenders floating as high as their straps would allow. Somehow the overhead lights inside the shed stay on, and the windows in the doors afford the surreal view of an indoor sea.
Peter and I watch orange bursts of light over Manhattan. “Probably transformer explosions,” I say. Manhattan goes dark. I watch the water for several hours to make sure it isn’t rising and then sleep for several hours.
Lower Manhattan without power except at Staten Island Ferry Terminal. Jersey to the left, midtown to the right.
Upsticking bolts show where head logs were ripped off the pier by Sandy.
Tuesday’s plan is to shorten the docklines and get off the boat; but the wind is still so high that, even though the shed is a windbreak, the wind roaring over the shed is enough to grab the tippy top of the tanker and push us off the pier. The ebb tide pushes us back onto the pier, and we pull in a little line; then the wind blows us off again. Given how many lines we had out and that they were double and triple parted and since we don’ have a working winch, it takes us three hours of floating back and forth to shorten all the lines and get the boat to the pier.
I get a few worried calls and emails asking us if the MARY is aground. Perplexing, until I learn that a similar tanker, the JOHN B. CADDELL, is aground on Staten Island, a cautionary tale of what can happen if a ship is not well tended before and during such a storm.
This is not us! Tanker JOHN B. CADDELL aground on Staten Island. Via Twitter
At dusk, some volunteers make it in. Jenny Kane, Amy Bucciferro, Paul Amico after inspecting the damage at the DUMBO ferry dock.
I tell Peter that PortSide had historic documents stored in one room in the shed.
Peter looks startled, then irked at me and, as he told us weeks later, “This was news to me and I scrambled to rescue what I could. Unlike riding out a storm on a ship, dealing with wet paper artifacts I was familiar with. I had worked in museums for years, with collections stored in leaky basements, and had rescued a lot of paper ephemera after 9/11. Fearing fused wet paper and mold, I turned the tables on Carolina and charged her to get as many dry sheets and towels as she could find fast.”
PortSide's archive of historic documents is somewhere beneath all this.
I kick in the door to the stevedore's lounge, and we all schlepp tables up the stevedore’s lounge (I find the height of the second floor oddly comforting after the flood). Modern books we junk. Peter begins a painstaking process of separating wet papers, blueprints and photographs, blotting them dry, interleaving them with sheets, weighing them down. I am bushed and crash into my bunk.
Peter works until 4 am, bringing things aboard and slowly toasting some near the galley stove.
Over the next several days, Peter covers most horizontal surfaces in the tanker with drying antique documents. “Some of the blue prints lost most of their blue to the water, and the modern pulp paper fared worse than the rag paper of the 1800s but in the end most of the important items in the collection, if a little worse for wear, were salvaged.”
Wednesday, the Halloween that never was, Peter and I head into the shed to inspect more things.
The hard-to-find vintage engine parts that could repair MARY’s engine have been submerged. Ditto all the historic artifacts from Todd Shipyard. Ditto our electrical transformer.
I make some calls and am told to douse the transformer in fresh water, dry it, and then spray it heavily with di-electric cleaner. We retrieve buckets of water from our rain barrels (there is no running water connection to the ship) and pour them over the transformer. I locate one outlet with power (which blessedly worked for a few days), plug in a fan and park it in front of the transformer. (10/27/19 update: The treatment above worked. We are still using this transformer!)
Drying our rinsed transformer. We were so lucky! Right after several days of drying, the power in the outlet went out. The ebbing waters pinned lots of dunnage around our transformer.
The engine parts are beyond us, and we turn to the artifacts.
Once upon a time, Peter had carefully wrapped each one in paper and identified each with a number and a photo. That labeling system is gone. We unwrap it all and leave stuff to air out. I console myself with the thought that shipyard artifacts have likely been wet before.
An email arrives saying Red Hook restaurants are cooking their food at a community BBQ rather than have it be wasted, BYO charcoal, and Peter and I bike into Red Hook toting some charcoal.
I leave the port with my spirits high. The ship is fine, the artifact loss was minimal. Irene had been a great preparatory experience; we had survived Sandy.
A few blocks down Van Brunt my spirits drop. I was a photojournalist for some 15 years and worked in rough places overseas, and I recognize the signs of disaster. A burm of garbage three to four feet high lines Van Brunt Street. Dazed and muddy people mill around at the corner of Pioneer Street amid the clatter of generators and a tangle of electrical cords.
Peter remarks that it looks like a macabre Christmas. Santas, which had been stored in cellars, are now muddy and atop garbage heaps, or, at the bar Bait and Tackle, set up by the door like a dark joke. In short, the mess ashore is bad, much worse than the damage to PortSide NewYork. I immediately decide that PortSide should come ashore to help our neighbors.
More on that in the next installment.
PortSide NewYork would like to thank the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for their support during Hurricane Sandy while we were in their Red Hook port.
For our latest Sandy relief info, see our blogpost, follow us on Twitter.
Additional reporting and editing by Dan Goncharoff and Peter Rothenberg.
The kind of thing we prevented: how a vessel went up on a pier during Sandy.
Photo by Frank Yacino, crewmember of tug KRISTY ANN REINAUER
How we're helping & your help we need at #Sandy5
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At Sandy5, find out about new PortSide Sandy/resiliency programs and a request to help us as we helped others recover for that superstorm.
Read MoreSummer 2017 preservation internship - as the interns tell it
/The experience of the summer 2017 preservation internship at PortSide, in the interns own words.
Read MoreFREE TankerTours for MARY A. WHALEN's 78th Birthday Sat 5/28
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PortSide NewYork is excited to welcome you aboard our historic flagship, the tanker MARY A. WHALEN in honor of her 78th birthday!
Sat 5/28/16 from 10am-5pm
Sign up for tours on-site. Groups of 20 will be admitted every 20 minutes. No tours at 1:00 & 1:20 as we break for lunch.
Can't make it? For other ways to experience the MARY, see Visitor Info
Flat soled shoes recommended. Directions here
More Ships! On the next pier at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, Fleet Week will have three ships open to visit at the same time. Those ships will be open Thursday through Monday of Memorial Day Weekend. More info here.
Visit historic Red Hook, home to great restaurants, bars, cultural institutions and parks! Info
Please support our restoration of the MARY and other programs, donate to our Red Hook WaterStories campaign. Help us raise $20,000 by the end of June to match a grant. Red Hook WaterStories is funded in part by Councilman Carlos Menchaca and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
More about the MARY A. WHALEN
The MARY A. WHALEN is the only oil tanker cultural center in the world and an icon of Red Hook maritime history. She is the last of her kind in the USA and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. She is significant for her role in the 1975 Supreme Court legal decision U.S. vs Reliable Transfer, a major case in US maritime law. The MARY is a symbol of resiliency because PortSide's crew rode out superstorm Sandy on the ship, and then brought our office equipment ashore to set up and run a hurricane Sandy pop-up aid station.
The MARY A. WHALEN's story is woven into Red Hook WaterStories because she was built for the Red Hook company Ira S. Bushey & Sons and has been based in Red Hook for a good half of her life, first as a working tanker, later as a floating dock and office for Hughes Marine, and as PortSide's flagship since 2007.
The MARY was launched May 21, 1938 at Mathis in Camden, NJ and built for Bushey's, an innovative and unusually diverse maritime company which closed in the 1980s. Bushey's was based at the foot of Court Street and ran a ship yard, fuel terminal and fuel delivery fleet of tugs, tankers and barges. Bushey's built over 200 ships for the Navy and commercial service and had ships built at other yards. Today, the Bushey property remains an active maritime site with the fuel tanks operated by Buckeye and their fuel moved by our friends at Vane Brothers. Vane runs a fleet of tugs and fuel barges and has often towed our MARY A. WHALEN for free. Vane also introduced us to their paint supplier International Paint who has donated all the paint to recoat the decks and house.
Please donate now to support our restoration of the MARY A. WHALEN, public programs aboard which include TankerTours, TankerTime,
and our summer preservation internships with the WHSAD high school,
programs off the ship such as
our Sandy recovery and resiliency work and
Red Hook WaterStories which tells Red Hook maritime history over 400+ years.
Help us match a grant and raise another $20,000 for Red Hook WaterStories by the end of June and donate here!
1860, Slave ship ERIE sold in Atlantic Basin, a major step in movement to end slavery
/On this day, December 5, 1860, the slave ship ERIE was sold at government auction in Atlantic Basin, Red Hook, Brooklyn. One month prior, November 5, 1860, the ship had been condemned and ordered to be sold by the United States District Court. [Please note that this is a correction from our November 5 blogposting. Discussion of this, and other changes are at the bottom of this post.]
This was news of national note.
The African American Maritime Heritage program of PortSide NewYork will explore the African American experience on the water. This includes many stories of great accomplishment and much history that was forgotten and/or deliberately erased. Recovering these WaterStories presents a fuller picture of American history.
This particular blogpost is also part of PortSide NewYork’s Red Hook Waterstories that explores the history of the Red Hook, Brooklyn peninsula along a water theme. PortSide, and our home ship, the MARY A. WHALEN, are located in Atlantic Basin, the location where the slave ship ERIE was sold in 1860.
Red Hook WaterStories is supported by funding from Councilman Carlos Menchaca
The ship was sold, after being captured and impounded by the US Government, for enslaving and importing Africans, a business banned by the federal government under the Piracy Law of 1820, which followed The Slave Trade Act of 1794, two steps in the USA’s long, slow process of devolving and banning the slave trade (the shipping of captured people) and slavery. Slavery was finally banned in 1865. The case of the ERIE was chosen by a US Attorney, a judge, and by President Lincoln himself to signal a major change in policy on slavery and their commitment to end it.
The owner and captain of the Erie, Nathaniel Gordon of Maine, did not get off free as was usually the case. He was tried and found guilty of running a slave ship - and the Piracy Law of 1820 said the punishment was execution. Gordon’s supporters, including members of Congress and even friends of President Lincoln, sought a presidential pardon; but Abraham Lincoln refused due to his conviction that a point about slavery needed to be made with the ERIE and Captain Gordon.
Captain Gordon was distressed, in jail, and attempted suicide. He was resuscitated and was hanged at the Tombs in Manhattan and became the first – and only – importer of slaves to be executed for the crime in the USA. Soon after Gordon’s execution, Abraham Lincoln presented his first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. Several months later, the Proclamation was finalized, followed by the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery.
Timeline from the ERIE to the end of slavery
August 8, 1860, The ERIE was captured close to the coast of Africa.
November 5, 1860, the ERIE was ordered to be sold at auction in Atlantic Basin, Red Hook, Brooklyn
December 5, 1860, the ERIE was sold at auction in Atlantic Basin, Red Hook, Brooklyn, for a reported amount of $7550.
November 9, 1861, after one hung jury and a new trial, Gordon was convicted in the circuit court in New York City. He was sentenced to death by hanging on February 7, 1862. After his conviction, his supporters appealed to President Abraham Lincoln for a pardon which was denied though Gordon was granted some extra time to arrange his affairs.
February 21, 1862, Nathaniel Gordon was executed.
July 22, 1862, President Lincoln read the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet members.
September 22, 1862, after some changes, Lincoln issued the preliminary version which specified that the final document would take effect January 1, 1863
January 31, 1865, the 13th Amendment was passed by the Congress
December 6, 1865, the 13th Amendment was ratified and slavery banned in the USA.
The following is designed as a glimpse into the complex subject of slave ships and slavery. Below we offer some information and links to encourage you to explore the often misunderstood history of slavery in the USA, in New York State, in New York City and in Brooklyn ( a separate city from Manhattan at that time) and the role of the maritime industry in slavery. We ourselves are in the process of conducting more research into the maritime end of the slavery story, and if you want to share some information or get involved, reach out to us via our webpage CONTACT.
In 1860, Nathaniel Gordon and the slaver ERIE in Atlantic Basin were at the center of a major national issue and representative of a major business sector for New York and the northeast. Slavery in the USA is often thought of as a southern activity, a thing of the plantation system; however, slaves were also owned in New York State, and the economy of New York City and Brooklyn, their financial and insurance sectors, maritime activity and trading status were hugely dependent on the economic activity of businesses that owned slaves and/or that processed the products produced by slaves. For example, New York bankers lent to southern plantations, southern cotton produced by slaves was processed in New England textile mills with the raw and finished goods moved by ships from our area and passing through our ports and insured by businesses here.
Over time, and varying by state, there was a layering of state and federal rules limiting the importation of more captured people and changes in the obligation to return escaped slaves. Then states began to prohibit their own populations from owning slaves (but slave owners from other states could visit a non-slave state like New York with their own slaves) and finally slavery was banned completely.
The short 2010 article in the New York Times that told PortSide about the ERIE in Atlantic Basin
Note that Atlantic Basin, Red Hook is called Atlantic Docks at the time and in this article.
Two cropped citations from the New York Herald, January 13, 1861 from the paper's lengthy review of Court actions in the year of 1860. They read as follows:
"November 5 - Judge Betts entered an order condemning the ship Erie as a s slaver and directing her to be sold by the Marshal."
"December 5 - Deputy United States Marshal Thompson, by virtue of a decree of condemnation, sold the slave ship Erie at the Atlantic dock, Brooklyn. The vessel brought $7,550, and the cargo, consisting of oil, water casks and some beef and pork, sold for about $300"
Short Wikipedia bio of Nathaniel Gordon
Nathaniel Gordon (February 6, 1826 – February 21, 1862) was the only American slave trader to be tried, convicted, and executed "for being engaged in the Slave Trade," under the Piracy Law of 1820. Wikipedia
How slave ships avoided the laws against importing Africans as slaves
The prohibited business continued because there were buyers - and a government reluctant to enforce its own prohibitions against the trade. The ships used various strategies to evade detection.
Articles from the 1860s about the ERIE and Nathaniel Gordon
10/10/1860 Chicago Tribune, capture of the slave ship ERIE
Court reporter summarizes the day in court 10/24/1860
Their correspondent reports on slave ship from sea 12/24/1860
A description of slavers arrested the year and a half before the ERIE suggests both an effort to stop the trade and how much capturing and importing of Africans still continued 11/17/1862
"South-street," who keeps a bulletin of the movements of slavers, and reports them through the Evening Post, gives the following statements
11/5/1860 United States Circuit Court; Before Judge Nelson. THE SLAVER ERIE.
A book about Nathaniel Gordon
From the review of the book “Hanging Captain Gordon” on Amazon: "Soodalter, a former museum curator and history teacher, uses this singular event as a prism to provide an overview of Civil War-era politics, Lincoln's presidency and the maritime economy of slavery."
The judge’s sentence of Nathaniel Gordon communicates strong condemnation of slavery
“In passing the sentence, Judge Shipman, in the course of his address to the prisoner, said:
"Let me implore you to seek the spiritual guidance of the ministers of religion; and let your repentance be as humble and thorough as your crime was great. Do not attempt to hide its enormity from yourself; think of the cruelty and wickedness of seizing nearly a thousand fellow beings, who never did you harm, and thrusting them beneath the decks of a small ship, beneath a burning tropical sun, to die in of disease or suffocation, or be transported to distant lands, and be consigned, they and their posterity, to a fate far more cruel than death.
Think of the sufferings of the unhappy beings whom you crowded on the Erie; of their helpless agony and terror as you took them from their native land; and especially of their miseries on the ---- ----- place of your capture to Monrovia! Remember that you showed mercy to none, carrying off as you did not only those of your own sex, but women and helpless children.
Do not flatter yourself that because they belonged to a different race from yourself, your guilt is therefore lessened – rather fear that it is increased. In the just and generous heart, the humble and the weak inspire compassion, and call for pity and forbearance. As you are soon to pass into the presence of that God of the black man as well as the white man, who is no respecter of persons, do not indulge for a moment the thought that he hears with indifference the cry of the humblest of his children. Do not imagine that because others shared in the guilt of this enterprise, yours, is thereby diminished; but remember the awful admonition of your Bible, “Though hand joined in hand, the wicked shall not go unpunished." — Worcester Aegis and Transcript; December 7, 1861; pg. 1, col. 6. From Wikipedia
Lincoln resolves to use the ERIE and Nathaniel Gordon to communicate condemnation of slaving and slavery:
Quoting from Historynet: “Lincoln from the beginning had no intention of sparing Nathaniel Gordon’s life. On February 4, just three days before Gordon was scheduled to die, the president wrote, “I think I would personally prefer to let this man live in confinement and let him meditate on his deeds, yet in the name of justice and the majesty of law, there ought to be one case, at least one specific instance, of a professional slave-trader, a Northern white man, given the exact penalty of death because of the incalculable number of deaths he and his kind inflicted upon black men amid the horror of the sea-voyage from Africa.” And three years later, shortly before his own death, he told Congressman Henry Bromwell: “There was that man who was sentenced for piracy and slave-trading on the high seas. That was a case where there must be an example and you don’t know how they followed and pressed to get him pardoned, or his sentence commuted, but there was no use of talking. It had to be done; I couldn’t help him.”
More on President Abraham Lincoln’s refusal to pardon Nathaniel Gordon
“On November 1861, Nathaniel Gordon was convicted of slave trading and sentenced to hang. Participation in the slave trade had been punishable by death since 1820, but Gordon was the first man to be executed for the crime. Between 1837 and 1860, seventy-four cases relating to the slave trade had been tried in the United States, but very few men were convicted, and even then they received only light sentences. Only one other slave trader had been sentenced to death, but he received a full pardon from President James Buchanan in 1857.” More
Slavery was officially ended by the 13th Amendment
Slavery was officially ended by the 13th Amendment in 1865, the culmination of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (1862-1863), the products of a process that lurched through American courts, pulpits and the press for well over a century, and the ERIE and its owner became pivotal symbols in the story.
New York’s significance in the case of the ERIE and the prosecution of Nathaniel Gordon
“Captured by a ship of the African Squadron, Gordon was taken to New York City for trial in federal court—ironic, since New York had long been the epicenter of the U.S. slave trade. It had financed, fitted out and sent forth more slaving expeditions than any other American port. Slavers had typically been given a token slap on the wrist thus far. The U.S. attorney had no particular interest in prosecuting slaving cases. President James Buchanan, who occupied the White House when Gordon was arrested, had declared that he would never hang a slaver. It seemed Gordon had nothing to worry about. But after the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, a strongly Democratic, Southern-leaning New York City found itself with a new Republican U.S. attorney, Edward Delafield Smith, who entered office determined to put an end to the slave trade. And Smith made Nathaniel Gordon his personal demon.” From Historynet
Importance of the site of Nathaniel Gordon’s execution
A blog about New York Corrections history shows how the location of the execution (the Tombs in Manhattan/New York City) suggests legal jurisdictional issues in the attempts to prohibit slavery. More
SLAVERY IN THE NORTH, IN NEW YORK CITY AND IN BROOKLYN
Some information on how Brooklyn’s economy related to slavery
In CUNY's digital collection, a discussion of the activities of leading families. See table 3.1 for slave owning families among founders of Kings County Banks. More
Slavery in New York City
A short summary of slavery in New York City by Douglas Harper a historian, author, journalist and lecturer based in Lancaster, Pa.
Book “Slavery in New York”
New York City Slavery Walking Tour
New York City ran a Municipal slave market
There was a 1711 Law "Appointing a Place for the More Convenient Hiring of Slaves" that created the slave market:
"Be it Ordained by the Mayor Recorder Aldermen and Assistants of the City of New York Convened in Common Council and it is hereby Ordained by the Authority of the same That all Negro and Indian slaves that are lett out to hire within this City do take up their Standing in Order to be hired at the Markett house at the Wall Street Slip untill Such time as they are hired, whereby all Persons may Know where to hire slaves as their Occasions Shall require and also Masters discover when their Slaves are so hired and all the Inhabitants of this City are to take Notice hereof Accordingly." from Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, vol. II, 458, December 13, 1711
The slave market was located at Wall Street near the East River. It was second busiest slave market in the country in terms of the number of human beings it trafficked. June, 2015, it was finally memorialized with a plaque. See and hear WNYC report about that plaque and the history of the site.
In a short slide-show presentation, Anne Guerra of Untapped Cities discusses aspects of this Municipal slave market and slavery in New York City and notes that the market had the additional intention of preventing slave rebellions (frequently selling slaves was seen as a way to keep the people from organizing). The blog also states that the Civil War period actually saw upsurge in the slave ship business with New York City having a leading role. That upsurge and New York’s role in it may be why President Lincoln felt he needed to make an example of the ERIE and Nathaniel Gordon. We welcome hearing from experts about our theory on that. Untapped Cities says: “Between the years 1857 and 1862, while the Civil War was being fought, America experienced a tremendous resurgence in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, which had been illegal for five decades. And at the forefront of this highly illegal activity was New York City. The city’s legitimate trading tries with Africa made it easy to mask illicit slaving activity. In 1857, the New York Journal of Commerce reported that, ”downtown merchants of wealth and respectability are extensively engaged in buying and selling African Negroes, and have been, with comparatively little interruption, for an indefinite number of years.” More
Black Brooklyn Artist delving into NYC’s slavery history
In 2015, Red Hook photographer and story teller Kamau Ware relaunched his Black Gotham project with plans to make a multi-media recreation of history with living actors, in the street, during walking tours and generate a related photo book for each story/issue. Black Gotham will move beyond the slavery period to cover broader African diaspora content.
Slavery in the North, role of the maritime industry and the Episcopal Church
The maritime might of the northeast, its shipbuilding, ports, and seafarers meant that the North was hugely involved in direct and indirect aspects of slavery. A new museum is being planned by the Episcopal Church in Rhode Island to capture the history of the North’s involvement in slavery, the role of the Episcopal Church, and foster racial reconciliation and healing. A shuttered cathedral will be repurposed to host the museum. Quoting from a 2015 New York Times article “Tiny Rhode Island played an outsize role in the trade, thanks to the state’s financiers, a seafaring work force and officials who turned a blind eye to antislavery laws. While many slave ships were built in Boston, they were supplied, manned and dispatched from Rhode Island ports. Between 1725 and 1807, more than 1,000 slaving voyages — about 58 percent of the total from the United States — left from Providence, Newport and Bristol. Those vessels brought more than 100,000 Africans to the Americas as part of the triangle trade. They traveled to West Africa carrying rum, which was traded for slaves. The human cargo was then transported to the Caribbean in the infamous Middle Passage of the triangle. There, the ships were emptied of slaves and loaded with sugar, which was brought back to Rhode Island distilleries to make more rum to take back to Africa and repeat the cycle.”
Book about the Northern role in slavery
“Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery”
Slavery on Long Island Estates
Joseph McGill, created the Slave Dwelling Project, for which he sleeps at sites previously inhabited by slaves to underline that slavery was part of the history of the location. He recently visited Long Island estates. Here is a quote from a 2015 New York Times article:
“So far, Mr. McGill, whose ancestors were enslaved in Williamsburg County in South Carolina, has slept in more than 70 slave dwellings in 14 states, alone or in groups as large as 30, with the descendants of slaves sometimes lying alongside descendants of slave owners. This weekend, he is doing his first overnight stays in New York State, bedding down on three historic properties on eastern Long Island, in some of the region’s most beautiful (and expensive) resort areas.
If these are not places where slavery is the first — or 51st — thing to pop into visitors’ heads, it isn’t because it didn’t exist in them. In the mid-18th century, New York City’s slave market was second in size only to Charleston’s. Even after the Revolution, New York was the most significant slaveholding state north of the Mason-Dixon line. In 1790, nearly 40 percent of households in the area immediately around New York City owned slaves — a greater percentage than in any Southern state as a whole, according to one study.” From So far, Mr. McGill, whose ancestors were enslaved in Williamsburg County in South Carolina, has slept in more than 70 slave dwellings in 14 states, alone or in groups as large as 30, with the descendants of slaves sometimes lying alongside descendants of slave owners. This weekend, he is doing his first overnight stays in New York State, bedding down on three historic properties on eastern Long Island, in some of the region’s most beautiful (and expensive) resort areas.
If these are not places where slavery is the first — or 51st — thing to pop into visitors’ heads, it isn’t because it didn’t exist in them. In the mid-18th century, New York City’s slave market was second in size only to Charleston’s. Even after the Revolution, New York was the most significant slaveholding state north of the Mason-Dixon line. In 1790, nearly 40 percent of households in the area immediately around New York City owned slaves — a greater percentage than in any Southern state as a whole, according to one study. “
NATIONAL AND GLOBAL LEVEL
The only museum of slavery in the USA
The slavery museum at Whitney Plantation opened in December 2014.
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
The Slave Voyages database contains, in their own words, information on “more than 35,000 slave voyages that forcibly embarked over 12 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It offers researchers, students and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history.
Have history or comments on this you want to share? To write us, see our webpage CONTACT.
This is Nathaniel Gordon New Hampshire Legislator (1820-1908) not Nathaniel Gordon owner and Captain of the ship ERIE, executed for the crime of slave running, a pivotal case in elimination of slaving and then slavery by Americans.
ADDENDUM: When we first posted this we were under the belief that the slave ship Erie was sold on November 5th 1860. Additional research post posting revealed that the November date was when Judge Betts issued his order for the ship to be sold but that the actual date of the sale in Atlantic Basin was December 5, 1860, The initial posting also featured a portrait of a man said to be the slaver Nathaniel Gordon. We now believe this was wrong and, making the same mistake as many other websites, we erroneously used a picture of a different Nathaniel Gordon. The portrait, by N. B. Onthank, is of a New Hampshire state legislator and philanthropist, born in 1820 and died in 1908. (Source: New Hampshire Devision of Historical Resources) Again, we invite any history or comments you may have to share.
Red Hook Ferry Testimony
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NYC EDC Map
Why this blogpost
This blogpost is in response to the uproar over the two Red Hook ferry locations proposed by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC). See images at bottom. The EDC proposed these locations in a draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) and gave the public a deadline of October 8, 2015 for comments.
The Red Hook community via the NYS NY Rising resiliency plan it created had, over a year before, articulated its recommendation for a ferry location in Atlantic Basin. The EDC proposal did not include Atlantic Basin.
After the angry and frustrated responses to the DEIS in a public hearing shortly before the comment deadline and the comments submitted to the EDC DEIS, the EDC reversed itself. “We agreed to take a second look at Atlantic Basin as a landing,” said vice-president Peter Flynt in a Brooklyn Paper article “We’ve heard the community loud and clear.” In short, as of this writing, the topic is still open.
PortSide NewYork has long supported ferry service for Red Hook. Over the years, we have provided advice to ferry owners, property owners, elected officials, Brooklyn Community Board 6 and others. During 2010, PortSide advocated for waterborne transit during the Vision 2020 process. During 2013-2014, PortSide President Carolina Salguero was on the NY Rising Red Hook committee which proposed an Atlantic Basin ferry location, and PortSide staff and interns contributed research to her work for NY Rising.
EDC links
Media links
- 8/24/15 Brooklyn Paper Airy-ferry: Red Hookers say city’s planned ferry stop is impractical
- 9/11/15 Brooklyn Paper Shore it up! Board tells city to find new Hook ferry stop
- 10/9/15 Red Hook Star Revue Red Hook gathers at Borough Hall for a ferry hearing
- 10/16/15 EDC will take a second look Oh buoy! Daily Governors Island ferries could set sail by 2017
How this blogpost will work
To help resolve where a new Red Hook stop on the citywide ferry system will be located, PortSide NewYork has created this blogpost. Here, we will link all comments that were submitted to the EDC DEIS that we receive, or any subsequent statements people want to make about the Red Hook ferry, or you can post directly in the comment section at bottom. All statements we receive will be posted without editorial comment in alphabetical order by name of person who wrote the testimony.
We are doing this to improve transparency by showing testimony the EDC received, to foster discussion within the community by showing what the collective is thinking, and to help media reporting for all the same reasons.
Comments submitted to the DEIS process & other statements
Inna Guzenfeld Master's thesis on citywide ferry plans
Inna Guzenfeld comments to DEIS
- Gita Nandan, Chair of Red Hook NY Rising Committee, comments to DEIS
Allison Reeves, comments to DEIS
Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, comments to DEIS
PortSide NewYork comments to DEIS
Waterfront Alliance comments to DEIS
Bette Stoltz, in memoriam, a tribute
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By Carolina Salguero
I write to thank and honor Bette Stoltz for decades of work bettering Brooklyn. Bette passed away the Thursday before Thanksgiving, leaving many of us stunned and bereft. Some tributes from others, including her daughter Erica Stoltz, are below mine.
Bette created festivals, business organizations, collaborations, job training programs, school programs, businesses, and she founded SBLDC, the South Brooklyn Local Development Corporation. Bette dealt with the macro via the micro. Her successful community development work demonstrated a granular knowledge of community players in their diverse and contentious glory. She worked her magic on several shopping corridors which were once moribund: Flatbush Avenue, Park Slope’s Seventh Avenue, Court Street in Carroll Gardens, and then her masterwork Smith Street which she dubbed “the little street that could.” Like Bastille Day and petanque on Smith Street? Thank Bette.
Video about Bette Stoltz by her daughter Erica Stoltz
It was so Bette to address a problem by creating an opportunity, so when school dismissal was causing a disruptive flood of youth on revitalizing Smith Street, she created after-school programs for the students. Her next step was to recruit the chefs and business owners from the Smith Street restaurant row of her creation and get them involved in starting a culinary arts training program in a local school. Similarly, she created thrift shops to fill empty storefronts (Smith Street once had them aplenty) and simultaneously give retail training to women from NYCHA public housing developments. She was often a champion of the unsung and disconnected.
She worked for Brooklyn before Brooklyn was hip, and helped make Brooklyn hip in how she midwifed Smith Street into the mecca and brand it is today -- while also being an early advocate for manufacturing and industrial businesses. She helped create training programs for bus drivers such as Red Hook on the Road. She also helped start FROGG, Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus, which became a strong voice for getting the EPA to declare that canal a Superfund site. Civic and development work like Bette’s is often not easy but; “she employed her will of steel to bend the bureaucratic machine,” as her daughter Erica Stoltz says in the documentary she produced about Bette. I recommend the video as a great tribute to Bette and her style of community development. It is also a quick refresher course in how much parts of brownstone Brooklyn changed over 30 some years.
If you haven’t heard of Bette, maybe that’s because she did her work without a #LookAtMe buzz machine, even after that became so Brooklyn. She deftly deployed a know-your-neighbor, fact and relationship based ethos that fostered empathetic, site-specific, organic, evolution of place – and community.
I hope someone creates a Bette Stoltz award to honor and further the understanding of her work and to ensure that she continues to serve as an inspiration. We would be better for it.
A message from Erica Stoltz, daughter of Bette Stoltz
Dear Friends,
Thank you all for your condolences and comforting words during this difficult time. Your love has been received and has helped us as we try and pick up the pieces and heal our broken hearts.
Bette suffered a heart attack on Monday following ambulatory surgery and never recovered. Being the person that she was, death could not even stop Bette from her work. The first thing she did upon leaving us was give the gift of sight to another as an organ donor.
We have received an outpouring of calls and emails asking about plans and services to memorialize this amazing woman, mother, grandmother and community leader. In this regard, Bette chose to be cremated at a private ceremony with her immediate family. However, keeping with the Bette tradition, she also wants a memorial ceremony to be held in and around her beloved Smith Street where people who know Bette will have an opportunity to speak, and, which will be followed by drinking and a procession down Smith Street that she wants to be more like a parade than a funeral so that we may celebrate her life. We are in the process of finalizing dates and locations and will send that information along shortly. If you chose to memorialize her as well let us know and we will spread the word, join you in raising our glasses and keep her alive in our hearts forever.
In lieu of cards and flowers donations can be made to The Culinary Arts Program at the School for International Studies through SBLDC so that her work may continue. South Brooklyn LDC is a 501c3 Tax Exempt Corporation. Your donations are fully Tax Deductible. 100% of every donation made to support the Culinary Arts Program will go to buying food and equipment for this program. In addition we would like to support the cost of bus trips to nearby colleges that have culinary programs. Send your contribution payable to South Brooklyn LDC – 268 Smith Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231 and just indicate that it is for the Culinary Program.
Thank you.
Michael, Erica, Patrick, Van and Shirley.
Tributes to Bette Stoltz
Craig Hammerman, CB6 District Manager in December 2015 CB6 monthly Newsletter
Katia Kelly of the blog " Pardon me for Asking" On The Passing Of Bette Stoltz, Who Helped Revitalize Smith Street, "The Little Street That Could"
Councilman Brad Lander, Remembering Bette Stoltz a Champion of South Brooklyn
Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez "On the passing of Bette Stoltz"
“I’m profoundly saddened by the passing of Bette Stoltz. Our community has lost a dedicated activist, advocate and leader who will be deeply missed.
“Bette made so many contributions to South Brooklyn that one would be hard pressed to account for them all. She was instrumental to revitalizing Smith Street and helping it become a home to thriving businesses that add so much cultural life and vibrancy to our area. She organized the Smith Street Festivals in the fall and the Bastille Day Pétanque Tornament. She never stopped working to ensure Smith Street remained a thriving community anchor.
“Her efforts went well beyond Smith Street. By starting the South Brooklyn Local Development Corporation and the Red Hook Chamber of Commerce, she worked tirelessly to expand opportunity and commerce throughout Brooklyn. She helped organize Friends of Greater Gowanus and served on the EPA Gowanus Canal Community Advisory Group, working on multiple fronts to push to remediate and restore the Gowanus Canal in a green, sustainable manner. She helped to institute a Culinary Arts Curriculum at the High School for International Studies on Baltic Street. For years, Bette served as a member of Community Board 6.
“The fact is, in so many ways, South Brooklyn would not be as vibrant, diverse and culturally rich without Bette’s many contributions. She leaves behind a proud legacy, one that we will honor by continuing to improve our community. My thoughts and prayers are with her husband, Michael, her children and her beloved grandchildren.”
PortSide NewYork Sandy Story Part 1: saving MARY WHALEN
/This is PortSide NewYork's hurricane Sandy story, installment one.
Installment one is a personal report by Carolina Salguero, Director of PortSide, speaking as Shipkeeper of the MARY A. WHALEN. This installment covers PortSide's time in port preparing for Sandy, riding out the storm on the tanker, assessing our damage. We think the ship-related segment of our Sandy story is important because it shows how the maritime community in the port of NY-NJ spent days preparing for Sandy. The maritime community has something to offer inland neighbors in terms of understanding how to assess flood risks and prepare for them.
The second installment of our Sandy story will cover PortSide's effort to help inland Red Hook, Brooklyn recover from the storm.
The third installment will cover lessons learned and ideas for the future.
What a difference four days can make
Thursday, 10/25/12, Sandy minus four, the PortSide crew is excited to be hosting an elementary school class aboard the tanker MARY A. WHALEN. After finishing a TankerTour and jolly lunch for 30 on deck with the City + Country School and waving goodbye to their coach bus, Dan Goncharoff says “have you been looking at this storm coming up the coast?”
C + C School visit, Thursday morning
I check the weather websites. This looks like hurricane Irene plus some.
We convene a crew meeting and start hurricane preparations. School docents become a Sandy prep squad. By end of day, the deck was cleared of anything that could blow, and I am calling and emailing around for crew to help prepare and to ride out the storm on the ship.
Friday morning, after more info about the storm, I am trying to find a protected berth for the tanker MARY A. WHALEN. Just days before, we received word that our application had been accepted; the ship was on the National Register of Historic Places! Since the MARY is not fully restored, she lacks some equipment that would help her in a big storm: a working engine (eg, the ability to run away), machinery to raise her anchors if dropped to hold us in place, and a winch to haul in docklines under load. Compensating for that involves some extra forethought.
Despite our efforts, we can’t find a good alternate berth for the MARY outside of the Red Hook Container Terminal. Hughes Marine says “We’re out of space. You’ll be able to walk across Erie Basin by the time this is over; it will be so full of vessels.” A contact at a shipyard says “we flooded during Irene, and this one looks to be worse, you sure you want to be over here?” “No and good luck,” is my answer.
After more checking of the weather, I decide to move the MARY where she rode out Irene, on the other side, the north side, of our current Pier 9B. (The south side lines up with the end of Degraw Street). For non-sailors, here’s how this kind of calculation goes:
Winds were expected to start from NE, swing around to the East and end up SW, but this could always change. If rough weather were coming from anything west to southwest, our current position has us exposed to the wind from the southwest and the fetch (long stretch of water over which wind can build up waves) from Staten Island up the Buttermilk Channel.
The fendering (the wooden cribbing protecting ship and pier) is not robust on this side. A big advantage to the north side are some pilings at the inshore end that stand much taller than the pier and which would help prevent the tanker from riding up onto the pier if the surge were really high.
The north side would have us more exposed from winds at the start of the storm, but the hill of Brooklyn Heights and the pier to the north of us (even though it has no shed) would provide a compensating wind break.
As the wind clocked around to the south, a wall of containers near the bulkhead would provide a windbreak to the east, and the pier shed would be an enormous windbreak once the wind went south of east.
A final consideration was that in the extreme case of docklines failing while we were on the northside, the tanker had a chance of bouncing around inside the space between the two piers for a while, maybe long enough for us to get other lines out or call for help; whereas, on the southside of the pier, if our docklines broke, tide or wind could shove the ship up on the rocks nearby to the south (surely the death of the tanker) or shoot us down the Buttermilk Channel towards unknown risks.
I began calling tugboat companies to request a tow. Everyone is busy with storm prep so getting a tug takes a while. I have the tug turn the MARY around so her stern faces east, putting her heavier end towards the expected wind direction. Her light bow is my worry.
The tug’s crew helps us put out storm lines, more lines than we would normally use, and double and triple parted lines. (Instead of a line just going from boat to dock, a triple-parted line goes from dock to boat to dock to boat). The lines are set with a lot of slack to allow the boat to rise during the expected surge. During Sandy, Peter Rothenberg and I will go out in the wind and rain to ease the lines as necessary
From Thursday until Monday, a changing array of volunteers bang through a punch list: gangway lashed to the deck. Gas generator moved near entry hatch and tested. Gasoline, food, and water bought. Weepy portholes caulked. PortaSan moved inside the pier shed so it can't blow away.
More calls to look for crew... Commercial boats have paid crew, but most historic vessels rely on a corps of volunteers and; with so many boats to protect, available bodies were scarce. Compounding that, due to the danger, some spouses do not allow their partners to volunteer on the historic ships during the storm. Danger is one thing for paid crew; as a volunteer, it's another.
I ask Peter Rothenberg, our volunteer museum curator, if he wants to be crew. Peter makes a speedy calculation, “I hesitated for a moment, thinking this may be really unwise, and then said yes, probably being more reckless (brave?) than normally, because I had just lost my mother, and thus she was unable to question my judgment.”
Peter Rothenberg
The harbor is abuzz with chatter on phone, email, and texts sharing weather info, plans, moral support. Mike Cohen has info on the South Street Seaport ships. Mike Abegg is dealing with the Harbor School boats. I talk to tug captains and ask Jan Andrusky, Logistics Manager of Weeks Marine, if she can share weather and Coast Guard updates as she had during Irene. Answer, “yes!” Jan is responsible for floating equipment on the eastern seaboard, the Gulf of Mexico, and more, and has lots of experience and access to weather data.
Bobby Silva, captain of a Reinauer barge up in Albany sends a text: “wish I gave you my keys to move my truck. My baby will be a goner.” Other Reinauer crew who have not been sent out of town on vessels moved their vehicles from Erie Basin to the second floor of the garage at the Gowanus Home Depot and all their vehicles survived.
About a day before Sandy hit, the word comes that the surge would be at least 8 feet. Time to lengthen docklines.
A sign that things will be worse than Irene is that the port moves the stack of containers along the bulkhead. My windbreak to the east is gone. We also hear that the Port Authority will evacuate the port and lock the gates at midday before the surge, so there would be no new help getting to us. I ask the Port Authority Police officer if he will leave port if it gets really bad, “no, I will just drive a dump truck on patrol” is his stalwart answer.
Somewhere in all this, there is an announcement that subways would stop running in advance of the storm, and Mayor Bloomberg declares evacuation for Zone A areas, which include our neighborhood of Red Hook. An evacuation order is not changing my plans, though it could limit my getting help.
My mother calls “you’re not staying on the boat during this are you?” My responsibility is to protect the MARY A. WHALEN and to protect her from doing damage to the property of others. AT 172’ long and 613 gross tons, she is big enough to cause a lot of destruction if she breaks loose.
Sandy is due Monday night. Sunday night, I am one of many recipients of an email telling Red Hook people which bars will be open and what movies are being screened. This makes me wonder: Is the community ashore prepping for Sandy? Has anyone evacuated? After that email, PortSide’s maritime world feels separated from our shoreside neighbors by more than six blocks and a fence.
Monday day, the weather rachets up. My weather station is set up in the galley. A laptop, a clipboard with regular print-outs of NOAA marine weather, updates from Jan, the worst news highlighted in yellow. Peter nabs the ship's cat Chiclet and locks her in. As the weather rises, Chiclet cleans herself incessantly.
I read the shocking news that the HMS BOUNTY has sunk in the storm, at sea. I hear from Paul Amico, a dockbuilder advising us, “I just saw a Don Jon tug heading up the North River with waves breaking over the wheelhouse.” That means 18’ waves in the Hudson.
HMS BOUNTY sinks. Photo courtesy of U.S. Coast Guard
It gets colder and damper. I fire up the galley’s diesel stove, patented in 1918, as much to dry the air as to heat it. As winds rise, Peter and out go out to add extra lines to the tarp covering the wheelhouse windows. After warming up over tea, I get word that the surge would be at least 12’ and would hit in about 5 hours, right at high tide.
12’ is NOT good news. I am keen to keep the ship’s light bow from blowing or floating up onto the pier, my big worry during Irene, a risk to both boat and pier. The MARY’s stern is heavy and sits about 8’ in the water whereas her bow is actually up out of the water -- the forward engine room has been stripped, the forepeak has no ballast water, and she is carrying no cargo. Paul Amico calls, “have you considered a preventer line?” Yes. I turn to Peter, “time to go back out, time for a preventer line.”
We run a line to Pier 9A, the pier 265 feet to the north of us. We have a large collection of lightly-used docklines from tugboat friends. I bend together (that means tie together in mariner speak) two heavy eight-braid tug hawsers, and then add all our other dock lines. To drag this through the water, we tie together an agglomeration of light line (rope) and hand-haul the collection around to the other pier.
We are making the line off to a cleat on Pier 9A as the waters start to rise fast. While heading back to the tanker, the waters crest the bulkhead and pool into the port.
The string piece of the pier is several feet higher than the port landmass, which gives us about 5 minutes to disconnect our shorepower cord, pull it up onto the boat, haul in the ladder, and start the generator.
Somehow, between unplugging the shorepower from the shed and getting the cord onto the shed, our electrical system develops a short. This means the generator turns off every time I plug in the shorepower cord. Peter then runs an extension cord to the generator to keep the laptop and mini fridge running.
So begins 35 nights, of relying on flashlights and one 15-amp extension cord, until our shorepower connection can be repaired.
The waters rise. The port’s exterior lights go out. A container lifts and bobs our way. Humps appear in the water along the pier, like a long Loch Ness monster. I realize I am looking at all the tire fenders floating as high as their straps would allow. Somehow the overhead lights inside the shed stay on, and the windows in the doors afford the surreal view of an indoor sea.
Peter and I watch orange bursts of light over Manhattan. “Probably transformer explosions,” I say. Manhattan goes dark. I watch the water for several hours to make sure it isn’t rising and then sleep for several hours.
Lower Manhattan without power except at Staten Island Ferry Terminal. Jersey to the left, midtown to the right.
Upsticking bolts show where head logs were ripped off the pier by Sandy.
Tuesday’s plan is to shorten the docklines and get off the boat; but the wind is still so high that, even though the shed is a windbreak, the wind roaring over the shed is enough to grab the tippy top of the tanker and push us off the pier. The ebb tide pushes us back onto the pier, and we pull in a little line; then the wind blows us off again. Given how many lines we had out and that they were double and triple parted and since we don’t have a working winch, it takes us three hours of floating back and forth to shorten all the lines and get the boat to the pier.
I get a few worried calls and emails asking us if the MARY is aground. Perplexing, until I learn that a similar tanker, the JOHN B. CADDELL, is aground on Staten Island, a cautionary tale of what can happen if a ship is not well tended before and during such a storm.
This is not us! Tanker JOHN B. CADDELL aground on Staten Island. Via Twitter
At dusk, some volunteers make it in. Jenny Kane, Amy Bucciferro, Paul Amico after inspecting the damage at the DUMBO ferry dock.
I tell Peter that PortSide had historic documents stored in one room in the shed.
Peter looks startled, then irked at me and, as he told us weeks later, “This was news to me and I scrambled to rescue what I could. Unlike riding out a storm on a ship, dealing with wet paper artifacts I was familiar with. I had worked in museums for years, with collections stored in leaky basements, and had rescued a lot of paper ephemera after 9/11. Fearing fused wet paper and mold, I turned the tables on Carolina and charged her to get as many dry sheets and towels as she could find fast.”
PortSide's archive of historic documents is somewhere beneath all this.
I kick in the door to the stevedore's lounge, and we all schlepp tables up the stevedore’s lounge (I find the height of the second floor oddly comforting after the flood). Modern books we junk. Peter begins a painstaking process of separating wet papers, blueprints and photographs, blotting them dry, interleaving them with sheets, weighing them down. I am bushed and crash into my bunk.
Peter works until 4 am, bringing things aboard and slowly toasting some near the galley stove.
Over the next several days, Peter covers most horizontal surfaces in the tanker with drying antique documents. “Some of the blue prints lost most of their blue to the water, and the modern pulp paper fared worse than the rag paper of the 1800s; but in the end most of the important items in the collection, if a little worse for wear, were salvaged.”
Wednesday, the Halloween that never was, Peter and I head into the shed to inspect more things.
The hard-to-find vintage engine parts that could repair MARY’s engine have been submerged. Ditto all the historic artifacts from Todd Shipyard. Ditto our electrical transformer.
I make some calls and am told to douse the transformer in fresh water, dry it, and then spray it heavily with di-electric cleaner. We retrieve buckets of water from our rain barrels (there is no running water connection to the ship) and pour them over the transformer. I locate one outlet with power (which blessedly worked for a few days), plug in a fan and park it in front of the transformer. (The treatment above worked. We are still using this transformer in 2021!)
Drying our rinsed transformer. We were so lucky! Right after several days of drying, the power in the outlet went out. The ebbing waters pinned lots of dunnage around our transformer.
The engine parts are beyond us, and we turn to the artifacts.
Once upon a time, Peter had carefully wrapped each one in paper and identified each with a number and a photo. That labeling system is gone. We unwrap it all and leave stuff to air out. I console myself with the thought that shipyard artifacts have likely been wet before.
An email arrives saying Red Hook restaurants are cooking their food at a community BBQ rather than have it be wasted, BYO charcoal, and Peter and I bike into Red Hook toting some charcoal.
I leave the port with my spirits high. The ship is fine, the artifact loss was minimal. Irene had been a great preparatory experience; we had survived Sandy.
A few blocks down Van Brunt my spirits drop. I was a photojournalist for some 15 years and worked in rough places overseas, and I recognize the signs of disaster. A burm of garbage three to four feet high lines Van Brunt Street. Dazed and muddy people mill around at the corner of Pioneer Street amid the clatter of generators and a tangle of electrical cords.
Peter remarks that it looks like a macabre Christmas. Santas, which had been stored in cellars, are now muddy and atop garbage heaps, or, at the bar Bait and Tackle, set up by the door like a dark joke. In short, the mess ashore is bad, much worse than the damage to PortSide NewYork. I immediately decide that PortSide should come ashore to help our neighbors.
More on that in the next installment.
PortSide NewYork would like to thank the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for their support during Hurricane Sandy while we were in their Red Hook port.
For our latest Sandy relief info, see our blogpost, follow us on Twitter.
Additional reporting and editing by Dan Goncharoff and Peter Rothenberg.
The kind of thing we prevented: how a vessel went up on a pier during Sandy.
Photo by Frank Yacino, crewmember of tug KRISTY ANN REINAUER
The Big Day
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Original post published 1/20/07:
Thursday 1/18/07. The Whalen will finally go into dry dock. Perversely, balmy January ends the night before our trip to the
Brooklyn Navy Yard. Nonetheless, there’s a happy hubbub amongst the dozen or so guests aboard. It’s emotional day for many. The guests do meet n greet while I fuss over a recalcitrant generator that should go on as shore power is disconnected. Kitty Lulu, to her frustration, is locked into my cabin so she doesn’t leap back ashore – she figured out gangways weeks ago. Sal Catucci, CEO of American Stevedoring, who has generously provided us a free berth, shore power and stevedoring for months, tops it all off by driving out of the terminal to get some lost guests.
K-SEA is providing a free tow. I called them cuz they’re great people and good boathandlers, and because they, under their prior business name of Eklof, were the last company to run the Whalen as a tanker. Many of their people remember the boat, and fondly too. The tug Labrador Sea comes alongside around 0730 and the captain steps out of the wheelhouse and says “my father was the captain of that boat!” He’s recognized by Bill McGee, an Eklof retiree and former Mate on the Whalen, who is back aboard for the first time since she, and he, retired. It’s a big day for Bill, and I’m thrilled to meet him. He’s the man I knew was out there, the guy who loved the boat and saved her plans when Eklof/K-SEA shut her down, stripped parts off the boat, and pitched her records.
He called me a few days after Christmas, his son had found us while trolling the internet, and Bill said he had plans of the ship and that he would give them to us. “The plans should go with the boat.” I’m in tears after the call. The lack of plans complicated finding a shipyard during an 8 month effort; some yards didn’t want to lift her without the structural info contained in those plans. Once aboard, Bill swings right back into running the boat, tending lines in silent tandem with Tom Kerr, a recent transplant to Red Hook who came following the trail of his estranged merchant mariner father. Tom is writing a novel with maritime themes and writes poems about shipyards. He did a stint in the Navy and has helped get some things aboard the Whalen more shipshape.
Karen Dyrland and her husband John Weaver are up in the wheelhouse. Karen’s father Alf was captain from the late 50s until he retired in the late 70s. He was so attached to the boat that when he died 20 years later, his funeral program carried an image of him at the helm of the Whalen. Halfway to the Navy Yard, John tells me “the captain is back aboard.” Later I find that in the wheelhouse they’ve hung the photo used in Alf’s funeral program. I wonder what he would think of all this. They tell me that shortly before he died, he muttered “get the women off the boat, the Coast Guard is coming” and now there are lots of women aboard, and it’s a woman, me, who has decided to rescue his beloved Whalen.
0830 and we’re at the Navy Yard. A cluster of hard hats awaits us. The dock is flooded and the caisson (door) is open. A dinky block of wood floating on a slim line across the head of the dock indicates the centerpoint to align with the Whalen’s bow. The opening is too narrow for the tug to keep us on the hip, so the tug lands us on a fuel barge just outside the caisson, and moves to our stern to push us in. The Delaware’s tankerman helps out with lines even though he’s still in his slippers and it looks like we woke him. We slide in and the gantry crane soon swings over a man basket and lifts the guests away. My adrenaline wicks away rapidly. I’m beat. Wednesday night was a sleepless one due to the cold. I turned in too late to build a coal fire in the potbelly stove hooked up by John Weaver, and the little gas electric radiator didn’t beat the 20 degree temperature til nearly dawn. Fortunately, my boyfriend and firemeister John Gladsky arrives and builds a roaring fire. The rest of day will be about pumping out the graving dock.
The water drops rapidly, a testament to 19th century technology. The dock was completed in 1851 and still uses its original pumps, now electrified. Actually, it is using only one of the two pumps as one of the two water tunnels is clogged. GMD Shipyard now operates this dock, and all the other ones in the Navy Yard, as well as the one in Bayonne where the Intrepid will be repaired this spring. Their dockmaster pumps with care and stops whenthe dock is about half full. If the Whalen lands wrong, she could roll or be torqued out of shape. She’s down at the stern (heavy in the bum) as she’s basically three stories high there, and that weight is not offset by any cargo up forward in the tanks underneath that long deck. She has got to land evenly (both front to back and side to side). The crew pumps water into the forepeak (a vertical void at the bow of the boat) and when that’s not enough to get her bow down, the crane operator somehow fits two huge cement blocks between the railings and vents on the foredeck. That fixes the trim. A diver from Randive plunges in to see how she setting on the blocks. He reports that she’s not evenly down on them so the dockmaster dispatches the diver to slip planks between the hull and the blocks. He slowly works around the vessel, reporting regularly to the dockmaster at the top of the dock. It’s careful work and it shows how vulnerable a large steel thing can be.
Once she’s down on the blocks, I feel I can leave. I race off to Brooklyn Borough Hall where the Mayor’s office has called a meeting to discuss the new city plans for a sustainable future PLANYC 2030. To my puzzlement, neither this presentation, nor the powerpoint, nor their website make any mention of the waterways as a potential solution to our traffic and air pollution problems. In an archipelago, moving more people, vehicles, and cargo by water would be a green solution and a decongesting one; but it doesn’t seem to be on the radar. After a day outside, I wilt in the heat of the meeting room; so I slink off before the meeting is over to get a shower and a sandwich at a friend’s house. I drive back to the Whalen with the intention of writing a blog post but am wiped out. I crash into my bunk at 2200.
Photo 1: Stefan Falke
Photos 2 + 3: Carolina Salguero