Led by the stick ligher Vernie S. of 1897, the parade of working harbor craft passes beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Tugboats , a pilot boat, a Coast Guard cutter, excursion boats, a fireboat and others turned out to honor the heritage of the harbor. Photos, John Skelson.
New York Harbor Curatorship: I
SEA DAY: New York Celebrates the Working Harbor The morning of Saturday, May 19 brought a soft spring rain sifting down from the grey blankets of cloud hanging over the still waters of New York harbor. Up and down the floating walkways at Staten Island's Bay Street Landing, hard by where the ferryboats come in from Manhattan-whose tall towers gleam in transitory sunlight across the silvery waterthe people were in a holiday mood not to be dampened by the weather. I say to a
young woman coming down the way with two toddlers in tow : " It's good to see them getting out in the harbor so young." " Oh , this is a family day," she says. "Their aunts and uncles are on the other boats." And ultimately, after some tinkering with a faulty magneto on Jerome Kern's old yacht Showboat, which has been contributed to the occasion, the working fleet sets off, thirty-six craft in all, including the 425-foot fuel barge Cibro Philadel-
A festive f ountain of spray salutes the Vernie S. as she comes up to the Fulton Ferry Landing pier with Anthony Rando, born 1989, at the helm.
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phia, pushed along by the tug Jean Turecamo with the Tottenville High School Band and majorettes aboard . And there are Moran and McAllister tugs, and Poling Transportation's Rebecca P. , the Sandy Hook Pilot~' big 180-foot New York , the 110-foot icebreak~r Mahoning of the US Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers 100-foot catamaran Driftmaster, which swallows up huge balks of floating timber and other flotsam and jetsam, in a perpetual harbor cleanup campaign-and enough people aboard the three dozen vessels to hold a worthy family party, and enough horsepower, surely to move a mountain if that should be called for. All these vessels follow docilely in the wake of a 65-foot wooden lighter, called a "stick" lighter from the immense cargo boom she swings. She sits low in the water-waves from a passing wake slop easily aboard. This is the J.-emie S., launched into a quite different world in 1897. At her helm is Anthony Rando, born April 5, 1898 on Filicudi Island, off the northeast coast of Sicily. He came to Boston in 1909 to live with an aunt while his father was working in a Waltham cotton mill. Ten years later he came to New York to work on the coal docks in Red Hook. By 1922 he had is own boat running harbor errands and buying up old rope and sails for Domenic and Johnson's junk shop at the foot of 16th Street in Brooklyn-a rare business run by Italo-Norse partners-and that year he married 16-year old Josephine Santangelo, whose family came from Stromboli, a neighboring island off the Sicilian coast. As Anthony told me these things, acting out SEA HIS1DRY, FALL 1984