Boston Harbor: A Wharf Rat's Reverie by Peter W. Rogers Nahant, Massachusetts is a square mile lump of rock in the ocean, connected to the mainland by a causeway. At the end of the town lies East Point, and I often walk over the crest of a hill, past mouldering gun mounts and ammunition bunkers and settle into the windblown grasses at the edge of a cliff. Below lies the heaving, bright Atlantic and the end of Boston North Channel where the pilot boat waits. Out there a great slab of a freighter will pause, and the ladder will be pulled back aboard. A puff of smoke, the thrash of the screw, and in stately time the image melts into the horizon. This silent evolution in the sparkle of morning light is Boston in step with its history. In the popular imagination, Boston is either a dead or a dying port, take your pick. It is neither. In 1981, 1,001 ships and 1,300 barges entered Boston; in 1913 2,050 vessels arrived, three-quarters of them coastwise. In 1849 roughly 9,000 vessels of all types cleared Boston; but in 1849 we were not dealing with 930' x 108' x 30' container ships with turnaround times of a few hours . In 1979, over 26 million tons of cargo passed through the port of Boston, and in 1981 only six times as many ships cleared the port of New York as cleared Boston. Dead port myths spring from two sources-the layman's intense aesthetic aversion to container ships and LNG carriers, and old photographs of harbors teeming with ships, the latter as much a reflection of inefficient cargo handling as anything else. The reader may now breathe easy, for we have cleared the shoal water of statistics and can proceed on an anecdotal tour of the Port of Boston. The harbor is a complex profusion of islands, bays, disgorging rivers and manmade channels, but in general terms the outer harbor is a semicircle with the flat side facing Northeast. It is protected to the north by the long arm of Winthrop and Deer Island and to the south by the peninsula ofNantasket and Hull. The semicircle is neatly bisected by Squantum, Moon Island, a causeway and Long Island. Across the seaward face lie the outer islands and Graves, Boston and Minots Lights. Boston Inner Harbor lies at the northwest corner of the semicircle. Historically, the harbor was much bigger than it is today, for a great deal of Boston and East Boston were built on landfill. Up in the far corner is Chelsea Creek, girdled by tank farms, and a fine place to locate older tankers because of the limited depth of water and the narrow confines of the Meridian and Chelsea street bridges . On the Chelsea side of the Meridian Street bridge is a fine little shipyard, Munro SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1982
Drydock, and on the East Boston side an agglomeration of yard craft-tugs, lighters, crane barges and LCM's belonging to Perini Construction. One of these vessels, an old dragger, is ironically named Flying Cloud-ironic for the fact that right around the corner lies General Ship Corporation, on the site where Donald McKay's famous clipper was built. Further along the shore were the piers for many noted British steamship lines and the terminus for a thriving grain and livestock trade. At the end, under a commanding bluff sits the Bethlehem Steel Shipyard, built in 1859. Much of my time in Boston Harbor was spent at the bottom of it, and my first job out of diving school was right here at the Beth Steel yards, replacing transducer plates on the ship I was assigned to. Since scuba gear doesn't allow much purchase on a big Allen wrench, we waited until low tide, dug our feet into the mud and had about five feet of clearance to the ship's bottom overhead. A fine plan until the wake of a passing tug abruptly changed the headroom. Ships float on what's there to float them, a lesson not fully covered in the classroom. Opposite the entrance to Chelsea Creek stands the mouth of the Mystic River. Overhead is the vaulting mass of the Tobin Bridge. In its shadow, back to a tank farm, is the Chelsea Yacht Club where they do not wear red pants.* Along the south side of the channel are US Gypsum, the big J.F. Moran Docks (a Massport Container terminal) and the Schiavone Scrap terminal (ferrous scrap is one of Boston's leading exports). On the north shore, under a bluff crowned by the stately buildings of the old Chelsea Naval Hospital, are sugar refineries and piers, and Distrigas, where the massive LNG carriers from Algeria tie up. Several of these *Red pants were introduced in yachting circles right after World War II by Royal Ocean Racing Club members who picked them up from Breton fishermen. Today they are chic also on the golf course. -ED
ships have been built in Quincy, Mass. At the end is an enormous generating plant, an American Taj Mahal, dazzling and majestic in its own reflecting pool. Past the bridges and further up this narrow creek lies Medford where they built clipper ships, and the aspect of this place is such that that fact utterly defies the imagination. Around the corner lies Charlestown and Little Mystic Channel, once the center of the River Plate lumber trade. Passing the former Charlestown Navy Yard, one arrives at a bridge. Tucked into a corner here, and jutting out from City Square, is the GSA Pier. In this direction the message flashed from Old North Church, and standing here you could draw fire from Bunker Hill. Next door is the Hoosac Pier, named after the famous tunnel cut under the Berkshire Mountains, and through which passed 60% of Boston's exports in the 1890s. But on this site before that stood a landmark even more distinguished in the history of the city-Tudor Wharf, the center of a huge trade that was perhaps the paradigm of Yankee ingenuity. From here Frederick Tudor sent ice, the useless product of New England ponds, to India and South America, revived the Calcutta trade and made a bundle. And what is the purpose of the GSA Pier, surrounded by the richest aspects of American history? It is used to store IRS forms. Between Hoosac Pier and the Navy Yard lies a marina and a hundred-year-old barge. Below decks the massive timbers, low overhead, weak light and reeking bilges conjure imaginings of brutal surgery on orlop decks, thoughts soon dispelled by the aluminum lawn chairs stacked in a corner. On the other side of the channel is historic Boston proper and the North End, with a wonderful view of the harbor from Copp's Hill Burial Ground. At the apex of this section is the Coast Guard Base where I spent much time under water on coffeecup retrieval jobs. But there was also serious work, like looking for a lost 45 automatic. Lash Larue, the Quartermaster 21