What can we learn about New York City and its waterfront from its boats? Waterwire is inviting those across the maritime world and beyond—historians, planners, artists, business people, scientists—to share their perspectives on NYC History in 10 Boats. Below is our fourth installment, with urban planner Ann Buttenwieser. (Read the first, second, and third installments.) If you know someone who would like to tell the story of New York City in 10 boats, tweet author Stefan D-W at @DWStefan or email him at [email protected].
Ann Buttenwieser, the driving force behind a giant barge refurbished into a floating pool, is known as the Floating Pool Lady (as is the pool itself). The co-founder of the Council for Parks and Playgrounds (which later merged with what is now New Yorkers for Parks) and the founder of the nonprofit Neptune Foundation, Ms. Buttenwieser spent more than two decades working to recreate the floating baths of the 19th century, her mission to get recreationally underserved New Yorkers into the water. Ann is currently writing a book about that adventure. Here is her NYC History in 10 Barges.
Hopper Barge: Michael Hughes came from Ireland in 1843 and began to build wooden hopper barges in New Brunswick, New Jersey. These non-self-propelled vessels carried coal between Pennsylvania and New York. Today, Hughes Marine is famous for its specialty flat-top metal barges, which provide sets for musical performances, movies, and send up the Macy’s July 4th fireworks.
Floating Baths: In 1880, Boss Tweed opened New York City’s first floating baths. The barge-shaped, wooden structures surrounded a pool—open on top to the air and to the dirty river water on the bottom. In 1915, there were 15 baths berthed around the city, but by 1940 or so they had all closed because of water pollution.
Oil Barge: An award for bravery in the 1916 Black Tom Explosion gave Captain Fredrick Bouchard funds to found the Bouchard Transportation Company. In order to meet federal restrictions on single-hull vessels after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the company constructed 400-foot-long, double-hull, metal barges that can each carry 138,000 barrels of oil in holds under the deck, thus removing an estimated 650 trucks per barge and untold pollution from the roadways.
Floating Island: In 1970, Artist Robert Smithson, famous for his Great Salt Lake work Spiral Jetty, sketched a toy boat pulling a barge that resembled a park. Smithson died three years later. In September 2005, as part of a Whitney Museum retrospective, Smithson’s wife, artist Nancy Holt, created a real floating island on a barge. For eight days, the art work, with a lawn, rocks and trees, circled Manhattan.
Mobro: Unlike the appealing Floating Island, the Mobro carried 3,100 tons of trash, with which contractor Lowell Harrison hoped to start a business producing methane. For two months in 1987, the barge hauled the same load of garbage from Long Island to six states, three countries, and back to Brooklyn, seeking landfill space but continually turned away. The trash was finally incinerated in Brooklyn, and the episode touched off a national discussion about waste disposal.
Bargemusic: At Fulton Landing in Brooklyn, music lovers enjoy concerts while floating on the East River. Bargemusic, an intimate, unique chamber music hall, was the brainchild of violinist Olga Bloom, who in 1976 repurposed a metal barge that 100 years earlier had transported sacks of coffee beans.
The River Café: A year later, across the foot of Old Fulton Street from Olga’s Bargemusic, after a 13-year struggle with federal and state regulations and fire codes that applied only to land-based buildings, restaurateur and Waterfront Alliance board of trustee, Michael O’Keeffe opened the now legendary floating restaurant on another converted coffee barge.
Waterfront Museum: More than a century ago, the wooden Lehigh Valley Barge #79 moved cargo from ships to rail. In the 1950s, containerization took the vessel out of its middleman position. David Sharps rescued the mired-in-mud vessel in 1985 and brought it to Red Hook, Brooklyn. Now on the National Register of Historic Places, the artifact is a museum where visitors can enjoy theater, educational programs and exhibitions about the waterfront.
New York New Jersey Rail: Until the mid-20th century, and because the nearest railroad bridge crossing was in Albany, railroad companies saved time and money by operating barges across New York Harbor. Known as car floats, the barges carried rail cars from tracks that ended at the New Jersey waterfront to those that began in Manhattan and Brooklyn. When trucking boomed, railroads soon went bankrupt and the car floats mostly disappeared from the harbor. In 2008, however, The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey took over the last remaining car float operation in New York Harbor—called New York New Jersey Rail—and invested millions of dollars to modernize the service. Each car float can shuttle 18 rail cars, with more than a thousand tons of freight, between the Greenville Yard in Jersey City, and the 65th Street Yard in Brooklyn.
The Floating Pool Lady: In 2004, the Neptune Foundation purchased the C500, one of dozens of single-hull, flat-top, metal barges flooding the market. The vessel, renamed The Floating Pool Lady, was repurposed with a half-Olympic-sized pool, sunk into a cutout in the barge. This June, the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation will open the free, floating pool’s 11th season in the Bronx. Here, unlike the 19th-century baths, the neighboring community has a safe and clean place to recreate in water, on water.
