PortSide NewYork + tanker Mary Whalen

A captain who stayed with his ship, Captain Kurt Carlsen, FLYING ENTERPRISE

2012-01-22T23:16:00.005-05:00

Pier 9B

Posted by Carolina Salguero

The story of the Italian cruise ship COSTA CONCORDIA has had me chirping away on Twitter and posting on Facebook. Maybe I'll consolidate those posts here at some point ...

In the meantime, on the subject of stricken vessels, we got word that PBS was looking to interview a captain who stayed with his stricken vessel. I asked PortSide's admiralty lawyer, the wonderfully named Charlie Brown of SNR Denton, if he knew any cases. He said the best was an old one, the captain of the FLYING ENTERPRISE.

His heroism netted him a ticker tape parade in NYC in the 1950's.

Can you imagine a ship captain getting any kind of attention like that in NYC now?!

Meet Captain Kurt Carlsen of the FLYING ENTERPRISE.

The ship was hit by one rogue wave and damaged, and then hit by a second. He ordered crew and passengers off and stayed with his stricken vessel for 13 days, manning her alone, so that a growing fleet of salvage vessels could not lay claim to her. A rescue tug, astoundingly named TURMOIL came to tow her to safety, and the mate joined Carlsen on the FLYING ENTERPRISE. A storm hit them, and they had to abandon ship. She sank soon thereafter.

Vintage newsreels here and here

"He was offered $250,000 for his story by the British Daily Express newspaper, a half million dollars by Hollywood. Endorsement offers also came in. With riches his for the asking, Carlsen declined all offers. He said "I don't want a seaman's honest attempt to save his ship used for any commercial purpose." After honours from his king and a ticker tape parade in New York, Carlsen returned to the sea where he spent the rest of his career. He died, unnoticed, in 1989."

When he died years later in 1989, he was buried at sea over the wreck of the vessel at his request.

The book about it all "Simple Courage" is on Amazon. The review has more details of the story:

"Carlson stayed aboard, used a makeshift radio and his skills as a ham radio operator to communicate with the armada of ships that had gathered, and continued to run his disabled ship single-handedly for over a week. He risked his life moving about the listing boat, scavenged what little food and drink there was, wrote it all down in the store log, and maintained the ship's log and kept her 'legal.' As long as he was captain and on board, nobody could claim salvage. He arranged for a contract to be negotiated to get Flying Enterprise towed to port, all of this over a period of days in which she could have gone down at any minute. When the tug Turmoil arrived, after a day of trying to get a line to the lone captain in a large swell, Kenneth Dancy sprinted across the tug's deck and jumped across to Flying Enterprise to help Carlson secure the tow line. Dancy became First Mate and he saw the horrendous and terrifying conditions that Carlson had been living in, where some walls had become sloping floors, some walls had become sloping roofs, and sea water and diesel and oil was everywhere. Carlson had been working, eating, and sleeping in the middle of all this and remained calm and professional throughout."

85 pages of the book visible on line here

History compiled by a shipwreck blogger here

Report from a diver of the wreck here

First snow day of 2012 on MARY WHALEN, Chiclet asks for help shovelling the deck!

2012-01-21T12:07:00.002-05:00

Pier 9B

Posted by Carolina Salguero

That's Chiclet coming in this morning after anight off the boat.

Soon after that, I sent an email blast out to volunteers for help shoveling at3pm. Chiclet asks for help!

I did that rather last minute, Iknow, but I wasn’t on the ball vis a vis work yesterday. It was my birthday and day13 of a cold, two different excuses for being a dingbat.

Before shoveling, I'm relishing the cozy delights of snow day: Irishoatmeal with currants on the diesel stove.

Chiclet snoozing on her galleytuffet.

Snowy light on silver polished by Jenny Kane for a Supper Club dinner;thank you Jenny!

WBGO Rhythm Revue streaming. Dave Black, thanks for introducing meto that!

Here’s a snow day shot from 3years ago, a stove multi-tasking, heatingup the shovel so I can wax it and warming soup at the same time.

This is also a sign of progress! In 2008, the fidley deck had not been repainted yet (note the peeling paint on floor) and we were using anold shovel with a taped handle (it was a classic though), and now we have modCanadian shovels with plastic blades and carbon fiber handles. Come use onetoday! Stevedores will start plowing the pier next to the ship sometime after 1pm and deck shoveling starts at 3pm!

After that, I've invited people to join me at Montero's Bar at 6pm and raise a glass in honor of bar founder Pilar Montero who passed away at 90 this week and celebrate her and the great place she created.

Montero's

73 Atlantic Ave @ Hicks

Brooklyn Heights

Comments on Bowery Boys Red Hook history podcast

2012-01-14T14:32:00.030-05:00

Pier 9B, Red Hook, Brooklyn
Posted by Carolina Salguero

A recent podcast on the site THE BOWERY BOYS covers Red Hook history with a strong focus on gangs and crime.

There is much good about the piece, but it also has some errors, and in dwelling on crime so much, it skews the area's history. I wrote the creators; and in order to facilitate getting the word out, I post my email to them below.

In an idea world, I'd have time to upload supporting data, but I don't. I did add a link about the Carnegie Library in the version below.

You can write them yourself at the following email addresses boweryboysnyc@earthlink.net; tom@boweryboyspodcast.com, and/or post a comment here.

Dear Greg and Tom:

I just listened to http://theboweryboys.blogspot.com/2012/01/red-hook-brooklyn-rich-seafaring.html

I am glad that you love Red Hook and chose to dedicate time to the place, your piece reflects that love; but your history has considerable errors.

I'm the Founder and Director of PortSide NewYork a waterfront-themed non-profit here in Red Hook. We are based on the oil tanker MARY A. WHALEN docked in the Red Hook Container Terminal.

One of our missions has been to research Red Hook history on a water theme and produce related cultural tourism products. More here.

I don't have the time to write out a detailed correction of all the errors in your podcast and so will just rattle off some observations.

It was Norwegians first, not Irish. Planners did lay out grid for the streets in the early mid 1800's, but large parts of eastern Red Hook remained watery through the late 1880s.

Though Red Hook had gangs, as you describe; well before Red Hook was known as the crack capital of the USA, the neighborhood was also home to huge industry and many lower middle class and middle class residents and a booming retail corridor.

There was a Carnegie library, wealthy people using the Hamilton Avenue Ferry, built to facilitate access to Green-Wood Cemetary and soon used by commuters from what we now call Carroll Gardens to go to work in lower Manhattan's business district.

In short, Red Hook housed great poverty, but for decades was more mixed economically than your focus on gangland stories describes. Personally, I find what is most distinctive about Red Hook over the years is the capacity of this small place to hold AT THE SAME TIME a striking economic range in its residents and a striking range of land use from major industry to residences.

Also, residents of Carroll Gardens did not drive the name change of their area, it was real estate brokers who changed the name, my mother being one of them. It was a technique to attract buyers (and lenders) for brownstones who might be dissuaded by the name of Red Hook, which by the 1960s was associated with things dark.

Your most significant error is to say that the movie "On the Waterfront" is based on Red Hook. That is an easy error to make as that is oft repeated here. I myself made the mistake of writing so in one of our early Red Hook guides.

After additional research, I can confirm that this is not so, nor was Elia Kazan's movie of that name based on Arthur Miller's script.

In a zeigeist way, a number of people were likely focusing on dockland stories at that time, the issues having been recently been outed by a long expose series in the press.

"On the Waterfront" is based on another script by Budd Schulberg and based an actual person Father Pete Corridan who was facing issues on the docks on the westside of Manhattan and Union County, New Jersey, not Red Hook. Note that the Red Hook docks were by then controlled by ethnic Italians and not Irish.

A full length book, based on in-depth academic research, was recently published about the dockworker issues and the movie. The book is called "On the Irish Waterfront." It is a corrective to much popular misunderstand about how the famous movie came to be and the conventional interpretation of the movie as being an Elia Kazan apologia for testifying before HUAC.

I can put you in touch with the professor Jim Fisher of Fordham who wrote the book. His blog has information about the book, though lately it has veered into more personal terrain, so try this post.

The book's Amazon listing is here.

If you do follow ups or corrections, feel free to get in touch.

I may publish the content of this email in some form as a blogpost to facilitate these corrections being available to a wider audience which may be misled by your history.

Regards,

Carolina

Carolina Salguero

Founder + Director

PortSide NewYorkBringing NYC's BlueSpace to life

Boom! meets Pizza!

2012-01-08T22:09:00.020-05:00

Pier 9B, Red Hook, Brooklyn
Posted by Carolina Salguero
Photos by Carolina Salguero unless otherwise indicated.

The first volunteer day of 2012, Saturday, was blessed with GLORIOUS weather with temps hovering around 50 degrees and the sun mostly out all day. Project Boom! is in its final stages. Mike I-love-rigging Abegg tweaked the cable running through the boom's refurbished blocks, attached a block to the end of the boom, running its line through the fair leads used during the MARY WHALEN's days of carrying fuel hose. We'll use that block instead of the boom chainfall (so key for gangway tending) to do things like lift pallet loads of hard coal. We'll be getting 2 tons of coal once the boom is back up. Time to play Break Bulk! Better that than Break Back from carrying eighty 50-pound bags of coal up the gangway...

Today's goals: get shipwork work done, have fun (as always) and learn to make pizza to feed the crew. It's cold enough to want something warm at the end of the day, and deep inside the container terminal TWIC zone as we are, no take-out deliveries are possible. Today, we received a donated pizza stone from by A Cook's Companion - thank you! - picked up by John Weaver and Karen Dyrland who popped by to deliver my new used Leica digital camera (photos here may improve) and put in an hour of work. Before the volunteers arrived Smitty, a wizard musician on the steel guitar, came and donated to the firewood pile, walnut offcuts from his cabinetry work.

Today's work list was aspirationally long; but hey, Mike Abegg says to make a bigger list than we can do!

First thing I did before shipwork was make the sauce for the pizza. Time for a shout out here to thank Scott Pfaffman and Molly Blieden for donating a stack of saucepans after their tenant restaurant O'Barone closed. This is one of the big ones. So great!

Sauce is being cooked on our Webb Perfection diesel pot-burner stove, a design patented in 1918.

Diesel simply piddles down the pipe, turns right and then heads towards the back and into the "pot," aka a Valjean Burner. The holes allow oxygen to enter. The overflow safety cutoff is the little chain dangling to the right of the down-sticking overflow pipe. If the pot floods, the extra diesel spills down that pipe and into a cup. Once that cup get heavy (you have to calibrate that), it pulls down on the chain and cuts off the intake. Originally there was a round-bottomed brass cup. Now, we have a bean can with a dead padlock to give it heft. If someone knows where to get such a Webb brass cup, we'd love to know.

First volunteer in, Peter Rothenberg, nets the day's Best Dressed Award. Pete is painting the boom mast fully and his shirt not very much.

Mike Abegg where he likes to go, up the ladder and into what little rigging an oil tanker has to offer. Photo by Karen Dyrland.

Though the South Street Seaport is rising like a phoenix and has reactivated their volunteer program, our Save Our Seaport friends are still around. After spending the morning volunteering on the Seaport fleet, Mike Cohen, Nelson Chin and Linda Beal spend their afternoon at PortSide. Here they're pitching in on final stages of Mike Abegg's boom project.

Somehow Linda Beal seems to get involved in projects stretching things out on the pier. This time she handles it without Chiclet's assistance. Chiclet punked out this work day and did not supervise.

Me, setting off to cut firewood on the pier. Photo by Nelson Chin.

Linda Beal and Mike Cohen wire brushing the boom guy wires. Heckuva job! I wrote the guy wires off as badly rusted; but after Linda and Mike's diligent brushing, the wire rope looked really good!

Me, cutting wood offcuts donated by Ralph Gorham of Brooklyn Farm Table and Red Hook Lobster Pound. That's so Red Hook... that kind of range out of one person. I'm sorry to burn such wonderful old timbers and set aside a few for Mike Abegg who is also a cabinetmaker (what was I saying about people with diverse skill sets...). The axe here is a wanna be. I swung it twice and concluded that my shoulder is NOT healed after being hit by a truck on 1/14/11, so it's a good thing that I'm switching the fidley stove from wood burning to coal burning... I'll need much less wood this winter, just enough to start the coal fires...

Speaking of fuel. Here, passing us is the kind of 2nd generation equipment that replaced the MARY A. WHALEN. The first generation after coastal oil tankers was fuel barges pushed by harbor tugs. Now there are these huge "pin boats," ATB (articulated tug and barge units) whose tugs are pinned to double hulled fuel barges. The MARY is an old single hull. She carried 8,019 barrels. That's Reinauer equipment passing us, and their bigger barges carry 100,000 barrels and more, all of which constitutes a heads up as to how much fuel consumption has soared from 1938 when the MARY WHALEN was built until now. Photo by Karen Dyrland. Her father was captain of the MARY A. WHALEN from 1958 to 1978.

The wind really came up by the end of the day; and here Mike Cohen is wrastling the wheelhouse window tarps back into place. They came down for New Years Eve fireworks viewing....

Pizza #4. What you can't see here was the learning curve from Pizza #1, the pizza that was a lesson in corn meal or semolina flour. eg, without it scattered on your pizza peel, you're not getting your pizza off the peel! A nimble committee lept into action and helped me drag deformed Pizza 1 onto the Pizza stone.

Nelson Chin cutting pizza, Mike Cohen and Mike Abegg to the right of him.

Matt Perricone of the Tug Cornell and Amy Bucciferro arrived in time for Pizza #4. Matt was in to pick up two old radar monitors that were donated to us. We're trading them for work time from Matt. We all laughed about Lessons of Shipwork, The Shopvac Episodes. My tale covered why not to use one to vacuum out a diesel stove--clogs your filter in minutes, and there is no way to clean that off without getting blackened like a coal miner. Matt said "never use one without a filter; because if you do, what was over there, just goes zzzzip over to here." Matt described cleaning out the MARY WHALEN's boiler chimney on New Year's day. He removed about 15 gallons of rust scale and one dead pigeon. Minus the bird and friends, could we finally get the boiler to work? Wouldn't central heat be grand....

And with that, I'll leave you with the Shop Vac Song

Christmas in the Red Hook Container Terminal, back in the day

2011-12-22T18:39:00.027-05:00

Every object has a history. Unlocking that history is what interpretation is all about and is something we try and do here at PortSide NewYork with our WaterStories project. Here’s a story related to the crèche you can see outside the Red Hook Containerport.

December 2010, PortSide received an email out of the blue from a Fred DeAngelis. Here are some excerpts.

To whom it may concern,

My name is Fred DeAngelis. I am so glad to have found your website. In short I was practically raised on pier 9.

My dad worked there with JOHN McGrath for over 20+ years. Of course I would like to volunteer my time to support your project. I have not been on the pier itself since 1986 & would love the opportunity to revisit.

Fred and his wife and small child visited the Mary Whalen on 3/12/2011. While leaving, he spotted the battered crèche inside the shed on Pier 9b. He was very moved. He said “my father built that.” He got out of his car to photograph it.

When the crèche was installed outside the port this December, I emailed him to tell him it was in place in case he wanted to photograph it. I thought it might not be around forever, what with the changes in the port. He wrote back with a history of Christmas in the port from the 70s and 80s. His father was here from 1972 to 1986 when as he put it “John McGrath was the name of the company that was pier 9.”

The Holiday session on the water front was something literally out of a movie. The surrounding neighborhood wasn't as pretty as it is now becoming and the workers tried to make it as festive as possible.

Now remember these were the tough and rugged Longshoreman of yesteryear. However the special feeling of the holidays touched almost everyone. As I remember most of the waterfront would decorate a little.

My dad and his friends would cut a damaged container up and make a shed for the decorations that they would put on display. The nativity set was always the center of attraction with a lighted sign that would say "MERRY CHRISTMAS"

Santa was incorporated with strings of lights and the feelings of the holidays approaching would settle in.

Food was also another big part of celebrating the holidays. Through out certain parts of the pier they had what they would call shacks. This is a place where till today I have never tasted an Italian meal so good. Joe Black was the cook and also the forklift operator for John McGrath at the time and a special family friend.

You could picture snow on the ground, ships all docked at the piers and small shacks that would have smoke coming out of a chimney with friends inside eating and drinking together.

Indeed a special time and memories that will last a lifetime.

Happy holidays, whatever you celebrate, however you celebrate it.


From http://saveredhooklights.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/

Boom! and other shipwork projects

2011-12-16T14:22:00.000-05:00

More coming soon about more restoration work on the cargo boom, galley stove, fidley stove and more!

Amy Bucciferro priming parts of the block from the cargo boom. Mike Abegg took all the blocks apart for servicing and we're replacing all the wire in the running and standing rigging.

Mike Cohen (L) and Mike Abegg (R) both of the Save Our Seaport group, giving the gangway some TLC

Hugh McCallion working on galley stove chimney

Hugh McCallion servicing the galley stove.

Carolina Salguero in forepeak removing last of ballast water put in for Hurricane Irene. After 2 pumps burned out, the last bit went out in buckets. Care to donate more pumps anyone?

Dirty forepeak mucking crew Frank Hanavan (L), Carolina Salguero (R) and Mike Abegg who popped by our project (center)

Ben Paolino on top of the wheelhouse capping the tankerman's cabin vent for the winter

Hugh McCallion tackles the stove in the fidley this time, swapping out stove pipe

Our 2009 intern from Germany Yolanda Rother popped by for a surprise visit and jumped right in

PortSide AddYourVoice campaign

2011-12-16T13:53:00.019-05:00

Please send us a message that expresses

what PortSide and/or the MARY A. WHALEN means to you
or what great experience you had with us, etc.

You can post directly to AddYourVoice by adding a comment below or

email us at AddYourVoice@portsidenewyork.org

Messages from our AddYourVoice campaign will be used in grant
applications and in our quest for a home for
PortSide and the MARY A. WHALEN.

We are trying very hard to get out from behind the containerport fence to a place where we can provide programs more often and expand our program mix.Please support this effort and chime in to say why you want us out of here!

As always, you can also deploy the cash option to support us click

Click the link below "View comments" to see submissions to the campaign.

Wagenborg failure re-routes SI ferry

2011-12-09T22:22:00.000-05:00

Red Hook, Brooklyn

by Carolina Salguero

For reasons I can't explain, I so love it when the Staten Island ferries whoosh past the MARY A. WHALEN in the Buttermilk. Is it because they are my favorite color (orange)? Is it the wonderful way they stream by leaving no wake? or how they look so big slipping between the land masses of Red Hook and Governors Island?

This afternoon, I spotted one coming up the channel.

I called Staten Island Ferry Captain Jim Parese at 1544 to ask if he was steering the ferry headed my way.

He called back a while later to say that "that's my boat.. but I'm not on it." He was just leaving their simulator room. I asked why the ferry was coming this side of Governors Island, and he explained that a small ship in the 250'-300' size had lost steerage and dropped anchor off the range on Governors Island.

Jim Parese is a new friend thanks to PortSide's exhibit on the mariners response to 9/11. Jim evacuated thousands of people on 9/11, and his interview appears in the book "All Available Boats" and you could hear his oral history at our exhibit.

He sent the following photos of Wagenborg vessel which was having the trouble.

If you have any more info about what transpired, please call or write!

70th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day

2011-12-07T05:47:00.000-05:00

See some headlines of the day here

See vintage footage of Pearl Harbor and the attacks

FDR's speech with the line "A date that will live in infamy..."

US Navy official history webpage here

NPYD security training on the MARY A. WHALEN

2011-12-05T14:14:00.001-05:00

Today's New York Times reports on the underwater cameras used by the NYPD. Now that the secret's out, here's some news.

The NYPD trained officers on how to use the new cameras on the MARY A. WHALEN during May of 2007.

An NYPD boat came along side, and an officer in sunglasses skipped over introductions and said "can we look at your bottom with an underwater camera?"

I said, "I don't show my bottom to just any guy... who's asking?"

Without the hint of a laugh, Detective Keith Duval handed over a card and said he was with the Counter Terrorism Division.

"All the big stuff is either busy or moving," he explained; so the Mary Whalen would be helpful to him to use. He said the cameras cost some $80,000.

Elaine Carmichael, our urban planner from Economic Stewardship was visiting NYC. She and I interrupted our meeting to watch for awhile, and then just let the NYPD do their job.

Here are some more photos from their visit.

PortSide uses the MARY A. WHALEN as an educational resource in diverse ways and for diverse groups. We have given TankerTours to the general public in English and Spanish. We have helped train college professors in a City Tech program. We have run workshops and lectures (TankerTalks) aboard, and we've helped train the NYPD. We look forward to partnering with maritime training institutions to help offer professional training.

If you think your school, academy, or program could use the MARY A. WHALEN in some educational fashion, please get in touch with us at portsidenewyork(at)gmail.com

best
Carolina Salguero

Happy Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T23:47:00.000-05:00

Big Money, Big Ideas for Bklyn Waterfront Today - or not

2011-11-23T13:21:00.006-05:00

Last night Brooklyn Bridge Park officials revealed proposals for development on Pier 1, Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Below we offer a one-stop shop of today's links to Pier 1 coverage to make the proposal images easier to find.

In other (and the really astounding) waterfront news, the Times reports today that the Center for Urban Real Estate, which they call "a new research group at Columbia University" proposes connecting Governor's Island to Manhattan with landfill. The idea comes with a realtor-ready neighborhood moniker “LoLo” (Lower Lower Manhattan).

Hopping hollyhocks! Where to start on this one?

There's the environmental issue of filling the harbor, there's shutting down a major maritime channel, and then there are other questions such as:

Why give Governors Island to Manhattan? It was once more closely related to Brooklyn. At low tide, people reputedly could walk over from Red Hook, and it is fact that the Buttermilk Channel was dredged as far back as the 1800s to open up a shipping channel.

Alternatively, if one is to fill, would it be more useful for the city and region at the metalevel to fill out to the pier headline in Sunset Park and put a post-Panamax containerport there? Backers of that idea say the raising of the Bayonne Bridge is too little too late and doesn't address the hard right turn the ships have to make.

Or how about the idea that maybe what makes Governors Island so great now is that it IS an island? As LoLo, it's just another development.

Then there is the PortSide way of thinking, eg, it's OK to think big, but what is key is to get stuff happening right away with the infrastructure you have (open up all those city piers with nothing doing on them, make Governors Island piers more used) or build smaller projects to reflect real users (hello, "maritime piers" of 125th Street West Harlem, Pier 25 in Hudson River Park or the upcoming Pier 15 in the East River that are not designed for easy boat use). Hello, LoLo, rather than MegaBuild, how about “small but now”? Isn’t there a recession on? How about some now now while there is no there there?

Happy Thanksgiving.

Boom! History + volunteer day

2011-11-06T20:35:00.003-05:00

Time to lower the boom, replace the cables, check, service and maybe replace blocks and paint the boom itself. We finally have a sweet spot to do this. The weather is FINALLY going to give us a long run without rain so it should be possible to get this all done without too many days of disruption. We get some crane help to lower the boom as the boom winches walked a long time ago.

Project before the start. Where boom was 11/4/11 Friday morning at 0900.

This project, as so often happens if you are dealing with preserving a historic boat, raised all sorts of questions about what was. So, mixed with the grunt work was all sorts of hypothesizing and checking old photos and plans.

Saturday's s volunteer day had an A team of Mike Abegg, Nelson Chin, Linda Von Voss-Beal (all South Street Seaport people), Carolina Salguero, and supervisor Chiclet.

While the Seaport has their ship volunteer program on hold, Seaport folks have been stepping up to help over here. Thanks to you all for helping out while you couldn't get on your usual boats!!

While we have your attention, I thought I'd mention that the Seaport looks very much on the mend after the take-over by the Museum of the City of New York with Susan Henshaw Jones at the helm. You can follow the progress of the resuscitation of the Seaport on the blog of the group Save Our Seaport, heavy lifters in the cause, here

Where it was Saturday morning 0900 after new volies Jeffrey Jernstrom and Enrico Bazzoni chipped and scraped during Friday

Once the boom is on deck, you start to wonder what all the fittings attached to it were doing, why a bulge here, why a flat bar there. Mike figures out that a run of long shank shackles is a series of fair leads... and they went to the hose winch. But what were the mystery tubular fairleads along the forward edge of the boom? Carolina and Mike make several trips to the ship plans in the fidley, a photo in the galley, and a photo in the fidley.

Bob Mattson photo from 1979

Carolina comments that on a visit a while back Charlie Deroko pointed out that the mast and boom in the plans were not what's here now... that they are much shorter and look as if they're wood.

Mike then points out that in the plans the mast isn't even where it is now - something no one had remarked upon until now. As drawn, the boom was on a pad eye on the ullage trunk, not forward of it; but then again, the drawings don't show the mast on the aft end of the wheelhouse that appear in ST Kiddoo photos...

Carolina hypothesizes that the new longer boom reflects how Mary Whalen's work evolved from delivering to terminals (short boom) to fueling ever bigger ships, necessitating a long boom for reach.

Bingo! Within a day, Carolina has a phone conversation with a Mary Whalen Mate from the 1980s who said that Eklof was very proud of their elongated "superbooms" used to fuel ships. They found all sorts of ways to add stiffeners, he says, just what Carolina and Mike had been guessing. What a difference thirty years makes. The "superboom" seems mighty unimpressive in comparison to today's hydraulic, telescoping booms.

Mike I-Love-Rigging Abegg prepares to lift the boom with a shackle so we can rotate it to better get at the underside. We'll also clean and grease the pin.

Carolina & Linda stretch the old boom cable on the dock to measure it. The boom is not the original one in the ship plan; so until we lowered the whole affair to measure it, we didn't know how much new cable to get. Amounts to 242' of wire rope.

Ship cat Chiclet assists in the cable measuring process.

Team Abegg & Chin priming the boom. The primer is milk chocolate brown which leads to many jokes about repainting the whole ship brown. Anyone ever seen a brown boat? Tugster, can you help us here?

The cable measuring team comes up to heckle the boys on the boom. Classic boatwork slogan on the back of that old Wavertree t-shirt there, Mike!


Mike Cohen shows up, a fuel barge goes by, the sun is setting and it's time to get the tools back down below.

Kicking back in the galley after a day's work.

Next thought... might as well lower the mast, while we're at it, and paint that bedraggled thing and redo the mast stays.

Eerie Sea Smoke in time for Halloween

2011-10-30T00:02:00.004-04:00

So WHAT'S with the weather?!

Today's plummeting temperature brought more than snow, it brought sea smoke. Fast moving sea smoke, that is, given the winds. Here's a glimpse.

Last time I saw sea smoke on salt water in such quantities, it was 2 degrees out, and I was shooting my muse, the Janice Anne Reinauer. This summer she was sold to a Nigerian company and left on the Blue Marlin.

See what today's sea smoke looks like from the wheelhouse of a tug dockside at Carteret in another evocative video by Bill Brucato, Captain of the Nicole L. Reinauer.

http://youtu.be/OjJ-EXsYQg8

PortSide Exhibit: Mariners' response to 9/11

2011-08-22T09:52:00.058-04:00

Exhibit on the steamer LILAC - on Hudson River Park's Pier 25, Manhattan

PortSide NewYork, a waterfront-themed non-profit organization, is mounting a multi-media exhibit (photography, videos and oral history) and presentation about the extraordinary and little-known maritime role in 9/11, from evacuation to rubble removal.

Note:

The exhibit venue Lilac and PortSide's base of operations, the Mary A. Whalen, survived Irene unharmed. Despite Irene's disruptions and delays, we are proceeding with plans for the exhibit.

Sponsors are still being sought for this exhibit. Please contact PortSide NewYork, Director Carolina Salguero,917-414-0565, portsidenewyork(at)gmail.com

Opening: Thurs 9/8/11 6:00-9:00pm.

Talk: Wed 9/14/11 7:00-8:30pm by Carolina Salguero, photojournalist on 9/11 and now Director of PortSide NewYork and journalist Jessica DuLong

Location: Historic ship LILAC, Hudson River Park’s Pier 25 at North Moore Street, Tribeca,Manhattan

Hours: During September on Thursdays from 12:00pm to 6:00pm and Saturdays from 1:00pm to 6:00pm, plus scheduled visits by school groups. Additional open hours for the public may be announced by early September.

Download press release here

related event: U.S. Coast Guard 9/11 New York City Response Retrospective on the Intrepid, Sat 9/10, 10 am to 4pm. Open to the public. more info

Photo by Carolina Salguero

The Coast Guard estimated that, on the morning of 9/11, between 350,000 and 500,000 people were evacuated from lower Manhattan by water during just a few hours.

Particularly noteworthy is that the process was started spontaneously by the operators of the boats themselves. Within hours, five Coast Guard cutters, 12 small boats, and more than 100 public and private vessels operated on scene. For four days following the attacks, the boats continued to provide rescue workers with fuel, crucial supplies, and river water for firefighting.

The marine role continued, largely unsung, for months as all the rubble - 2,400 barges or 93,346 trucks' worth was removed from Manhattan by water, save for the ritual last column which left by truck. The fact that it was removed by water made it possible to finish the job in just eight months, and spare the city incredible truck traffic. In creating the exhibit, PortSide NewYork makes the point that the maritime 9/11 story has workaday implications for New York City as it develops new plans for its waterfront.

To bring home the point, the exhibit will be mounted on a ship docked at a pier from which Ground Zero rubble was removed. PortSide will mount the exhibit on the former U.S. Lighthouse Tender Lilac, at Hudson River Park’s Pier 25, at North Moore Street, New York City in partnership with the non-profit Lilac Preservation Project

The exhibit will include photography and oral history by the award-winning photojournalist Carolina Salguero, who went on to found PortSide NewYork, plus contributions from vessel crews, and other institutions.

Photo by Carolina Salguero

Related talk:

On Wednesday, September 14, from 7:00-8:30pm a related talk will be given by Carolina Salguero (www.carolinasalguero.com) and journalist Jessica DuLong (www.jessicadulong.com), author of the critically acclaimed My River Chronicles: Rediscovering the Work That Built America, and chief engineer of retired New York City Fireboat John J. Harvey (www.fireboat.org), which was called back into service to supply firefighters with Hudson River water—the only water available for days following the towers' collapse. DuLong and her Fireboat Harvey crewmates were recognized in the Congressional Record for valor in aiding FDNY’s rescue efforts, and appear as characters in Maira Kalman’s award-winning children’s book FIREBOAT: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey.

The Lilac where the exhibit will be installed

As a ship-based museum, our role is to educate New Yorkers about our maritime heritage, and the story of the heroic role of mariners in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks has received little attention," said Lilac's Museum Director, Mary Habstritt. "We are really honored to help recognize their contributions and to share this story on board a ship, at Pier 25, which itself played a role as a shipping point for debris removal."

Carolina Salguero, Founder & Director of PortSide NewYork said “I was really concerned that the story of the 9/11 maritime evacuation was so overlooked. That was one of the things that prompted me to found PortSide NewYork as a way to bring attention to the waterways. Doing this exhibit is a way to both commemorate what happened ten years ago and to help the city move forward with its new waterfront plan Vision 2020. PortSide hopes, that by illuminating how those boats worked ten years ago—and the impediments they found—we can help the city better plan its future waterfront for both good days and bad."

"It's an honor to help share the largely untold story of the maritime community's contribution in New York City's hour of greatest need," said Jessica DuLong, chief engineer Fireboat John J. Harvey and author My River Chronicles, "The spontaneous mobilization was truly remarkable, but for mariners it's just a part of the job. Among those who work on the water the notion that panic leads to peril is as deeply ingrained as the tradition of helping those in need."

The exhibit includes:

Photography of the maritime evacuation:

featuring the work of Carolina Salguero, Founder + Director of PortSide NewYork and an award-winning photojournalist. More about Salguero's reporting from ground zero in this video
Photographs from Rich Naruszewicz, Captain of the New York Fast Ferry "Finest" evacuating people during 9/11 and former tankerman on PortSide's Mary A. Whalen
Photographs from crew of the retired fireboat John J. Harvey which served at ground zero.

Photography of rubble removal

by Carolina Salguero of Pier 25, North River and Pier 6, East River.

Oral history

Of tug crews who evacuated people and removed rubble gathered by Carolina Salguero

Videos:

MARAD video "Rescue at Water’s Edge,” a 10th anniversary tribute to the Merchant Mariners who sailed directly into harm’s way on September 11 and evacuated more 300,000 people by water.
Video by Mike Mazzei, dockbuilder who worked at 9/11 rubble removal site on Pier 25
Center for National Policy new video "Boatlift" the story of the armada of civilian watercraft which came together with no prior planning to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people from lower Manhattan on 9/11. It was the largest sealift ever – greater even than at Dunkirk during World War I

More about PortSide NewYork www.portsidenewyork.org

PortSide NewYork is a young, innovative non-profit organization. Our mission is to show New York City better ways to use the BlueSpace, or water part of the waterfront, to educate the public and policy makers about the waterfront, and to help revitalize our home neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn while doing that.

We promote sustainable waterfront planning that increases use of the water. This includes fostering waterborne transportation, the greenest way to move people and goods, and providing educational, cultural, and social service programs for the community on a water theme. PortSide engages in harbor advocacy and runs an H2O Arts program that offers ship tours, talks, walks, readings, concerts, movies, and performing arts.

We use a historic ship, the coastal oil tanker Mary A. Whalen, as our office, mobile cultural platform, and teaching tool. She was built in 1938 and is 172' long. She is famous for her role in incidents leading to the 1975 Supreme Court decision U.S. vs Reliable Transfer.

More about the Lilac Preservation Project: www.Lilacpreservationproject.org

The U.S. Lighthouse Tender Lilac was launched on May 26, 1933. Built for the U.S. Lighthouse Service, she carried supplies and personnel to lighthouses and maintained buoys. The duties of the Lighthouse Service were later absorbed by the U.S. Coast Guard. Lilac was decommissioned by the Coast Guard in 1972. She was the last ship in the Coast Guard fleet to operate with reciprocating steam engines and is unique in still possessing her original engines. Lilac is on the National Register of Historic Places and is eligible to become a National Historic Landmark. The ship is owned by the non-profit Lilac Preservation Project.

Related 9/11 info:

Event: US Coast Guard 9/11 New York City Response Retrospective, Intrepid Sea, Air, & Space Museum. Saturday 9/10 10 am to 4pm. Open to the public. more info

Coast Guard 9/11 oral history project:

Rear Admiral Richard E. Bennis, Commander, Coast Guard Activities NY, Captain of the Port
Lieutenant Michael Day, Chief, Waterways Oversight Branch, Coast Guard Activities New York

National September 11 Museum Interactive timeline
Downtown Alliance list of 9/11-related events and programs

Directions

Hudson River Park's Pier 25. Cross West Street at N. Moore St. or Harrison St.

Subway
1 at Canal Street and Franklin St.
A,C,E at Canal St.
1,2,3 at Chambers St.

Bus
M20 and M22

Sponsors:

Exhibit Design + Planning
provided pro bono by

Paul S. Alter

Lee H. Skolnick Architecture +
Design Partnership

To join our sponsors of this exhibit

Please get in touch with PortSide NewYork

Carolina Salguero, Director

917-414-0565

portsidenewyork@gmail.com

Emergency call for help with generator installation + moving stuff

2011-08-14T14:17:00.001-04:00

Due to issues in the Red Hook container port, PortSide has have to move a lot of our stuff on the pier tomorrow Monday 8/15.

If you can help, at whatever hour, please email portsidenewyork@gmail.com or call Carolina Salguero at 917-414-0565.

We have a related emergency need for connect a generator we have installed in the forward engine room. We need the following skilled help:

welder to weld new generator in position on old engine mounts
plumber to connect exhaust and fuel lines to generator
electrician to connect power cord to generator

WHAT A RIGGING JOB IT WAS!
Michael Abegg (center), Matt Perricone (right), David Black (offstage left)
lower used Cummins 15kw Model 13212E1400 into pre-existing hatch in foredeck underneath one of the vents


In it goes by the hairs on its chinny chin chin


It was since rotated 90 degrees clockwise and is sitting on existing engine mounts

Opening by Frank Hanavan, friend of PortSide

2011-08-14T10:59:00.004-04:00

Frank's work lovingly captures light and atmosphere around his two favorite subjects, brownstones and ships. And bicycles, let's not forget the bicycles.

This Hanavan hangs over the galley sink on the Mary A. Whalen. It is based on a photo by Barry Masterson

Frank says this is his last show for a long time. We hope not, so come out and buy and keep Frank painting!

Opening info

Monday 7-9pm

@ Mini Bar

482 Court Street in Carroll Gardens

between Luqueer and 4th Place, west side of street

http://www.frankhanavan.com/

A painting in the show

A Christmas card from Frank Hanavan

Hot Weekend Tip: Coast Guard Tall Ship EAGLE Open to Public This Weekend

2011-08-04T12:11:00.000-04:00

PortSide NewYork would like to spread the exciting news that the Coast Guard's tall ship EAGLE will be open to the public in Brooklyn for the first time ever -- this Friday, Saturday and Sunday. This sailing vessel is so large it cannot fit under the Brooklyn Bridge!

Coast Guard tall ship Eagle open to the public in Brooklyn for the 1st time ever!

It has been five years since she visited NYC.

The visit is part of her 75^th birthday celebrations.

Public visiting hours:

Pier 7, Port Authority Brooklyn Marine Terminal, foot of Atlantic Avenue, enter next to Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier 6

Fri 8/5 2-5pm

Sat 8/6 1-7pm

Sun 8/7 10am-7pm

Friday 8/5, you can ogle the Eagle while stuck in rush hour traffic as she sails the harbor. She weighs anchor from Stapleton anchorage at 0800, sails to the Statue of Liberty, passes by the Battery, and docks at Port Authority Pier 7 at the foot of Atlantic Avenue at 0900. To follow the Eagle's summer cruise, visit the Eagle's Facebook page

Blue Marlin Blues

2011-08-03T11:34:00.009-04:00

Blue Marlin carrying an oil rig

What links the US Cole, the Mary A. Whalen, the Exxon Valdez and the Blue Marlin?

What related shipping spectacle was conducted in the Upper Bay last month?

Exxon Valdez (R) leaking oil in 1989

The Exxon Valdez spill spawned a powerful piece of regulation OPA 90 which, among other things, banned single-skinned vessels from moving fuel in US waters.

This regulation would have phased out the Mary A. Whalen, if she hadn't gone out of business due to a scored crankshaft.

A large collection of operable fuel moving equipment that WAS phased out by OPA 90 was recently sold by Reinauer Transportation to a Nigerian company. That company contracted Dutch-owned Dockwise to send their heavy lift ship the Blue Marlin to take away tugs and barges. It was the Blue Marlin brought the terrorist-damaged US Cole back from Africa.

Loading the vessels, a job planned and choreographed by the Dockwise team, became a 26-day saga of several failed attempts. The spectacle had harbor watchers glued to blogs, a tugcam, and their favorite telephoto lenses. Confused landlubbers ashore were overheard to say that the Blue Marlin appeared to be sinking. They received no help from the mainstream press which made no mention of the visit of this famous ship nor the engineering feats, and crises, running throughout the month of July.

Reinauer cleverly sold the lot but washed their hands of the loading. Miller's Launch, a new player in harbor towing, was assigned to load the tugs, McAllister Transportation the barges. (Thank you McAllister Transportation for allowing Carolina Salguero to ride and photograph from your tugs!) A Red Hook outfit was assigned to do the lashing of the barges

Reinauer had the Kristy Anne Reinauer outfitted with a tugcam to watch operations.

The barges were staged in the Red Hook containerport all near the Mary Whalen, putting PortSide in the cat bird seat to follow the ops, in fact, at one point we were told we'd have to move the Mary Whalen to make space for shifting fuel barges!

PortSide director Carolina Salguero got back into photojournalism gear and documented the saga. She recently joined colleagues Rick Spilman, Will Van Dorp (Tugster), Jonathan Atkin and Ed Fanuzzi at a Ship Lore & Model Club meeting in making a presentation on the story. Look for an upcoming PortSide TankerTalk that will present this story to the general public. For now, we offer you the following images by Salguero. Will Van Dorp compiled a chronology slideshow, but his narration at the TankerTalk is what will knit it all together (plus he adds some great overheard quotes that capture some colorfully misinformed speculation as to what is going on.)

The goal was to get four of the tugs loaded near the house of the Blue Marlin, with one tug at the stern, and with all the barges laying athwartships in between.

McAllister Port Captain Pat Kinnier dispatches tugs that will move the Reinauer fuel barges on Load Attempt 1

Four of the loaded tugs on Load Attempt 2. This is the after end of the Blue Marlin house, at the stern is another tug, The Maverick, which lived up (or down) to its name on this job and was the SNAFU on Load Attempt 1 and participated in SNAFU on Load Attempt 2

Tug John Reinauer listing over as Load Attempt 2 goes south. At the stern of the Blue Marlin, the Maverick is also listing over.

The Blue Marlin is due back this week or next for another load of Reinauer equipment. The Coast Guard must be reading itself for more calls from the landside public that a boat is sinking in the harbor...

Good luck to the crews working on this load attempt; and hats off to Reinauer for having only one vessel left for sale. Their salesperson sure earned a bonus this year.

11/16/11 update: The Blue Marlin never returned. Harbor gossip says that this is because Dockwise had a hard time being paid by the Nigerian buyer of the vessels. This is unconfirmed at this time.

The harbor grapevine also reports the following (also unconfirmed):

In 2011, the Reinauer Transportation Tugs Janice Ann Reinauer, Dean Reinauer, John Reinauer, and Curtis Reinauer, and Boston Towing and Transportation tug Maverick where acquired by Runner Marine Limited, a division of Capital Oil and Gas Industries limited of Lagos, Nigeria.

The tugs where renamed as follows:

Tug Maverick - Tug Alfa

Tug John Reinauer - Tug Bravo

Tug Janice Ann Reinauer - Tug Charly

Tug Dean Reinauer - Tug Delta

Tug Curtis Reinauer - Tug Echo

Chiclet issues 1st ever press release - response to TONY mascot list

2011-07-22T15:08:00.000-04:00

PortSide NewYork

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

7/22/11

contact: Chiclet

Chiclet says Time Out!
PortSide cat hurls furball at exclusion from TONY list of “Animal mascots of NYC”

Chiclet, ship’s cat at PortSide NewYork, today expressed her resentment at being left off the list of NYC mascots published recently by Time Out New York:

http://newyork.timeout.com/things-to-do/1718717/animal-mascots-of-nyc?page=0,5

She called some of the mascots “fly-by-nighters who laze around all day, and disappear when there is real work to be done, like catching mice and birds, and supervising humans.”

Chiclet referred to her active supervision of work on the Mary Whalen, the 172’ repurposed oil tanker that serves as office and floating venue for PortSide NewYork.

Chiclet also crowed about her computer work. “I designed the Twitter page for PortSide, although it was under false pretenses – I was led to believe it would attract birds. It took great willpower learning to use the mouse without picking it up it my mouth and offering it to my human, Carolina Salguero.”

Another job Chiclet takes pride in performing is her role as the boat’s official greeter, which was caught on camera last year. “When Charlotte Rampling came on the boat to film an interview show for European television, I hit my mark perfectly, reaching the actress just as she was about to climb the gangway. She reached down and stroked my head right on cue. It was a pleasure working with a real professional.”

Chiclet suggests that next time inclusion in the mascot list should be done democratically. “Make it like the All Star Game, not that I actually know what that is. Let us mascots vote for who deserves to be on the list. And get the humans out of the picture.”

Report from Waterfront Sunday 6/19 in Red Hook

2011-06-20T23:43:00.003-04:00

PortSide assembled a Power Team to man our set-up at the Red Hook sidewalk sale organized by RHED. Fresh off the Mermaid Parade, we had Will Van Dorp Tugster; and Frank Hanavan, the creative omnicompetent and maker of the Schooner Pioneer and Admiral Nelson costumes; from PortSide, Stephanie Ortiz, one of our interns, Dan Goncharoff and Carolina Salguero, and Michele Kogon, copy editor, ensuring that all our written emissions were spot on.

Smitty played the guitar for a while.


Will Van Dorp aka Tugster

We engaged in some family-friendly, maritime street theatre to raise awareness of our programs (so hard to do while locked behind the port fence!) and money for our teen Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP).

Most of us took turns being Admiral Nelson to the amusement of passersby.

Frank, who also believes a good prop is key, used the kiddie pool to flag cars.

Suited up as the traffic schooner for the first time since the Bar Tini move, Carolina slowed traffic with a flamboyant leaf-letting technique and got cars to stop, talk, donate and/or take information on PortSide's fundraising drive for the teen Summer Youth Employment Program.

Frank - creating maritime awareness one knot at a time - left one of his Turks Head Tags on the bus stop pole.

One new storekeeper of the Fulla T-shirt shop liked our hubbub so much he asked if we'd be out every weekend. He said if we were, he'd open up on weekends - even though we looked pretty strong in the t-shirt department ourselves!

Waterfront Sunday 6/19 in Red Hook

2011-06-18T12:23:00.004-04:00

Admiral Nelson, kayaking, seafood, circus on a barge, Red Hook-wide sidewalk sale & more...

Red Hook Sidewalk Sale 11am-4pm:
Enjoy hunting for treasures and discounts along Van Brunt Street. Or SELL. Set up your own table along Van Brunt.

PortSide will be in front of 281 Van Brunt Street (just north of Pioneer) selling t-shirts, talking about our programs and raising money for our Summer Youth Employment Program.

If you can't see us in person, please donate here.

Smitty will play guitar for an hour, we will have a kiddie pool with ducks and boats, a DIY photo booth with industrial objects such as our super-sized wrench (far right), and we will be joined by Admiral Nelson.

We'll be next to Kevin's Restaurant who will be selling smoothies outside and seafood inside. Eggs Chesapeake (eggs benedict with a crabcake instead of ham) is a favorite.

Across the street and just up the block is the famed Red Hook Lobster Pound

Around the corner to the west on Pioneer is the new Filipino eatery Philly Pinoy This hole-in-the-wall centers around a sidewalk tikki hut and is targeted at the Filipino crews of the cruise ships. They're hoping that the Brooklyn foodie scene finds them*** update, they are currently only open when a cruise ship is in. Schedule here. Hot food is made on the spot, and imported bagged and canned goods are inside.

Waterfront Museum Barge is running their annual Showboat Shazzam of family entertainment and circus artistry. $10 in advance, $15 at door. Shows 1pm, 4pm

Red Hook Boaters free kayaking Valentino Pier Park 1-5pm

For last minute shoppers, father's day gifts can be found at our three garden centers or Red Hook's unusual boutiques which include Metal & Thread selling lamps made from blowfish and curious, antique hardware.

Dads can end the day listening to live music at Bait & Tackle surrounded by taxidermy.

PortSide @ Red Hook Fest in Valentino Park

2011-06-05T10:42:00.012-04:00

The PortSide crew had a great time yesterday in Valentino Park at the 18th annual Red Hook Fest organized by Dance Theatre etc.

We were one of the first groups to set up. Thanks to Gary Baum (of City Beautiful Carpentry) and wife Amy for helping Carolina Salguero and Amy Bucciferro set up. Blake McDowell joined us soon thereafter, and Stephanie Ortiz and her boyfriend Victor joined us for the late afternoon shift.

We found many people interested in our Summer Youth Employment Program plans that will finish restoration of the Captain's cabin. Please join our supporters of that youth program here.

Our Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez came by. She had secured for PortSide a $50,000 earmark for youth programs; but the new US Congress banned earmarks in November. We are trying to make up the shortfall with the campaign on crowdrise.

Matt Perricone, owner and captain of the tug Cornell which towed the Mary Whalen around so much last summer, invented a line toss expo-game.

Matt taped one of our cleat paperweights to one of our baskets, put a splice in a line, and voila! an event that was popular with kids and adults.

What this displayed was the way workboat crew have to throw lines over distances when they tie up tugs and barges instead of actually touching the cleat the way it is done on little pleasure boats.

Here is a photo of professional line-throwing training:

Crew of a Moran tugboat are showing a new employee how to throw a line, using a cleat on the tug rather than one on a pier or barge.

PortSide's marine hardware inventory (the final inventory of Cowhey Brothers Hardware) includes full scale cleats, so if we can find a way to move hundred-pounders, we'll bring those to future events along with full scale lines for added line throwing challenge.

During the Red Hook Fest, our partners in the BoatBox, the fabulous Red Hook Boaters were out doing their thing and looking as popular as ever.

Shortly before 4pm, there was a moment that drove home the diverse a range of boats exist in Red Hook: a cruise ship left the terminal and came close to shore passing some kayaks benefiting from Kayak Valet, a service invented by PortSide and now run by the Red Hook Boaters on days they offering free paddling in the park.

Mary A. Whalen gets new and national recognition!

2011-05-25T09:43:00.006-04:00

WE ARE EXCITED! We applied to The NYS Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (SHPO) to see if the Mary A. Whalen were eligible to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and she is!

We've always said that we wanted to secure a lease before we could justify trying to raise money for the ship (please pick up the pace on that lease, EDC!) but enough things had aligned for us to start moving on getting recognition for the ship.

A first move to be eligible for major funding is to have the Mary Whalen become a NYC Landmark, on the National Register of Historic Places or "be deemed eligible to be on the National Register" a sort of interim status that implies significant documentation work in and of itself.

Many thanks to one of our spring interns Stephanie Ortiz, an Architect in training from Puerto Rico and a Historic Preservation student at Pratt for helping to translate the preservation concepts, digging up the official guide on how to do this, doing additional historical research, and contributing to the whole process.

The process was itself gratifying because we came to realize how much information we had accumulated on the ship since 2005!

She came to PortSide with no history. Nada. Not even awareness of her role in the major Supreme Court decision US vs Reliable Fuel.

Tom Rinaldi, a young history buff working for the Central Park Conservancy, told us about the case around 2007. (This reveals how much more data has been uploaded and is now findable by google than in 2005).

We were able to fill in some gaps in our information via rushed consultations with Charlie Deroko, Norman Brouwer, Gerry Weinstein of Archive of Industry and Steamer Lilac. As Norman has helped write some of the national guides to ship preservation, his help was a real boost. Thanks to all of you!

We will be sharing some of what we learned from them in upcoming posts...

We pulled it all together and SHPO reviewed our application in record time and wrote back "Great application!" They said they were pleased to hear from us, adding "we've been watching the Mary Whalen."

Read their Determination of Eligibility letter here and check out her history page.

The Mary Whalen's eligibility for the National Register increases funding opportunities and visibility for the ship, for PortSide and for Red Hook.

We have related news of PortSide's 2011 summer youth employment program to do restoration work on the Mary Whalen. You can support that via crowdrise. More on that soon!

Flooding bonanza

2011-04-18T22:46:00.004-04:00

Saturday night brought heavy rainfall and high winds. Add to that a full moon, and what you get is very high tides which means lots of damage to trees, docks, whatever. And whatever hits the waterway upstream comes down to us. That can be a scavenger's bonanza. One year I scored a 60' concrete dock, rather new and reeking of fancy marina. The boat PortSide uses for Operation Christmas Cheer is attached to that. (That boats needs a mechanic for small, gasoline boat engine, please email portsidenewyork(at)gmail.com if you have leads).

Such rains also overwhelm our own CSOs which then discharge street litter and sewage into the waterways.

This morning at 0820, at about high of the high tide, past all the messy flotsam, I spotted a little float across the way banging into the rag-tag shoreline that is the sad remains of the Hamilton Avenue Ferry. Quick inspection via binoculars: a float sized to 4x8' sheet of plywood with nice inset corner posts, through-drilled for docklines, bevelled tops to the posts even, a perfect little thing for working on the side of the hull. I called to Army Corps drift boats to see if they were in the area. Nope. No answer on the Gelberman. The Hayward was dispatched to Gravesend Bay.

A little while later, the purr of a small engine caused me to get up and look out the porthhole. A Miller's Launch boat was tending to the area that has a CSO, and I think the gate to the Gowanus Canal Flushing Tunnel. They have a contract with the DEP to tend the CSO discharge areas. Maybe they could bring the float over...

I watched them score a very large double ended fender. I waved them over as they came by. They didn't have a boat hook, so I lent them mine and they nabbed the float for us.

About an hour and half latter, another engine sound outside. This time it was a DEP skimmer boat picking up the floatables. It reminds me of a baleen whale in that it opens its gullet and take all the little stuff into its gut.

Gullet end to the right, down and skimming

They cleaned up all the yuck that was floating around, a clog of twigs, branches and plastic unmentionables.

Gullet closed and up, stern to the right showing mass of collected wood

Later in the day, the tide was headed out and you could trace the line of the current, an arc of litter spread from the crotch of pier and bulkhead, out past the Mary Whalen into the stream of the Buttermilk.

2000 hrs, I talked to a tug captain southbound on the Hudson from Albany off Haverstraw. He said "I don't know what you got for Saturday night rains, but up here it was incredible. It's like somebody flushed up in Albany, we're southbound at 13 knots."

Titanic on Twitter

2011-04-15T13:38:00.003-04:00

99 Year anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic

Experience the RMS Titanic wireless messages in real time

On Friday, April 15, 2011, it will be 99 years since the tragic sinking of RMS Titanic. To commemorate this significant anniversary, the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic will use Twitter to broadcast the vessel's original wireless transmissions.

Ten years prior to Titanic's sinking, the first wireless transmission to cross the Atlantic from North America was sent from the Marconi station in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. Much like the short messages we send today via text, instant messaging or Twitter, wireless transmissions bridged distances between people and made it possible to share information across the world.

As the largest and grandest ocean liner of her time, Titanic was equipped with the most modern wireless technology available. When disaster struck, that technology proved invaluable as it was crucial in saving many passengers and, also, provided the world over with the stunning news of the loss.

This year, starting at 11:55 pm ADT on April 14, follow the hash tag #ns_mma on Twitter for a real time account of the famous disaster. Rather than re-telling the story of the ill-fated ship, this event provides the unique opportunity to experience the magnitude of Titanic through the same wireless messages operators received in 1912.

It should be noted that the transmission times are based on “ships time”, the local time aboard Titanic which changed every day as the ship moved west across time zones. When she sank, Titanic was about 30 minutes ahead of Atlantic Standard Time.

thanks to Maritime Network on LinkedIn for this information

Summer friends return

2011-04-14T00:58:00.000-04:00

from www.richard-seaman.com/Birds/USA/VoloBog/index.html

Returned to port 1145 tonight.

Another of the larger container ships on Pier 10, fueling barge already alongside. The port is ever busier.

Heard first croak of a night heron this calendar year. Had it just returned from migration? I look forward to the cheerful chuffling of the swallows. They live under the pier. Clearly, they haven't read the DEC policy on shading, otherwise they would know they couldn't live there.

Fun fact: A group of herons has many collective nouns, including a "battery", "hedge", "pose", "rookery", and "scattering" of herons.

Save a lighthouse? Buy a lighthouse?

2011-04-12T15:47:00.003-04:00

Want a lighthouse?

See correspondence just in from the GSA about Romer Shoal Light and Great Beds Lighthouses (posted with their approval)

-----Original Message-----
From: meta.cushing@gsa.gov [mailto:meta.cushing@gsa.gov]
Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2011 8:00 AM
To: portsidenewyork@gmail.com
Subject: Romer Shoal Light and Great Beds Lights - GSA offshore auctions

Dear Portside:

Your programs sound very interesting. -

sending this information along in the off chance your membership might be interested in these historic lights, offshore near the border of NY/NJ waters... they are available under the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act (NHLPA) via online auction. Thank you.
..(See attached file: Great Beds IFB Final.pdf)(See attached file: Romer Shoal IFB Final.pdf)

MC

US General Services Administration
Boston

-----Original Message-----
From: meta.cushing@gsa.gov [mailto:meta.cushing@gsa.gov]
Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2011 8:56 AM
To: portsidenewyork@gmail.com
Subject: RE: Romer Shoal Light and Great Beds Lights - GSA offshore auctions

Good to hear back from you! I found your site while I was looking for maritime programs in NY and NJ... - there has been so little interest in these two offshore lights, I am concerned and want to let more maritime people know about the auctions. We will keep the auctions going as long as we have some bidders! I had thought by now there would be some...(Usually, people do not start bidding until we have had an offshore inspection - but to do that, I need people to register! I have only one person who has registered so far for Great Beds and no one for Romer, disappointingly.)

As a nonprofit, you may know like-minded organizations who might be interested in other lighthouses: Starting on June 1, 2011 for 60 days, GSA will be contacting nonprofits about several other offshore lights in NJ and NY - The Federal government offers these historic lights out first and foremost for stewardship by nonprofits, museums, or schools or cities or towns at no cost. Nonprofits need to apply for them, and be recommended by the Dept of the Interior, National Park Service. My agency is in charge of outreach and also deeding once the applicant has been approved. This year, we are offering Race Rock and Orient Point lights in New York to nonprofits and public entities, as well as Brandywine Shoal, Ship John Shoal and Miah Maull in New Jersey. All offshores.

It is only when we can't find a steward that we sell them.. (i.e. Great Beds and Romer are at the selling stage)

Yes, please put me on the e-newsletter... Thank you..

In Memoriam - Bernie Ente

2011-04-11T09:49:00.001-04:00

Photo by Cindy Goulder 2007

It is with heavy heart that I report that our small clan of harbor advocates has lost another soul.

Bernie Ente died in the early morning of Friday, April 8. May he and John Krevey be re-united in heaven and running their waterfront. Oh, what a heaven that would be.

Bernie was a professional photographer and an avid rail and marine fan, full of arcane bridge and transit knowledge which he shared with a mixture of boyish enthusiasm and wry humor.

Years ago, I dubbed him the "King of Newtown Creek" because of his tireless advocacy of that creek and the genuine joy he got from the place and the endeavor. He surely helped to raise awareness of its issues and possibilities. Before the waterfront was such a popular destination, he was out there giving walking tours and organizing boat tours of his beloved toxic creek; and of course photographing it.

Bernie was so generous with his photos. Many organizations benefited from the selfless way he donated photos. Many a day started with my finding an email from Bernie with another photo of the Mary Whalen, or of Red Hook, that he'd made on his latest harbor junket. Of these he made many as he was a mainstay of the Working Harbor Committee which gives harbor tours. He supported them with photography and so much more.

Around here, people who never met him are grateful to him as the man who told us about the tanker being scrapped in Seattle. That tip led to our getting so many of the engine parts to fix the Mary Whalen engine. So like Bernie to be reading a distant Seattle newspaper to find news about a Bushey tanker on the west coast, and so like Bernie to share information that would help someone else.

Here are some of the photos that Bernie sent us out of the blue

His close friend Mitch Waxman posted a tribute

The Working Harbor Committee tribute

Will Van Dorp's tribute on Tugster here

Rest in peace, Bernie.

Carolina Salguero

Send off to Old Man Winter

2011-04-04T21:47:00.008-04:00

Is shipboard life romantic? You decide. Here's some of life on Pier 9B since late December.

Below is a video from the Christmas blizzard where Carolina and her brother Antonio get ready to put out another bow line due to 50mph winds whipping around the end of the shed and hitting the bow. A few hours later, the winds were pushing the ship so far off the pier, they decided to raise the gangway on the boom so the gangway didn't come off the pier. We've kept the gangway rigged to the boom, which has allowed us to raise it and protect it from wake damage at high tide. This has given the office crew an athletic interactive feature they use several times a day, and Chiclet has become expert at catapulting herself off it at high tide.

In order to spring the spring that has not sprung, we offer this tribute to Old Man Winter on what he does for us on the Mary A. Whalen!

Block the view

Coat everything

Have us go for salt from the pile

Prevent office staff getting carpal tunnel by having regular shoveling breaks. Here, Dan Goncharoff demonstrates excellent shovel technique.

Provide opportunity for Smoke 101, or How to Use the Damper, a
short intensive class for Stephanie Ortiz, our planning intern from Puerto Rico.


Beat up on the gangway chainfall until it snags, kinks and chokes and needs rescue lubrication. Thank you ASI for sending this forklift 12 minutes after the request!

Oblige us to call Rich Naruszewicz of the Captain Log for diesel fuel deliveries to run the galley stove. Like the mail boat, he comes with sea stories (Brownwater Edition) new and old (he used to be a tankerman on the Mary A. Whalen).

Attract better dressed shovellers on Volunteer Days! Here Claudia Steinberg, who writes about design and fashion for the New York Times and German publications, joined a shoveling committee, needed after our director Carolina Salguero was hit by a truck in January and couldn't shovel for most snowfalls after the blizzard.

Set off the ship colors so nicely


Make lovely patterns, such as this March snow where the frames under the deck, warmed by the sun the day before, are still warm enough to melt the damp coating of an early morning.

New and strange on Pier 9B

2011-04-03T14:16:00.005-04:00

Our ship's cat stands a good watch; Chiclet detected something way before me.

11pm, April 2, I was carrying her up to the captain's cabin when she tensed up and began to shiver and stare off the boat towards our vintage Hyster.

I could see nothing.

After about a minute, a humpbacked something came out from under the rollup door, headed behind the Hyster and then came out towards the boat and us.

Then, it looked up, and I could see the masked face of a raccoon.

Weirdly, I couldn’t see a tail. A tail-less raccoon?

It was not a huge one.

I barked and growled, and it trundled away as fast as its humpbacked self could go around the offshore end of the shed.

No, this is not April Fool’s!

Best,
Carolina Salguero

Petrolero con Salseros (tanker with salsa musicians)

2010-06-21T16:57:00.057-04:00

PortSide's home, the tanker Mary A. Whalen, performed magnificently during the 2nd annual Concierto Tipico in Sunset Park. The can-do Edgar Alvarez of Fiesta VIP produced the event which is sponsored by City Councilwoman Sara Gonzalez. See our video here.

Bracketed by brightly colored inflatable kids rides, the Mary Whalen's hulking steel self held a powerful allure.

Over 400 people toured the tanker, many of whom had never been on a boat before.

We gave tours in Spanish and English.

NYC Councilwoman Sara Gonzalez invited PortSide to bring the tanker for this event.

Several of the bands toured the ship, as did kids, a great grandmother and the pina colada vendor.

At the end of the day, Councilwoman Gonzalez and headliner Willie Colon stopped by for a photo op and to sign autographs for our crew. Some survivors of the Mermaid Parade joined us too.

Many people hoped the tanker would become a regular feature at Brooklyn Army Terminal pier 4 (aka the 58th Street pier). We told them all to come check us out in Red Hook's Atlantic Basin July 1 to Aug 24.

Thanks to a dynamic group of volunteers who had great team spirit and who made the day a success and lots of fun:

Diane Cho in the galley, Ray Howell engine room, Terry Reilly in the wheelhouse, Michele Kogon office monitor and copy editor, Iris Abra gangway reception (5 hours in the baking heat!), Maria Diaz tour guide and networker and quicker picker-upper, Mina Roustayi indefatigable guide in Spanish, Dan Goncharoff tours and deck monitor, John Weaver video and Official Fence Dismantler and Remantler.

Above is Amy Bucciferro playing air guitar on PortSide's photo-op wrench with boyfriend Matt Perricone, owner and captain of the Cornell, looking on. Amy works at PortSide one day a week. Thanks to the historic tug Cornell for towing us there and back for free!

We left the southside of Pier 9B at 0900, passing a containership unloading in the Red Hook port...

and returned at 2200 hours to the northside of 9B where we had the crippled Del Monte container ship as a neighbor on the southside of Pier 9A . They were there for about two weeks undergoing repairs. It was a long but glorious day!

Branding - not the cattle

2010-04-11T10:41:00.009-04:00

post by John Weaver of PortSide NewYork

RAZORFISH: The very name conjures a creature slicing through the water so rapidly and with such precision as to leave no perceptible wake!!!
Unique indeed!!! As so, equally unique, is Domenic Venuto, Managing Director, of the aforementioned RAZORFISH.

A devoted fan of PortSide NewYork and an outstanding practitioner of the art of “Branding”, Domenic has come aboard to lead our core group in the exercises that will result in a re-branding of our enterprise.

As well as we know who we are, the personality, thrust, and mission of our efforts needs to be more accurately telegraphed to those we wish to serve and those who are increasingly approaching us to get involved.

As a veteran of 25 years in the “Ad” business, I have experienced this kind of effort in workshops and “brain sessions” many times over. This one was a standout being so expertly led, engrossing, and conducted in the maritime atmosphere of the Mary Whalen’s galley which we all look forward to sharing with visitors more often in the future.

Editor's Notes: Domenic is working independently with PortSide on this branding exercise.

John Weaver of PortSide was staff Director at WABC-TV. He turned to producing and directing commercials for twenty five years, becoming a Senior Vice President at Young and Rubicam before he retired.

Photo captions:
branding words submitted for consideration
Domenic Venuto and John Weaver
Dan Goncharoff and board member Jeanne-Marie Van Hemmen

The family grows

2010-01-31T21:56:00.006-05:00

Out of the blue, we get calls or emails from people who are moved by the fact that the Mary A. Whalen (originally christened S.T. Kiddoo) has been saved. It's always a moving experience on this end. The ship speaks to quite a range of people and for very different reasons. I'll start blogging about these as they come in. Dunno why I didn't think to do so before.

From: Tom and Julie KIDDOO
Sent: Saturday, January 30, 2010 5:10 PM
To: portsidenewyork@gmail.com
Subject: S.T. Kiddoo

To whom it may concern,

My name is Thomas E. Kiddoo III, and Soloman Thomas Kiddoo was my great grandfather. I am one of those people who can't help but "google" their own name, and I found the boat formally known as S.T. Kiddoo! Growing up, I remember a picture of the ship with S.T. Kiddoo written on the side of it hanging on a wall just outside of my fathers office, but never really paid much attention to it's signifigance. I currently live in Vail, Co, I am sure S.T. would be proud to know that his great great grandson (Charles Thomas Kiddoo) just turned 7 last week. I look forward to the day I can bring my children out to the East Coast to visit a ship formerly named after their great great grandfather!

Best Regards,

Tom Kiddoo
Owner
www.thanks-dad.com

and here is the Mary A. Whalen as the S.T. Kiddoo

Irish Waterfront, Then+Now

2010-01-13T21:05:00.016-05:00

Gabriel Cohen, with whom PortSide did the Graving Dock book reading at GMD shipyard, runs a great book reading series at Sunny's Bar in Red Hook. First Sunday of every month at 3pm.

January 3, he had an author in the roster who brought me back to town earlier than I would have come otherwise. That was James T. Fisher, author of "On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York"

The title is one heckuva mouthful, but the book promises to explain the story of Father Corridan, the priest, and his fight against corruption on the docks upon which the movie “On the Waterfront” is based. The reading was the bomb. All three readers were good. Fisher turns out to be a professor of Theology and American Studies at Fordham. My ears perk up at the AmStud label; that was one of my two majors at Yale and shaped the lens through which I view the world.

Listening to Fisher, it occurred to me that Corridan in the 50s was inventing here at home what was called liberation theology and so associated with Latin America. Hearing the degree to which senior people in Manhattan’s Catholic church were complicit in corruption on the docks, corruption that led to the killing and disappearance of many men, impressed me and my seat companions, Seth Goodwin and Meg Fellerath, two beloved water rats I was happy to find in the bar.

I introduced myself to Fisher and soon thereafter a torrential exchange of emails began, excerpted here [links added during blog creation]:

Jim:

Carolina it was only later heading home I remembered that my great friend/former student Adam Davis was cast member in that Puccini Opera you hosted out in Bklyn. Adam was touting the setting to the skies. … I love the 'blue space' concept and amazed by the vision behind this; thanks from Jim now the NYT has promoted the write up of Sunny's event from City Room blog to book page, just below Warren Beatty and Joan Collins

all the best to you from Jim

Carolina:

….Glad you like the Bluespace concept. The waterfront is so sorely overlooked and misunderstood that we had to work to find language to get people aware of the water part of the waterfront. Clearly, that was not the case in the era of your book Irish Waterfront.

I overheard the Times journalist remarking to you that your reading contained some important history in rebutting the idea that "On the Waterfront" was a Budd Schulberg justification for HUAC testimony. THANKS for sending the link. I was afraid I'd miss his follow-up column.

I just read his piece. Such a shame that he did not mention, as you did, that the Times itself for weeks carried many pages of stevedoring testimony. You strongly made the point that the stevedoring testimony was a major issue of the day. In neglecting to include that Jim avoids being too self-referential to Times' prior coverage but slights the importance of a maritime issue to a general audience, eg, he continues the forgetting of the Bluespace. While listening to you at Sunny's, I felt that the whole HUAC slant to interpreting the movie was only possible because the world had forgotten the importance of the docks at the time. Similarly, another line of criticism of the movie is that the priest is just too much, is implausible, and that the morality message is too melodramatic, but that line of criticism also depends on not understanding the documentary basis of the film.

Jim:

… why did the Port come to be romanticized nostalgically even as it remained a vital element of the local political economy? SNIP

So I treat some the issues that engage you but until we met I had yet to really dig in to the contemporary issues: tho I take every class every semester (some more than once) to hold class on west side piers it's nearly always historically-oriented. You don't need me tell you what a richly anomalous position you occupy since everything about Red Hook reads from a superficial perspective as "post-industrial," "post-modern etc' and indeed not long after yr time in Am. Studies at Yale the program became engulfed in just such 'discourses.' So part of your vocation as I see it is to teach a wholly different way of seeing what it means to work in a working port when the conditioned impulse is to respond: not so working port, least not like the old days… SNIP

As you know the waterfront commission was nearly dismantled last year once it was alleged to be as complicit in corruption as the hiring system it was designed to supplant in 1953.

Then I read that the new exec. director was inspired to achieve reform after reading my book! I had no idea what to make of this, having overlooked contemporary scene SNIP

Rocky Sullivan's on Feb 3 I plan to talk real directly about Columbia St and about the divisions between irish and italian waterfronts.

P.S. the crime commission stories are on any data base the offers NY Times: the public hearings covered Dec 1952-Jan 1953. Yet for a vivid education on life in the port at that time there is no substitute for the 5 volumes the NY State crime commission released in 53: these are at many local college libraries, NYPL etc.. At least one of the vols is heavy Bklyn-oriented.

Photo at left: 1953 Strike in Erie Basin, Red Hook, from collection of Brooklyn Public Library

-----------

Well! I can’t wait to sit down and talk at length with this guy. I hope to interest him in PortSide’s historical research. Since the death of the researcher Henry Silka, the pace of our research has slowed. An interim product is the Red Hook Visitor Guide we did Sept 2009. I’m definitely headed to Rocky Sullivan’s on Feb 3, 7pm to hear about the split between Italian and Irish waterfronts on Columbia Street.

PS If you want to read the Pulitzer Prize-winning articles that also inspired the movie see this book

Water at 18 Degrees

2010-01-13T21:02:00.004-05:00

Maybe some people can finish posts in chrono order, but not around here. Life and Work get in the way!

Back to Sunday 1/10/10

It's just 18 degrees at 0930, but all PortSide water is liquid!

The water drum in my rowing machine froze up a few days after I got back from the holidays on 1/2. It was more important to get the Whalen's water "systems" unfrozen first, so personal fitness was far down the To Do list.

After two days with heat tape under a tarp, the large cylindrical ice cube was again liquid despite it's being 18 degrees outside. The machine is an unheated room with open window in the shed, so yahoo heat tape!

'twas also Chiclet's first day outside after her first heat cycle. If only we could use cat heat to warm things on the boat!

But no. Feline heat applied itself more towards the knocking over of manuals in the office as desperate aforementioned feline tried to look out a porthole.

Were there courting toms lurking behind the headlog? Not that I could spot, but hope springs eternal in the hearts of all the gals on board!

She'll be fixed on Jan 24, but who knows when the Mary Whalen's water systems will get fixed. The interim systems seem under repair all the time during the winter... No one is going into the water tank under the galley floor this time of year to bang off the loose cement wash and re-cement it. That's a task for balmy days ahead.

WaterRower lifestyle as advertised

Actual WaterRower lifestyle here

PS. thank you Pam Hepburn of the Tug Pegasus for the hand-me-down WaterRower machine. I'll provide enthusiastic testimonials for anyone considering this machine.

Nitey Nite!
Carolina

Port Patterns

2010-01-12T22:18:00.004-05:00

Tuesday 1/12/10 I looked up from the galley sink and saw a vessel coming down the East River I'd never seen to before, the rather long and oddly named Gypsum Centennial. This was at at 0815.

I looked her up on a ship tracking site. By the time I was writing this at 2225, she was in the anchorage off Owls Head Park. You can trace the pattern of her route yourself at marinetraffic.

Another nice port pattern I found on the floor of the shed. It is how some cacao beans fell off a pallet. A pallet pentimento in beans, with a very nice pattern of pastel pallets behind making an industrial tartan.

Ice Capades

2010-01-11T18:04:00.003-05:00

We shut down the PortSide office and the Mary Whalen for 10 days over Christmas and New Years. What does that mean when re-opening the boat Saturday night 1/2?

Ice Capades, eg frozen everything.

The interior of the boat was 30 degrees when I returned and turned on space heaters. Soaking rags were frozen where I left them (kind of handy that one!). The water line supplying the galley sink was frozen. I ran around with a torch and flashlight and ascertained that it wasn't frozen at the elbow where the line comes through the overhead in the tool crib where the line perforates the deck, it wasn't frozen on the line that ran from water tank to that through-deck fitting.

Inspection the following morning revealed that the 6-foot tall water tank, aka "the body pickling tank" up on the boat deck was, for the first time, frozen inside blocking the valve - downside of no water running for 10 days and me not being here to smash ice in the tank.

I checked the weather. Temp would be over freezing on Tuesday 1/5. I decided to wait it out. I'm doing better with the impact of winter weather this year. I used to fume about how much time it took from what I thought was Real Work (in the office); but maybe I'm now understanding that saving, and guarding, the Mary Whalen so she's not plundered as she was in Erie Basin, requires being aboard, slowly fixing systems, putting up with interim solutions. I also have to say that the ski pants Mum gave me for Christmas are making winter life aboard a lot easier. Warmer legs may account for higher spirits.

Monday afternoon, diesel for the galley stove ran out. With that, the galley temp would not get above 40 given the weather. There's just so much a space heater can do in a space with cold air above, below and behind it. John Weaver would be in the office by late Tuesday morning and with his van he could go fill up the diesel jugs, so that wasn't so long to wait.

By Monday afternoon, I realized that my "Whalen Life in Winter skills" were really rusty. I'd forgotten that when it's 20 degrees and blowing hard out of the N or NW, the cold air comes right up the galley drain freezing exiting water unless it comes down hot and in quantity. By pouring out dregs of tea, dollops of water, toothpaste spit, I'd frozen up the drain. By end of Tuesday, the galley was ringed with dirty dishes from me, Weaver and Dan Goncharoff working in the office, eating lunch and drinking tea and coffee.

Temps were not soaring, so Tuesday, I started calling tugs to get a delivery of some warm water to unseize the Body Pickling Tank. After that, Weaver would shroud it in a black tarp, something we didn't get to during December craziness. Thank to the crew of the tug Taurus and K-Sea for the water delivery!!! I ran the hose down a steel pipe so that I could direct it to the mouth of the valve; and in just minutes, there was running water!

Here's a photo from one of last year's Big Freezes. That time, we'd frozen the valve OUTSIDE not inside the Body Pickling Tank, and so to prevent losing water when we took the valve off, I attached a flexible cutting board to a mop handle with zip ties. This I slid into the tank while Weaver unthreaded the valve, and the suction jammed it against the fitting quite tightly, thank you very much....

Tuesday afternoon, 1/5/10, I climbed down the hatch in the galley to see the galley drain. Damn, stupid moi. I should have torched that pipe as soon as I deduced that it was frozen. I'd cracked the valve that Ed Fanuzzi had installed last year. Replacing that would be another item on the to do list.

Here's Ed working on that valve last year.

(Note: Body Pickling Tank photo above is part of the PSP (PortSide Sustainability Project). In the warmer months, we collect rainwater off the pier shed roof and pump it up to the boat.)

Krumkake-a Norwegian Christmas tradition

2010-01-10T20:02:00.033-05:00

John Weaver here:

As stories go, this one has more than its share of nostalgia. Going back in history, there was a time when the S.T. Kiddoo was re-christened the Mary A. Whalen. On that occasion, command was given to Captain Alf H. Dyrland. It was 1958.

Alf Dyrland’s story goes back, across the Atlantic, to 1931 and the fishing village of Skudeneshavn on the southernmost tip of the island of Karmoy just off the southwestern coast of Norway. That year, having completed his seventh grade studies, 14 year old Alf went to sea as a “cabin boy.”

We dissolve to Christmas, 1979. Alf was retired after twenty years as Captain of the Whalen and yours truly, courting his daughter Karen, was a guest for the holiday in the house he built in northeast Connecticut. Of the many ritual observances associated with this holiday, perhaps the most intense, as well as joyous event was the baking of traditional Christmas cookies…Norwegian Krumkake.

The recipe was handed down from Alf’s mother. The batter, mixed and chilled overnight, was cooked by Alf on the stovetop using the iron from his mother’s kitchen and rolled into its cone form on a hand turned wooden dowel. You can find recipes for Krumkake on the web and in Scandinavian cookbooks. Alf’s has a wrinkle or two that are special and, in as much as the holiday always was a gathering for an extended family, it produces between ninety and one hundred cones.

Alf taught me how to bake and roll, and Karen prepares the batter from her grandmother’s recipe. For a few years after Alf died (1996) I used the old iron. Then an electric Krumkake baker became available and we purchased it at one of the last surviving outposts of Norwegian culture in Brooklyn, “Nordic Delicacies” on 3rd Avenue and 69th St.

When Carolina founded PortSide NewYork and rescued the Mary Whalen from the jaws of the scrap heap, she invited the public to visit for Open House New York in 2006. Karen and I arrived and were warmly welcomed by Carolina. The welcome was so warm, we never left and, now Carolina and the Mary Whalen have become part of Alf’s extended family and her ration of Krumkake graces the galley table every Christmas.

(Top photo: Captain Alf Dyrland the day the S.T. Kiddoo was re-christened Mary A. Whalen, and converted from gasoline service to heavier oil products.)

(Bottom photo: Bill & Karen Dyrland, two of Captain Alf's children, in the Whalen wheelhouse in 2008)

Note: In 2009, Skudeneshavn only has a population of 3,229. Imagine how small it was when Alf Dyrland left in 1931.

2009-12-20T15:39:00.004-05:00

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

2009-11-29T21:09:00.011-05:00

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.