Hi,

My name is Chiclet.

I'm the ship cat on the Mary A. Whalen. I"m looking for a place to stay over the Christmas holidays because Carolina is going home for Christmas for the first time in 6 years. PortSide isn't doing Operation Christmas Cheer this year due to funding reasons.

Peter Pan busline won't let me on the bus (Scrooges), and they're the only bus company that goes to Cape Cod.

I'm small and bouncy and cuddly. I like to play with Mister Mouse and Kitty Wand and sit on your lap. I'm about 8 months old. We don't really know; I'm adopted. I don't shred furniture and am well trained (well, sometimes I like to knock pens off the table, but I know that's bad.) I'm mostly black, with some white patches on my chest and tummy to reassure the superstitious folks.

Carolina's friends Gary and Amy in Red Hook can take me from 12/28 to 1/2 when she returns. I'm looking for place from 12/23 to 12/28.

Here I am.

Please post a comment here if you want to host me.

Meow,

Chiclet

What’s in a name – first week of December 2008

After the Whalen’s birthday party, I plow through the inbox. The day before the party, Mary Habstritt, wife of Gerry Weinstein, and President of the national Society of Industrial Archeology, had sent an email:

"I was boning up on history of Whalen and saw that her old name S.T. Kiddoo was a mystery. I searched just the last name and got several threads about the surname on www.Ancestry.com that mentioned A history of the Kiddoo family in the United States, 1780-1981 which is full text on the Brigham Young University libraries digital collections site. On p. 188, it tells of a Solomon Thomas Kiddoo (1883-1965) who, after a career in banking in, of all places, Wall SD, became Secretary-Treasury of Fairbanks Morse. Hmmm. I think it cannot be a coincidence that the ship had the same name as an officer of Fairbanks Morse and the ship has a FM engine."

Bingo! We also know that Bushey was a distributor of Fairbanks Morse engines, so we are quite sure this is the person for whom the Mary A. Whalen was first named.

This is a lesson in the limitations of google (a reminder to myself not to work like the 20-somethings I lamented earlier.) In 2005, I had googled “S.T. Kiddoo” extensively looking for some history to explain the name, hoping to find some history that would make saving a tanker more Historic, that would appeal to preservationists. I’d found one S.T. Kiddoo in South Dakota in the teens heading some local banking society. I never included the link as South Dakota seemed so far from the sea, and the citation was 20 years before the tanker was built. Funny; that WAS was the same man as the tanker. By now, google has much more up about Mr. Solomon T. Kiddoo; old records are coming on line. Now, if they will just help us learn more about the woman Mary A. Whalen.

Tanker engine parts – first week of December 2008

We interrupt this gripping narrative to tell you about the Whalen’s 70^th birthday party.

It was great! It was a hoot! We were mobbed! The December weather held!

It wasn’t without hiccups, mind you.

There was a bit of a glitch getting setting up due to someone outside the organization being slow to vet some paperwork, so the Whalen did not get towed to Atlantic Basin Friday morning for the Saturday event. Friday towing would have allowed our Friday volunteers to begin setting up the site in Atlantic Basin. But that didn’t happen, we got towed over at 2130 Friday, and I had to get our electrician in from Staten Island as the officially supplied one had gone home at that hour.

After that, our electrical guy, the master of old systems and all-around Mr. Fix-it Ed Fanuzzi, kicked back in the galley and chatted with Scott, a friend who had brought me take out dinner. I sat in the office writing the party program while the two guys drank coffee, smeared Nutella on Lorna Doones and told dirty jokes. “Carolina’s Home for Wayward Boys,” I dubbed it.

Early Saturday morning, while I was still in a pre-caffeinated state, I got a call from our insurance agent Totch Hartge. He was outside on the dock! He came bearing a gift for the Whalen, a brass ship’s lamp.

Next call was good friend and former neighbor Gary Baum. He had just driven his wife to the subway and was wearing a coat over his pajamas. “Howzit going?!” “We’re behind, we got here a day late.”’ He showed up in pajamas to pitch in.

The event caused such excitement that all the volunteers who’d RSVP-ed actually showed up. (You usually can’t be sure of that). Actually, volunteers we hadn’t heard from showed up! We had more volunteers than we needed! Here’s some text from the post-event PR we sent out. Please forgive me for not writing more original copy. Too much to do...

“December 6th, a happy horde of about 500 came from as far away as Maryland to cheer and visit the tanker Mary A. Whalen, home of PortSide NewYork, during her 70^th birthday party.

The tour guides were a salty lot: Bob Moore, Vice President of Atlantic Container Line a shipping line that calls on ports both sides of the Harbor, Gerry Weinstein and Mary Habstritt of the Lilac Preservation Project, John Weaver, son in law of Alf Dyrland who had been captain of the Whalen for twenty years, and Will Van Dorp, author of the blog Tugster who sagely dubbed the harbor “the sixth borough.”

The galley and engine room were clogged with visitors of all ages, including former crew members, maritime buffs and rank landlubbers. The latter included one woman who stepped off the gangway to say “where’s the tanker?” but all had a grand time. Former crew members came bearing old photos and boat parts, from the Whalen and other tankers, in an effort to put her back together. Waterfront bloggers from Philadelphia and the Long Island Sound chatted over the wood stove; urban and ship preservationists found common ground while discussing things afloat.”

Guests arrived by water: PortSide partner the tug Pegasus attended, as did one working tug. The luxury yacht Manhattan came into Atlantic Basin for a salute. Two gigs from the Village Community Boathouse rowed over from Tribeca, and kayakers came from two other islands, Manhattan and Staten. Local Red Hook businesses got in on the action: Atlantis, a home furnishings store, loaned their signature six-foot red velvet hook for the café area; Steve’s Key Lime Pie compensated for the lack of a boathouse in Valentino Park (hello Parks Department!) and allowed visiting kayakers to leave boats in their garage. Maritime photographer Jonathan Atkin served as Master of Ceremonies.

Tours ceased during a half hour of formalities when proclamations were presented by Anthony Chiappone of the New Jersey State Assembly, the Brooklyn Borough President’s Office, and Roberta Weisbrod of the Working Harbor Committee. PortSide NewYork and the Lilac team gave Sal Catucci, CEO of American Stevedoring a Historic Ship Hero award—an illustration made by Christina Sun—for helping save historic vessels by providing free berths to three ships Nantucket, Lilac and Mary Whalen .

Carolina Salguero, Director of PortSide announced that most of the missing parts needed for the Whalen’s cannibalized engine had been secured in Seattle thanks to the co-operation of Stabbert Maritime and the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, Derelict Vessel Removal Program which had just scrapped an old tanker similar to the Whalen.

Salguero also announced that the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation had invited PortSide to produce a performance on the Whalen in the Navy Yard, and she asKed for performing arts groups with water-themed work to get in touch.”

After the public left the party, some folks hung around in the galley. Some PortSide volunteers, two tug captains (one came by land and one by sea), some harbor activists. I ordered pizzas and realized as I served that it was all guys. “Carolina’s Home for Wayward Boys” AGAIN I laughed to myself.

I also marvelled at how easy life could be if we got the Whalen out of a containerport or out of an industrial park; because after three years of life that included Erie Basin, Red Hook Marine Terminal and Brooklyn Navy Yard, this was the first time that takeout food could be delivered right to the boat.

sigh.

Tanker engine parts -Third week of November 2008

The discussion of engine parts has expanded to include the crankshaft which is encased in the lower engine block. That seems monstrously heavy to move, and I’m wondering if it should be taken out and shipped separately. Gerry Weinstein recommends I put in call to Gary Matthews, a specialist on vintage engines, and ask him to come look at the Whalen’s damaged crank. He’s running an old locomotive in NJ, he worked on tugs in New York harbor for 17 years. He’s married to one of the few women to have been a tug captain Anne Loeding, and together they are restoring an old tug. Gary says he can’t make it until January, or February. Crushing. He says he’ll call some people though.

A revised estimate from Stabbert comes in. I can’t do boo about it.

After months of negotiating about Atlantic Basin, PortSide has been cleared to bring the Mary Whalen in there to throw her 70^th birthday party with free tours of the ship. We have three weeks and one day (MINUS Thanksgiving week) between approval and B-day. That means all permits, invites, program, invites and press releases have to be done in that time.

I tell Stabbert I need to get past 12/6 before I can think about parts.

They accept that. Unbelieveable. Thank god.

Tanker engine parts - Third week of October, 2008

Stabbert says the scrap barge will leave with Ked parts. Their bill is higher than we expected, I don’t have shipping worked out yet. How the hell am I going to get these parts, and after so much work!

All the other things PortSide had planned for the autumn have been front burner lately, including very important networking to push the possibility of getting an operating space in Atlantic Basin.

Real estate has been a big issue since we completed the business plan in May 05, and the developer did a "fade away and radiate” and avoided all meetings where we could present the data in the business plan and discuss lease terms. Actually, we couldn’t really complete the business plan because neither he nor Fairway would come to the table, so we submitted it to the funders, New York City’s Department of Small Business Services calling it “’A Report on Business Planning Activities.” That real estate story fizzle was so perplexing.

When Fairway needed a rezoning to get a supermarket in an m-zone on the waterfront, they were asked “why do you need to be on the waterfront” and they gave the answer “because we will service the working waterfront” and they talked about tugboats coming in to shop. I had supplied the information that tugboats would flock to a waterside supermarket since it had become so hard to get provisions due to the decline of finger piers near neighborhoods. I learned that while doing my National Geographic project on tugboats in NYC. The PortSide business plan followed up on that knowledge and surveyed the local towing industry about how much they spend on boat grub a year ($7.MM) and whether they wanted to shop at Fairway (yes) and why. We concluded that $1.5MM of business wants to shop at Fairway. PortSide was going to position shopping tugboats as an attraction, much as they are in Fells Point, Baltimore, and build our maritime museum concepts around visiting real boats doing real things.

Over the ensuing 3 years, we write many real estate proposals. The Mary Whalen’s fan base grows, but few people seem to understand that it is a hub, a place, that PortSide is trying to be, not a ship project, and certainly not a conventional historic ship project (much as we now love the Mary Whalen).

So… once there were August rumblings that Atlantic Basin was being replanned and that the EDC might be interested in our putting our proposed maritime hub in there (which seems the perfect fulfillment of their own 2008 Maritime Support Services Inventory Study), PortSide has been busy networking about Atlantic Basin, creating program concepts, analyzing how much of what we proposed in 2005 could work in another space, thinking how to combine cultural programs and port operations in that space.

Now that there’s a Stabbert deadline, I shift my energies to finding an interim Seattle storage space so that PortSide can leave this whole engine thing alone for a while and focus on the New Yorker mantra “location location location.”

K-Sea agrees to store the parts in their Seattle yard. They are just across the ship canal from Stabbert.

Whew.

I convey to Stabbert that their bill is tough for PortSide to pay right now, can we discuss an installment payment plan. I offer to get the parts out of their way and held by a third party (K-Sea) til we work this out?

They write back “up to my eyeballs in alligators right now with issues but you have my promise we will not toss the parts you need and will work out a satisfactory arrangement. “

Stabbert is really being great.

Tanker engine parts - First week of October, 2008

I send and email to a shipbuilding history website and ask for Ked history. I hear back from Tim Colton of Maritime Business Strategies, LLC in Delray Beach FL.

“According to the USCG, the Ked was formerly the Fletcher J and was built by Bushey in 1945, not 1943 or 1944. If so, that narrows it down a bit: it almost has to be either 583 or 585. Did you ask if there's a builder's plate on the ship?”

I thank him and suggest he amend his Bushey history to get Hornbeck included by changing his site description from “[Bushey] was the parent company of Red Star Towing and was located on Gowanus Creek, in the Red Hook section, at the foot of Court Street: the site is now occupied by the Hess storage terminal” to say “the site is now occupied by the Hess storage terminal and the yard of Hornbeck Towing which moves the Hess product.”

Always trying to raise awareness of the working waterfront!

He changes his website. We continue exchanging emails. The PortSide Whalen family grows.

I send the URL to Gerry Weinstein, this leads to more info on davits.

“Carolina: A great site. Looks like Bushey did build tankers before the war so they may have had radial davits. I actually e-mailed him a year ago regarding a photo we found in a Minn. antique shop showing the preparations to side launch one of the water tanker versions. Gerry”

They’ve already been in touch. Small world. Big Whalen family.

Tanker engine parts - More on Fourth week of September, 2008

Simultaneous with the engine and davit research, I’ve been trying to figure out costs of shipping this stuff, cuz the question really is “can we afford to get this stuff now?!” I’ve learned that Stabbert cannot donate the stuff as Washington State needs to recoup the scrap price of the boat, so on top of buying the stuff, we have the cost of shipping. And as mentioned, engine parts were not in the immediately plan and thus no fundraising has been done to cover this.

I send an email blast out to rail people, most of them historians and buffs, but two people are close to current RR operations people and I hope they’ll pick up the phone and call.

“Have any idea who I should contact to ask to have replacement parts for MARY WHALEN engine shipped BY RAIL FOR FREE from Seattle?

I'm 90% sure that the engine in the Bushey tanker Ked that is being scrapped in Seattle at Stabbert Maritime is the same engine ours (as of jpegs received over the weekend and a conversation this morning with the WHALEN's last engineer). We have a 1938 Fairbanks Morse 37E12 direct reversing 6 cylinder diesel.

I'm trying to assemble a cost and vendor list to see if we can afford to get these parts.

The Washington State Dept of Natural Resources (DNR) that is having the vessel scrapped as part of their Derelict Vessel Program (sadly) wants us to pay for the parts, and additionally says that my crew cannot go in and remove them, due to liability at the yard; eg, I'll have to pay for parts and for the labor to remove them. No, we dont have money raised to cover this (as we had no idea bout the Ked's existence til 9/1/08) and no, there isn't much time. Scrapping is under way.”

All the while, in front of Stabbert I act as if this is all a go, but they’re not stupid. They have to think that non-profit start-ups are not rolling in dough. They’re being wonderfully responsive and helpful, thank god.