It takes a village to fix a vintage tanker engine - part 1

Here’s the sticky wicket about blogging.

Often you can’t write about things in real time because to do so could affect the course of events, in ways you can’t foresee, so sometimes you have to just sit on things. Voila, the case of the tanker engine parts and the Bushey tankers Ked and Mary Whalen. The story from September through February will now come out in installments. Yes, I kept all emails and good notes. The posts are mostly all written.

Tanker engine parts - The first week of September, 2008:

Thanks to a tip from Bernie Ente, I learned that another Bushey tanker was being scrapped oh so far away in Seattle, and I made a play for parts. Engine parts, davits, interior cabinetry and brass fittings. Several Whalen cabins were gutted when she was in Erie Basin being an office and one day, we’d like to restore bunks, hanging lockers n such. Right now we need those spaces for offices, but once we have a base ashore, we can get that stuff off the boat and restore more.

Anyway, first answer out of Stabbert Shipyard in Seattle was a lot of silence.

I looked at their website and saw that one line of their business was turning old workboats into luxury yachts. Was this what they would do with Ked, I wondered, and so wouldn’t want to give stuff away? Were they really scrapping the Ked? If so, it certainly would seem preposterous to a scrapper to get a call from across the continent, from a non-profit, and I suspect, from a woman, looking for parts to save an old tanker. No one saves tankers! Tugs maybe; yachts surely, but tankers don’t have Enthusiast Societies, yet.

What to do? Here my old skills as a journalist, a foreign correspondent of the pre-digital era were useful. I did most of my work overseas in a career that ran from opening of Berlin Wall to 9/11 in countries that often didn’t have decent phone systems (or had phones systems with the government listening in). The way you got information was social. You saved every name and number you ever got, you horded them, you kept them in handwritten notebooks; and these names and numbers were exchanged with select (friendly) journalists coming and going to the same countries. This is a segue to a little rant of mine: I’ve noticed that 20-somethings who come to work at PortSide are conversant with web and digital connections but less good at reaching people to solve a problem. Once they’ve googled or filled out the web contact form, they’re done; and when that isn’t working/doesn’t net the solution, it’s often hard to get them to get on the phone, to reach out and touch someone; and most to the point, they don’t seem good at recruiting a person to the cause to help solve the problem at hand. It makes me appreciate being middle-aged and having experienced the world before email, web, and customer service in India.

But back to the Ked parts... I began reaching out. When PortSide was creating its business plan, a Capt. Kris Lindberg out of Seattle had worked for us. He did a raft of things and headed all the market research on the charter and excursion boats in NYC and determined which would be interested in coming to our proposed Maritime Hub. He was getting a Masters in planning at the time and thinking desk job after years of running boats from Seattle to Alaska. After graduating from NYU in 2005, he returned to Seattle. I called.

Turns out Kris knew the Ked well. He had not got a desk job after all and was doing environmental ops for Global Diving & Salvage Inc., and had been on the Ked just months before. Global did the abatement work on the Ked, and had bid on the scrapping job and lost to Stabbert.

I called K-Sea in NY, knowing they had bought a Seattle tugboat company. Could their Seattle folks could see if the Ked was still afloat… Answer: yes.

I called the Washington State Dept of Natural Resources, Derelict Vessel Division to see if they could find a way to help. I had no idea what their contract to Stabbert allowed or mandated, but surely scrappers worked with eye on the clock and wanted no delays. Could they facilitate? Melissa Montgomery said “Yes, we’d love to.”

I got my brother Antonio Salguero of Coastwise Marine Design, on the phone. He’s worked a range of marine jobs near Seattle (fishing boats in Alaska, shipwright at Port Townsend’s shipwright’s co-op, freelance yacht designer and shipwright). Could he come down from Port Townsend to Seattle to visit the Ked and assess? Yes.

On the eastern front, I started calling folks to learn more about the Whalen’s engine, what had failed, what was fixable, what other Bushey tankers had for engines as a way to determine what this thing in the Ked might be, even what this Ked was originally called to learn more about her. I asked about alternative sources for parts because schlepping things from Seattle looked expensive on the transpo alone… and the logistics of cross-continent research were going to be challenging.

All that hadn’t been done earlier, because, honestly, the planning team did not see the engine as an immediate priority. The Whalen can deliver a lot of programming as a dead ship. We came to her as the cheap alternative to a spud barge, a means to a docking end, making her go was not the plan. Admittedly, our thinking was evolving since we learned some things during ship tours.

What we learned was that the engine room was the 2^nd most popular place on the boat. Galley first, engine room second. The wheelhouse, to our surprise, was definitely third. We had considered yanking out the whole old engine (down the road) to give us more space, and then we listened to the public. As Tim Ventimiglia, our museum designer, put it “I thought the boat and engine room would really appeal to middle-aged men, but that is not what is happening.”

I remember the day the Whalen’s engine room cured a woman. I was leading a tour of 15. As we approached the engine room stairs, a woman said “’oh no.”

“What’s the matter,” I asked?

“I’m claustrophic.”

I said “here’s what we’ll do. I’ll hold the group back, you go down there, and if you feel uncomfortable, you can rocket right back up those stairs, and no one will be in your way.”

She went down the stairs. Silence.

“Are you all right?” I yelled.

Then came the answer “WOW.”

I told the group to stay on the fidley and went down. “You OK?”

“This is amazing.” And there she stayed, so excited by the engine that she wasn’t claustrophic and was able to have a crowd of 14 join her for a 20 minute stay down there.

So we learned over tours large and small that because the engine room captivated, it created a way to discuss mechanical and infrastructure topics you would think were too dry for the public: the dated peculiarities of a bell boat system and a direct-reversing engine and what that meant for ship staffing, shaft generators and how the ship created and stored its own power. Even the marine composting toilet system interested people. Not to mention the thrills the engine room brings to kids. For them, it is the best of cave, tree fort and space ship.

The looming, antique lump of the engine had a powerful voice; and so, when engine parts seemed available, I thought we should try for them. They might not get installed for years, but if we started looking for them years from now, they surely wouldn’t exist. With the price of scrap steel high, old boats were being scrapped pell mell; and old marine businesses all over the country were being pushed out by gentrification, so repair places with old parts were on the wane.

And so, as inconvenient as the timing of the Ked’s demise was for PortSide’s autumn plans, I went for it and redoubled my efforts on the phone.

Can the Ked help the Whalen?

My how small the world can get! Thanks to the indefatigable maritime reader-photographer-emailer Bernie Ente, I got a link on September 1 from a west coast newspaper saying there was a Bushey tanker headed for scrap. The Ked is a bit younger (if the story has her age right) and shorter than the Whalen but is unmistakenly a Bushey boat. (photo from Kitsap Sun)

September 2, I got in touch with the Seattle yard handling the scrap job Stabbert Maritime to discuss the possibility of engine parts or anything else we need. (They have an interesting line of work in converting workboats to yachts and produce some posh stuff.) And yesterday I had an encouraging call with Melissa Montgomery, the Washington State official in charge of their state Derelict Vessel Removal Program who gave the shipyard the contract. Her tone was one of “we’d love to help.”

During the PortSide business plan process, we had a young captain working p/t for us while he was getting his Master’s degree in planning. He’s back out in Seattle and I gave him a call. He knows the Ked; she’d been grounded in Bremerton for years. He’d been aboard earlier this year, and he encouraged me to try for a shot at Ked parts and photos of the interior. I’ve also spoken to some people on the water in Seattle who can see how the work progresses. Looks like there is still time to get at that engine!

It’s sad to see another Bushey boat go, but we’re hoping the Ked can help save the Whalen. The Ked has two davits on the boat deck (we are missing 3) and also has a Fairbanks Morse engine. We don’t know what type of engine yet; I’m hoping it’s a 37E12! Standing by!

9/11 on Pier 9B

It’s funny how life works sometimes. 7 years ago, two planes flew into the World Trade Center, and 7 years ago I snuck into the Red Hook containerport to make photos of the burning buildings. 7 years later, I’m living on a retired oil tanker on the same pier from which I made a widely-published photo of the disaster (and Homeland Security funds have since built a new port fence that makes such sneaking-in impossible.)

I’ve been interviewed and awarded aplenty for my photojournalism work at ground zero; but up until now, I have refrained from writing anything about 9/11. What I’d like to do here is acknowledge the work of others who I think deserve appreciation.

First, starting with the personal: Many thanks and much credit should go to Debby Romano. She’d only steered a boat one time before 9/11. That was a few days before 9/11, when I was shooting Robert Buchet bagpiping on the tug Amy Moran at dawn for a long term National Geographic project. I told Debby to hold a course right off the tug’s beam and just outside the barge wake. She did it, and that ain’t easy in a 26’ runabout. I told her she was a natural.

When 9/11 happened, I called her boss Greg O’Connell, baron of Red Hook, and asked if Debby could get off work to join me on my boat going to the World Trade Center. The Brooklyn Bridge was already closed, I had tried to bike over it after sneaking into the port. He said yes. Debby and I watched the 2^nd tower go down from the water, and we got involved in getting one cop from shore to the Sandy Hook Pilots boat just off the Battery. As I left her in North Cove and handed her my bag of exposed film in case I didn’t get out, I told her “When you dock, remember that boats keep moving after you decelerate more than cars do. Take that into account and also the wind; and so long as you approach the dock very slowly, you can’t damage anything, and good luck.”

With only that for experience and instructions, she got the boat home. She reported that, on the way to Red Hook, she passed a slew of tugboats steaming out of the Kill Van Kill -- some 20 of them roaring towards ground zero. More on them later.

I shot for several hours at ground zero, and went to go as I felt bad vibes (building 7 collapsed shortly thereafter). I spotted the tug Nancy Moran on the seawall and her engineer Gina Sikes, who I knew. Gina has since passed away, but still I’d like to thank Gina and that crew for their assistance in getting me out and for being friendly faces on a dark day.

I reached L&I Color lab in the photo district and had the weird good luck to have Kathy Ryan, photo editor of the New York Times Magazine, walk in as soon as my developed slides hit the light table. I needed the bag of unexposed film, the bag I’d left with Debby, and I’d like to thank Richard Dennis and other Red Hook friends who tried to get to Manhattan in my powerboat. The Coast Guard turned them back, so they gave the film to Joe Martin, a Red Hook townie who has since been pushed out of here by gentrification; and he biked over one of the bridges - after attempting several - to deliver the film.

As to the bigger picture, I’d like to acknowledge the tremendous role of the marine industry in 9/11. Their contribution on that day, and for the weeks and months thereafter, has not been duly registered, analyzed nor appreciated.

When Debby and I approached the Battery, thousands of citizens were crammed along the seawall. As I left ground zero on the tug Nancy Moran only 2 or 3 hours later, there were none; all evacuated by boat in what was a spontaneous, civilian-initiated operation. It began before the Coast Guard asked for it. Tugs, ferries, excursion boats, pilot boats, police and park police boats, historic vessels, dinner boats -- all sectors of the marine industry on all sorts and sizes of craft showed up and got people moving.

They sorted themselves out by size, the shallow draft vessels took people to locations with shallow waters. Boat crew sprayed bedsheets with destination signs; they got out torches and cut the (stupidly) designed fences of Battery Park City that had no removal sections nor cleats or bollards for boats to tie to. Tugs and then barges brought fuel for fire trucks and generators, and fresh water. Boats brought food from the Jersey shore. I remember standing knee deep in rubble and water on West Street and Liberty within an hour of the second tower collapse, shortly after a firefighter shared their grim estimate “we’ve lost 340 men,” to see a college kid coming out of North Cove pushing a shopping cart with snack bars, Gatorade and water. Hats off to the boats that brought that all over.

As the “rescue” period with its hope of survivors eroded into the “recovery” period with its goal of finding body parts, the marine industry soldiered on removing the rubble. Floating cranes unloaded trucks and loaded barges. Tugs took the loaded barges away. The larger steel pieces left from Pier 11 on the East River. The smaller stuff, which was really none too small, left from Pier 25 in Tribeca.

Mike Mazzei, videographer and diver who day-jobbed as a dockbuilder, put up a series of banners at Pier 25 documenting the tonnage and number of barge loads they removed. He shot the job and made a video.

Still, most of the media drove past the pier to do stories from the pile, then the pit, from firehouses, from city hall, stories about steelworkers, medics, cops, shrinks, priests and even photographers. Much of that media continues to chime that the working waterfront is dead. (A special Broken Record Award goes to the New York Times for reiterating that old chestnut.) Is the working waterfront dead, or is the media just blind?

Other media ignored the significant maritime story even when they had it. National Geographic considered running my tugboat project, with it’s unpublished content about the 9/11 marine evacuation, on the first anniversary of the attacks. The Director of Photography decided not to “since we have two other water stories in the same issue.” So, rather than doing a water-themed issue, they put meerkats on the cover — I got many an angry call from tugboat captains on that one. They never published the tug work and held on to it so long it was un-publishable anywhere else. My apologies, fellas; but you can see why I left the media biz.

But back to ground zero: When the politicians got around to concocting a ceremony for the last piece of steel removed, they didn’t include a tug or barge in the choreography. They put a huge beam on a truck and slowly rolled it out of Manhattan. The Pier 25 rubble removal crew watched as the departure ceremony started north of them.

Why is this all important?

Everyone should get their due.

We should understand what really happened.

We should be prepared for the next one.

We should understand where we live (an archipelago) and build to suit.

There’s been a whole lot of waterfront revitalization going on, leading to a rash of newfangled piers without cleats, piers too weak to dock a tug and barge, piers designed for pedestrians-only, silly piers whose planners want them designated “water dependant.”

We shouldn’t be doing that.

Not only because of disaster preparedness, but because the seam between water and land should be a porous membrane with people and things coming and going across it. Not only would that make the most useful (or what 2008 plannerspeak calls “green and sustainable”) waterfront, it would also make the most interesting and fun one.

And with that, I leave you all to your prayers and memories and your own rituals of thanks and acknowledgment. 9/11 was a public episode, but many of us have private ways of handling it. Today, this happened to be mine.

More on the marine role in 9/11:

List of Boats involved in Manhattan evacuation on 9/11

Book “All Available Boats”

Interviews associated with South Street Seaport exhibit on the topic

Video Merchant Marine heroes of 9/11 by MARAD (US Maritime Administration)

Interviews with local tug crews on www.carolinasalguero.com see section “Maritime 9/11” under section WTC. Slow to load – it’s an old Flash site.

Paradise in 60 amps

________________________________________
From: Erica Reynolds
Sent: Monday, February 18, 2008 8:31 AM
To: Carolina Salguero
Subject: The boat trip

Hi, I hope the trip went well. I had to work yesterday so I couldn't make it. Any good news from the trip? Today I am looking at a painting job that I hope to start today. I will let you know what my schedule is like for this week. How's the view? and Lulu?

Dear Erica:

Sorry you missed it. The move was astounding. Our best yet. What joy aboard.

We had about 50 passengers, volunteers, bloggers, Tim Ventimiglia, our museum designer who said "this is my paycheck," David Bianiciardi who did all the powerpoints and AV hook ups for us. Anthony Mancebo the AV fellow at the book reading sadly couldnt make it. The amazing caterer gals from Bar Tini and Roquette Catering, some kids, septegenarians, Hans Hansen, the son of the engineer Hans Hansen who worked with Karen's father Alf Dyrland. Karen remembers answering the phone to Hans' thick Norwegian accent asking for her father, another Norwegian. Hans and Karen had never met before. This ship does bring people together.

We had about 10 band members from the Hungry March Band, a last minute connection to Nydia Velazquez' office of all things. Dan Wiley is, I think, going out with one band member. They were fantastic, made the day. Brass band, the music reminded me of gypsy music from Balkans to Spain, both places I've spent lot of time. I loved them. High energy and as Karen put it, clothes like Pipi Longstocking. There was a gang dancing the wave on the bridge deck. I danced on the main deck. the rain held until 2 hours after everyone left. Channel 12 TV was here, so it's on the record.

The K-Sea tug was great - again. Really nice crew. That company has been so good to us. The boat arrived early, some came aboard to visit. The engineer on the tug was Robert Mowbray. He used to be engineer here. I've been corresponding with him, he has some parts for this engine.

It was a magical day. Everyone was grinning. As we were unloading a guy in coveralls appeared on the pier and said "my father used to work on this boat." I said "I'd love to talk to you but have to deal with the tug." Next time I turned around he was gone. The guys on the tug told me that was Scotty Gellatley. I've tried to reach the other side of his family often, to no avail. The Gellatleys had some massive falling out and one side got the tugs and the other the tankers – I think that's how it goes. I do love the Irish, I'm half myself, but, my god, the feuds.

In any case, he was like some sort of ghost, no idea how he was here nor where he went but it's another case of "everyone worked on the Mary Whalen." Maybe he was over at the Circle Line boats. I'll try and track him down.

Once the cheerful mob left, I sat for an hour the galley with John, Karen and a friend of theirs Richard DuBois (who doubles for Robert DeNiro of all things); He says he'll come scrape paint God bless him.

I let Lulu off once all the guests left. The pier has a large burm of ancient used sandblast grit gone wild with weeds and one small tree. A Lulu Serengeti, as someone said. She began to prowl right away. I'm sure she'll find lots of fun chasing rodents, it's more kitty freundlich than the cement pier over in Red Hook. I do still worry about the hawk. Ernie brought him up right away saying he'll be two years old right away. It feels like he's become some sort of GMD mascot. Murray Fisher of the Harbor School who visited 2 weekends ago claimed to be a bird of prey buff and said red tailed hawks don’t go for cats, but as Ernie put it in his ever to-the-point way "why not?" I'll call Audobon. The hawks aren't here right now. Maybe that will be our new reason for summer home for the Whalen "save Lulu from the Navy Yard hawks."

Loving birds that don’t eat Lulu, I raced to put up birdfeeders before the snow. So far not a one.

In any case, the view is mighty different. We are no longer alone. I can see a building or boat out of every porthole, actually usually lots of both. Moran fuel barges on other side of pier. Circle Line fleet across the water of this berth, tho dunno how many folks are around there. Those are the boats tied up in an acquisitions haggle. When Hornblower won the RFP for the Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island ferry run, the Circle Line boats were supposed to be bought for the service. The price has been rising... I'm sure all the lawyers as sending love letters back n forth and here the fleet sits.

Ernie in his trailer is right at the head of the dock. A Coast Guard bought is coming in soon so the men in blue will be all over this place. Handsome nighttime view down the deck of the Williamsburg bridge and Schaefer Landing's curious light show.

I've so wanted to get here to make winter more bearable, I can see we will be sheltered from the worst of the winter winds and we will be basking in sun all day. This will raise the boat temp a good 10 degrees is my guess. Ernie has 400amps in the 220 power!!!!!!! I don’t know what it is in the 110 service yet, but it will be so much better then the trickle over in Red Hook. In short we will be able to run enough space heaters. You should be able to reduce your 4 layers of pants to 2. such progress.

and then WiFi. I see two networks right now without using Kyle's satellite dohickey. I can imagine there will be more networks after President's Day and folks come back to work.

So, as we long dreamed, here it all is, shore power, internet, sun and neighbors. Plus some dirt for Lulu. Paradise, til March 31 and our agreement expires. Then what, god only knows. Lots of calls to make to solve that one.

I can’t decide whether to go to the Russian Baths and soak my tired bones tonight or roast up a big dinner and invite the barge next and Ernie over for dinner. I'm feeling very nesty about this new home.

Heating the shovel so I can wax it and shovel off the deck. Why go to the gym when there's yards of snow to shovel?

613 Tons of Homelessness

This is reposted here thanks to the generosity of Richard Fleming, Red Hook wit extraordinaire, that is when is his wit is not in Rwanda, the Congo, Antartica and all the other challenging remote places he prefers to the purportedly untamed frontier of the Red Hook peninsula.

http://antarcticiana.blogspot.com/2008/02/613-tons-of-homelessness.html

2/20/2008

613 Tons of Homelessness

Some weeks ago I got an email from Carolina Salguero informing me that she was hoping to resurrect her once-excellent but lately dormant blog about efforts to refurbish the Mary Whalen, the 172 foot long rust-bucket of a tanker that she has adopted like a stray kitten. She mentioned that she would momentarily be moving the Mary Whalen from her most recent home in the Red Hook container port, to a new, but also temporary berth in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, that vast pocket of crumbling industry wedged between Williamsburg and Vinegar Hill. "Ooh," I said. "I'd love to come along on that journey."

Weeks passed, and when I did think of Carolina and the Mary Whalen I was forced to conclude that I had been forgotten. I was sure I had literally missed the boat. Then, last week, to the in-box came the message that the much-postponed towing of the Whalen to her new home was to happen on Sunday. What's more, in recognition and thanks for the many countless hours of voluntary toil that friends of the Mary Whalen had put in, scraping up buckets of rust chips, we were all invited to voyage on her decks as she traveled to her new home.

In my case this was a bit of a charade, since the sum total of my work aboard amounted to a couple of hours of painless schlepping, many months ago, on a warm and sunny day at the end of spring. After that morning I managed to let an entire summer and fall season of volunteer days slide by without another visit.

Last Sunday was a chilly one, but we try never to let an opportunity to get out onto the waters of New York harbor go unseized, so, bundled up and fortified with bagels, we trudged down Van Brunt street to the container port.
The tug Nathan Stewart, lashed tight to the Mary Whalen in the container port.

The irrepressible John Weaver prepares to hoist the gangway on deck. In every picture in which Weaver appears he wears this broad, warm grin, perhaps delighting in the fact that, even if only under tug power, the Mary Whalen is once again setting out to sea. In a moment of idle Googling, Weaver and his wife, the daughter of a long-serving captain of the Mary Whalen back in her days of active duty, discovered Carolina and her attempts to save the ship. Since then he has become deeply involved in the project.

Under way at last, lower Manhattan sliding by on the port side.

In a particularly inspired moment, Carolina contracted with a motley crew of musicians known as the Hungry March Band to provide a live soundtrack, as it were, for the move. As the ship prepared to get under way, the musicians got themselves ready to play, strapping on portable drums, lounging on the decks with trombones and firing sample volleys from trumpets. Most had never been on board before, and some had tremendous difficulty finding the ship, hidden away deep inside the vast container port. At the very last moment a Japanese player arrived, rushing up the gangplank just before it was hauled on to the deck and, half out of breath, whipped out his saxophone. Their music sounds like a military band gone to seed, or even to pot, or perhaps an impromptu jam session turned parade, and it lent a glorious aspect of triumph and conquest to our outing. It was cold out on the water, and the music kept our spirits up. I thought of the Russians on the eastern front, and how cheered they might have been to have the Hungry Marchers urging them on. They reminded me, too, of the weirdly joyful clash of instruments I once heard accompanying a funeral procession in rural Haiti, and when I asked one of the band what other sorts of gigs they play besides ship relocations she said "all kinds, really; recently we played a New Orleans style funeral on the Upper East Side."



Raise the Roof! As the wicked winds of winter came whistling in over the waves, many danced to stave off the chill, shaking their groove things to the funky brass band sounds of the Hungry March Band.

I counted at least six video cameras on board filming the historic event, from the palm-sized to the professional. It is starting to feel as though everyone is making a documentary about something. However, despite all the cameras, there were no working soundmen participating in this media frenzy, which may explain why I don't have any gigs at the moment. This dude, from Channel 12, was doing his own sound the hard way. I would have thought having to hold a hand mic for the interview you are filming would seriously limit your ability to choose and hold a nice frame. In the business, this is known as the "one-man band," or "one-man banding it," and we sound brethren frown on this sort of behavior, for obvious reasons. I'm going to complain to my union, if I can get anyone on the phone over there.

Carolina, wearing some sort of Uzbeki yak-herders hat, supervises the docking from her new front yard.

Home, sweet ghetto. The new digs in the Brooklyn Navy Yard seemed a bit on the decrepit side, after the immaculate stacks of containers and tidy blue warehouses of the container port. But it is only temporary. So far, the next stop is unknown, TBD. Do you have a home for the Mary Whalen? An underused two hundred feet of New York City waterfront is all that's needed. All suggestions are welcome. If you see something, say something!

Adieu Red Hook: The Mary Whalen at her new berth in the Navy Yard. I know this picture looks as if it had been taken from on board the tug as it heads back south, the day's work done, but that would only be possible if the Nathan Stewart had kindly offered us a lift back to the neighborhood, which they couldn't have, because their insurance and other policies wouldn't permit it. So, in short, I have no idea how this picture came into existence.

The Ballad of the Mary Whalen

This is reposted here thanks to the generosity of Richard Fleming, Red Hook wit extraordinaire, that is when is his wit is not in Rwanda, the Congo, Antartica and all the other challenging remote places he prefers to the purportedly untamed frontier of the Red Hook peninsula.

http://antarcticiana.blogspot.com/2007/05/ballad-of-mary-whalen.html

5/27/2007

The Ballad of the Mary Whalen

Aaah, is that the Big Apple I spy through my porthole? Delightful

Even before I abandoned rent-controlled Manhattan tenement life five years ago and up and moved to my very own little shack of a frame house in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the latter neighborhood had become a throbbing termite-mound of home renovation, new construction, face-lifting and just all-around progress, as they call it. On the waterfront, the original setting for the play that became the classic Brando vehicle of that name, Red Hook is on the front lines of the epic gentrification still sweeping New York City's neighborhoods, leaving only a few hidden corners of ground too barren for Starbucks. Gracias a Dios we don't have a Starbucks here yet, but the Ecuadorian bagel and caffeinated swill spot where methadone survivors buy their oversweetened coffees has been supplanted by baked, a delightful free-wireless-internet hipster emporium with glowing pine wood walls and puff-pastries filled with goat cheese and herbs, where one manages all too easily to be dinged seven dollars for a designer latte and a muffin.

In there the other morning I ran into my friend Carolina Salguero, one of the first people I met in the neighborhood and herself a gentrification victim who was asked last summer to move on, when her affordable apartment was caught in the rising rental tide. Now she lives in Oyster Bay, Long Island. She still has interests in the neighborhood, however, as the founder of PortSide New York, an NGO which "seeks to breathe life into the relationship between Red Hook’s landside community and the maritime sector—to the advantage of both." Last summer the organization aquired the defunct tanker Mary Whalen, and Carolina spent much of the fall and winter repairing and restoring it. Getting a 172 foot steel ship built back in 1938 into action again makes makes most of the gut renovations of houses around here seem about as daunting as, say, washing a car, and I've been eager to see the beast since she first told me about the project.



Carolina is big on getting people involved, so I wasn't surprised when the second sentence out of her mouth was a request for me to volunteer at "our first volunteer Sunday," an occasion she seemed almost to have invented on the very spur of the moment to take advantage of our bumping into one another. I mumbled something about the non-sustainable flooring I was trying to get laid down in my living room and then counter-attacked with the observation that she hadn't updated her previously fascinating blog about the Mary Whalen renovation since January. She then mumbled something about someone having suggested she really ought to write a book about it, as if that were an excuse. I took that as an implication that she felt that by blogging it she would be cutting the legs out from under some future publishable opus. Had I already drunk my latte I might have been quick enough to observe that nothing would make a better outline for a book than a completed boat-renovation blog, but it was early and I was still a little thin on the ground. You just might see me on Sunday, I said.

In fact I was the first volunteer to arrive, making me that much more certain that the "spring-cleaning" had been invented for my benefit alone. Fresh from my new floor, in sawdust-covered work pants and greasy suede gloves, I waited for Carolina by the guard-house at the entrance to the Red Hook container port; when I told the guard I didn't have photo-i.d. he said "what are you thinking? This is New York City." Nonetheless, if Carolina would vouch for me when she arrived he would let me in. I've been in the container port only twice before, once to film the behind-the-scenes of a big-budget commercial for a Brazilian shipping company, when we followed a camera crew following Claudia Schiffer walking in front of the Manhattan skyline, before delivering two or three quarter-of-a-million dollar syllables, and once on another shoot when we interviewed a guy who wasn't sure if he was an actor playing a goombah, or a real, actual goombah, standing in the doorway of a warehouse full of cacao pods that smelled like paradise. Carolina picked me up in her pickup truck and we whizzed around the deserted Sunday port, slaloming through stacks of containers until we got to the Mary Whalen's pier. There are acres upon acres of open waterfront space here with the greatest views of lower Manhattan imaginable, and now that this neighborhood has gone from being one big crack bodega to the home of the latest gourmet Fairway supermarket, the developers must be salivating and scheming and hoping the last remnants of New York City shipping would just load up and steam off into the sunset.

In the belly of the beast: eager volunteer and recent Red Hook arrival Jim Clark, proprietor of LOOK NORTH, an Inuit art gallery. That's right, Red Hook now not only has art galleries, it has Inuit art galleries!

The Mary Whalen began life in 1938 as a local gasoline tanker and was eventually converted to haul loads of diesel fuel throughout the harbor. The Captain's cabin still has original mahogany trim and the former oil storage holds will hopefully soon become a maritime museum but she's pretty humble. Which may be the point. We set to work offloading the winter trappings, mostly coal and firewood and the woodstoves that had made the ship bearable to work on over the winter. I coiled some vast ropes in piles on a shady corner of the steel deck, where the summer sun shouldn't batter their uv-sensitive strands. We moved some mattresses. We considered what to order for lunch.

At last another volunteer arrived, Jim Clark, an Alaskan fisherman who recently moved to Red Hook. We had barely been introduced before he clambered down a long ladder into one of the Mary Whalen's innumerable gunk-filled foredeck caverns, carrying a shop-vac and a submersible pump. Shortly waste-water began spurting out of a tube and running along the decks, but Jim himself was never seen again. I assisted Carolina by hauling buckets of rust-sludge out of another hatch. She did the dirty work, sweating below decks, shoveling pounds of what was literally the oxidized inner wall of the ship into white plastic buckets donated by yet another Red Hook fixture, Steve's Key Lime Pies. Once these buckets had held some ingredient of his delicious desserts; we filled them with vile metallic goo that smelled like foetid cheese, and lined them up along the starboard side for disposal. After a dozen buckets or so of this I stuck my head down into the overripe compartment and yelled to Carolina, some twenty feet below, that I had better be getting along; I needed to return to the ongoing flooring emergency back on Coffey St. It wasn't quite an Amish barn-raising, but it was a morning that offered up the hope that Red Hook's community spirit, its old-school neighborhoodyness, so exceptional in the heart of the city, may actually be surviving the real-estate feeding frenzy snapping at its shores.


Carolina even further down in the belly of the beast. The small intestine of the beast, as it were. Today's task: shoveling out countless buckets of rust-sludge

Eight of the countless buckets...

I warned Carolina not to wear this crisp white Armani henley for such a foul task, but she wouldn't listen

Spudwell S1

Tuesday 1/30/07

I’m feeling in the groove here, like I’m living up to John’s knickname for me, “Tanker Princess.”

Ernie and I are getting along like a house afire. I’m feeling on top of this project.

I go down to check status of the forward spudwell. I never feel too welcome with this team, Roach always has a way of keeping his head down, no eye contact. I don’t have a sense of the other guy; but, I’ve always loved the cavernous, moody spaces of the cargo tanks and so this spudwork is great to photograph.

I’m loving photography again. The camera that Erica delivered yesterday, the latest little Elph, is astounding. Auto mode can expose images in low light and high contrast, it has a wide lens, a view finder even, and makes a 20 meg file! This little $400 cigarette pack is out performing my “pro” Nikon D1X that only makes a 19 meg file. No, Canon is not a sponsor. Hmmm…Hello, Canon?

Then I look down near the spudwell, I see that the Whalen’s gangway pin, a 4’ steel rod, threaded at one end with an eye at the other, has been used to lever the spud in place. The threads are mashed.

Something blasts out of me. “Yo pago, yo mando” (I pay, I give orders) and continue to dictate in Spanish that they will not use parts of the boat as tools, they’ll go off the boat for tools. I steam up the ladder “joder.”

Straight to Ernie “I have my first close-to-complaint.” Ernie is back in a few with the rod. He’s smirking. “I took care of it.” He waves the rod. “Yes, Ernie, the threads look better in daylight, yes, they can be recut.” I mutter about Roach’s attitude. Ernie tactfully points out, “you have to understand, it’s a macho thing… and his relationship to women is that they put bills in his underwear.” I laugh. Good joke about Roach's former job as a stripper, but maybe very wise. I move on.

I check in on the laborers cleaning out the crawl space underneath the forward engine room floor. Because the forepeak was not pumped out promptly, and the bulkhead failed, the water ran back into the next space; and as it wasn’t pumped out of THERE promptly, there are cakes of rust ice in the bottom of this compartment. Ernie doesn’t want to use heat to melt it as that will ruin the paint, so a team of Hispanics is hunkered in there smashing ice.

Diligent Freddy continues working round the hull, washing of steel. He’s always alone, up high on scaffolding or a high reach. Burning open the bow steel leads to lots of smoke and lots of looking from below and from within, looking to understand the structure, the damage and to devise a plan.

After lunch, I go back into cargo tank S1 to make nice with Roach. He says “this must be a special project, they never put me on work like this." I don't really know what to say, but at least we're talking. The day concludes without episode. We're all in the groove.