Archive for the ‘Tugboat’ Category
what would
You wanus, I wanus, so let’s Gowanus…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Last week, one was onboard for the Working Harbor Committee’s tour of Gowanus Bay and part of the Gowanus Canal. My pals Joseph Alexiou and Capt. Maggie Flanagan were handling the narration, and I spent most of the trip down on the bow of the NY Waterways Ferry boat shooting. One of the many interesting tableaux encountered included the sudden appearance of DonJon Marine’s Caitlin Ann tug.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Caitlin Ann was towing a barge of recyclables, specifically metals. A 1961 vintage, 2,400 HP tug, Caitlin Ann’s story can be best explained by visiting this page at the ever reliable tugboatinformation.com.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
DonJon is a New Jersey based company, founded in 1964 by a fellow named J. Arnold Witte. In concurrence with the traditions of the towing industry, their tugs are named after family members. It isn’t limited to just the tug business either, and the company handles all sorts of hauling – including terrestrial tasks like trucking, as well as heavy maritime industrial tasks like dredging and even diving.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
On our way out of Gowanus Bay, I couldn’t help but get a shot of the Abu Loujaine at the Quadrozzi Grain Terminal docks. I wrote about the Loujaine a while back, in this post from January of 2012.
Upcoming Events and Tours
Saturday, June 25, 10:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. –
The Insalubrious Valley of the Newtown Creek,
with Brooklyn Brainery. Click here for more details.
Sunday, June 26, 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. –
Calvary Cemetery Walking Tour,
with Atlas Obscura. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
gray city
It’s complicated, man…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A humble narrator is known for his somewhat quixotic inflections of mood by those who know him privately. It’s not exactly “manic depressive” in the clinical sense, but it often doesn’t seem far off. With me, it’s more “happily content and patient / consumed with red hot anger and resentment.” I don’t know why, maybe my parents loved me too much, or not enough. Can’t say.
Either way, I’m often a hot mess and the only way out of feeling bad is to get out and do something. Work, hard work, is the answer to almost every problem – as I see it. In many ways, I’m a lot like that horse Boxer from Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Since nothing grinds my gears worse than a summer cold, an experience which I recently suffered through, one has been hitting the terrestrial pavement and the deck plates of boats as hard as I can for the last couple of weeks in pursuance of working harder. Now, the odd thing is this – I haven’t been to the Newtown Creek.
Normally, Newtown Creek is my happy place. Also, being exposed to that waterway bolsters my immune system and generally keeps me from getting sick and or contracting a summer cold. Oddly, however, I haven’t felt Queens calling for me to go there in a few weeks.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s not that I’m bored with the place – far from it. There’s just some little bird chirping away inside my “happily content and patient / consumed with red hot anger and resentment” state of mind that’s saying “explore” and is thinking about the far horizons.
Upcoming Events and Tours
Saturday, June 25, 10:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. –
The Insalubrious Valley of the Newtown Creek,
with Brooklyn Brainery. Click here for more details.
Sunday, June 26, 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. –
Calvary Cemetery Walking Tour,
with Atlas Obscura. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
distance south
Some tugboat action, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Working Harbor Committee, which I’m both a Steering Committee member and the Official Photographer of, is all about education. Our motto and mission is to “educate the public about the Harbor of New York and New Jersey” after all. To this end, there’s a bunch of public tours – I’ll likely be conducting the Newtown Creek boat tour in the fall, and on Thursday of this week will be part of a trio of narrators on the “Brooklyn Waterfront: Past and Present” excursion. Last week, our education director, Meg Black, invited me along for one of the student tours which WHC produces.
There’s a gaggle of high school kids and their teachers onboard for these student tours, and the speakers WHC brought onboard were “Harbor Heavyweights” from the NYC EDC, Martime Association, Port Authority, and the like.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The goal behind these student excursions is to provide a concrete experience that backs up the kids’s classroom work, and to encourage them to consider a career in the maritime world. For a lot of inner city kids, they aren’t even aware that the Harbor is out there waiting to hire them. There’s hundreds of individual career paths that you can choose from in the maritime world – everything from Homeland Security to working on ships. The great news about these waterfront jobs is that wherever there’s a Port, which is just about everywhere that you’d want to go, you’ve got a skill set which is highly transportable.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This particular tour left from Pier 11 in Manhattan about a NY Waterways Ferry. We headed over to the busy Kill Van Kull waterway separating Staten Island’s North Shore from Bayonne’s Chemical Coast and then visited Port Elizabeth Newark and the Global Marine Terminal in Newark Bay, after passing under the Bayonne Bridge. There was a parade of working vessels, some of which are pictured in today’s post.
Upcoming Events and Tours
Thursday, May 26th at 6 p.m. –
Brooklyn Waterfront: Past & Present Boat Tour,
with Working Harbor Committee. Click here for more details.
Saturday, June 4, 11:00 a.m. -1:30 p.m. –
DUPBO: Down Under the Pulaski Bridge Onramp,
with Brooklyn Brainery. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
even thirstier than
A few tugs, observed, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Last week I was invited to attend the Waterfront Alliance’s annual conference, which takes place on a large excursion boat operated by the Hornblower corporation. Onboard, there’s a series of conferences in which bigwigs and harbor heavyweights discuss this or that issue which impacts the Harbor of New York and New Jersey. Onboard… well, let’s just say that after nearly a decade of a humble narrator hanging around with the harbor crowd that there were a LOT of familiar faces. Last year the conference boat headed north along the Brooklyn and Queens coastline, but this year I was pleasantly surprised when the trip went south and we found ourselves on the Kill Van Kull separating the north shore of… Staten Island… from the chemical coast of New Jersey.
“Cool” thought I, when Moran’s “Marie J Turecamo” tug slid past!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Kill Van Kull seldom disappoints, as it’s a busy maritime corridor connecting the upper harbor with Port Elizabeth Newark and the cargo docks which you’ll find back there. There’s almost always a ballet of tugs and cargo ships moving through here, and after Newtown Creek and the East River – it’s the one of the NYC waterways with which I’m most familiar and can speak intelligently about.
This is, of course, due to the tutelage I was lucky enough to receive from Capt. Doswell of the Working Harbor Committee, on the many, many Newark Bay tours he led back here for WHC. I’ve studied the place on my own, of course, but when you’ve got somebody like Doswell sharing his “smarts” with you – you shut up and listen.
I believe WHC is going to be conducting a Newark Bay tour this summer, but obviously our late Captain Doswell will be there in spirit only.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Waterfront Alliance boat didn’t go as far back as WHC does – we didn’t get a close look at Global Marine Terminal for instance – but it was a real treat to get to shoot some tugs. I was onboard the WA boat to shoot the actual conferences, and some Oyster thing in the morning as well, but after accomplishing my “shot list” one headed topside and checked a few things off of my personal shot list.
“Franklin Reinauer” on Kill Van Kull, check.
Upcoming Events and Tours
Saturday, May 21st at 3:30 p.m. –
A Return to The Poison Cauldron of the Newtown Creek,
with Atlas Obscura, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Click here for more details.
Thursday, May 26th at 6 p.m. –
Brooklyn Waterfront: Past & Present Boat Tour,
with Working Harbor Committee. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
went wherein
Tug Sea Lion, at Newtown Creek, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Not too long ago, one found himself lurking around the Nature Walk at the Newtown Creek Waste Water Treatment Plant when the tug Sea Lion appeared on the languid waters of that legendary cataract of municipal neglect referred to, in hushed whispers, as the Newtown Creek.
It got me to thinking about life, and how much of the last decade I’ve spent photographing Tugs and Newtown Creek, or some combination of the two.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Constant pursuit of material examples of these two subjects has taken me to a lot of weird and interesting places over the years. I’ve met a lot of incredible people, and made quite a few friends who are also interested in both topics. The real treat has been the research, of course, and the broader story of a carefully hidden history that has appeared – one which I’m still piecing together.
It starts with Newtown Creek, and the tendrils leading out from the waterway.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Erie Canal? I can tie that one back to DeWitt Clinton sitting on his porch in Maspeth. Jello brand gelatin? Peter Cooper in Greenpoint. In the shot above, which depicts the Sims Metal facility in LIC’s Blissville, are three distinct subjects which I’ve ended up learning as much as I possibly can about – maritime shipping, the garbage and recycling industry, and that tall building with the green stripe on top – incidentally – is the former GEVC factory where electric cars and trucks were manufactured in LIC back in 1915 (which led to me learning about early electric vehicles).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Newtown Creek forced me to learn about the early petroleum industry, and to study manufactured gas plants, which led to looking at the chemical industry. Luckily, Phelps Dodge was the owner of the former General Chemical factory at the border of Blissville and Maspeth nearby Penny Bridge. The Creek has also led me into Calvary Cemetery, which forced me to learn about 19th century Irish Catholicism and has somehow resulted in me photographing the Irish Language Mass at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on more than one occasion.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Newtown Creek led me to study tugs, both their history and their current occupation in NY Harbor. Tugs led me to the East River Coastline of Manhattan and the vast ship building complex that existed between Corlears Hook and 23rd street. Manhattan real estate valuations in this area were so high, as early as the 1820’s, that ship yards began to relocate across the river to Greenpoint and Williamsburg, where the Federal Government established the Brooklyn Navy Yard at Wallabout Creek…
That led to reading up on Continental Iron Works, at Bushwick Inlet, where the USS Monitor and the caissons of the Brooklyn Bridge were built and launched.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
All down the Queens side of the Creek, there’s rail, which forced me to learn about that one as well. That led me to the Sunnyside Yards, which Dutch Kills once flowed through, and the grist mills operated by Dutch farmers, which led me to the English takeover of New Amsterdam and its satellites, and eventually to the American Revolution. Then I had to learn about Cornwallis and Howe and their occupation of Maspeth and how their troops rowed down Newtown Creek in pursuit of General Washington, who was fighting his way north…
It goes on and on like this.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Everybody asks me when I’m going to write a book. I tell them to subscribe to this blog, as half the Newtown Creek book is already written and contained herein at this – your Newtown Pentacle. Thing is, the Newtown Creek story is so unbelievably complicated and so intrinsic to the story of not just New York – but the entire United States – that without pictures to prove what I’m saying about this waterway – you’d think I was making it all up.
Upcoming Events and Tours
Sunday, May 8th at 11 a.m. – North Henry Street Project,
with Municipal Arts Society Janeswalk and Newtown Creek Alliance,
in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Click here for more details.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
The Newtown Pentacle 