THE OCEANIC MISSION III
HERALDS OF THE MORNING
T
hey were ambitious towers-as ambitious as the American dream. T heir message will carry while the language is spoken , or as long as New York will last among the world 's great cities. Fo r make no mistake, they carried a distinct m essage-a m essage that has evolved, endured , and traveled around the wo rld. Ir is a m essage ofNew York C ity's involvement with the world through seaborne trade. People differ about that message, as they differ abo ut American involvement with the world. And they take different views of the economy and society we have built at home through foreign tradeand immigration. But whatever view one has of the outcomes-and most peopl e take a positive view, despite the dissent that always exists and always must, if we are to keep our freedom s-it was our seaborne activities that brought the city its wealth and its peop le, and with these the diversity, creative energy and freedoms for which New York is famous around the wo rld. Since scrambling ashore on the far side of a stormy ocean, we have been dependent on those viral links with the outer world, and it is approp riate that the tall towers of the World Trade Center stood as monuments to those connections, monuments visible from many miles away by land, sea and air. Our Society's links with th e rwin towers seem to express som e of what they stood for in N ew York, and will no w stand for while memory lasts. I have called them "Heralds of the Morning" - borrowing the name of a famous clipper ship that sailed from New York-because that is how I saw them each morning when our Society was headquartered at Fulton Ferry Landing, on the Brooklyn shore of the East River. Our gang was then wo rking on the South Street Sea po rt Muse um ship Wavertree, just across the river, while at the sa me time we strained to bring th e bark Elissa in from G reece and the Ernestina back from the far- distant Cape Verdes, among o ther projects. People thought we we re crazy, and some did not hesitate to say so publicly. But the towers sho ne like trumpets so unding the call to us in o ur business in
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by Peter Stanford great wate rs. And it helped to know that th e wo rldwide trade of the city was centered there. We also had a special link w ith the rowers, dating back to when the massive foundations we re being dug in 1967. Som e of us were then busy founding South Street Seaport Museum at the other end of Fulton Street. As chance wo uld have it, part of the forefoot of a Dutch trading vessel, probably the ill-fa ted Tijger, burnt in Manhattan in 16 13, had been recovered just outside the foundation wall when the tunnel for the Seventh Avenue subway was
1978, to visits by high school students I h ad the pleasure of leading when we launched our NMHS Maritime Education Initiative in 1992, and a reception we held las t year to honor Walter Cronkite for his leadership of the MEI. And, for a few years we had NMHS offi ces at One World Trade Center, from which o ur chairman Jim McAl lister kept in close touch with the affairs of the port he served so well. W hen the towers fell, the m aritime community turned o ut in force to cope with the horror as best it could. At a recent m eeting of the Ship Lore & Model Club, founded in 1928, which included in its membership such marine stalwarts as the Cape Horn sai lorman Alan Villiers, Captain Bob Bartlett of the Effie M. Morrissey (later Ernestina), and the marine artist Gordon Grant, the h arbo r p eople of today gath ered to record the waterborne com munity's response to the catastrophe. Norman Brouwer, ship historian of South Street Seaport Museum (and autho r of the World Ship Ttust's International Register of Historic Ships) reported on the situatio n of a whole section of the city in fli ght, with people stumbling across wreckage and human remains in a choking black fog that turned a bright autumn morning into a Stygian nightmare. Boats gath ered in the nearby Hudso n River to pick up desperate people, in an operatio n No rman compared to "a small Dunkirk," harking back Morning in Brooklyn, 1980s. Photo: f oe Deutsch to the evacuation of the British.Army from France in the face of the Nazi dug in 1916. Hoping to recover the rest of onslaught in 1940. Some of the evacuees the bottom timbers of the vessel, which were marked with blood, not their own but had burnt to the water's edge, we worked from the falling bodies of people jumping to w ith the Port Authori ty to scan the earth as escape the searing fire in rhe rowers. Dr. Al it was removed for the Trade Center foun- DeMayo, president of the club, who turned dations. We never found the balance of the out to deal with the injured, was appalled to Tijger remains, but with the help of Ken t find that there was only a trickle of wounded Barwick, later director of the Municipal people; the attack by its nature didn't proArt Society, we did recover a magnificent duce cuts and broken bones, but lost lives. eleven-foot anchor of the approximate pePerhaps the leading vessel in the rescue riod, which the workmen saved for us and operatio n was a seven ty-year-old museum which is in the NMH S collection today. ship , the doughry fireboat John j. H arvey, And of co urse we had more wo rkaday whose vo lunteer skipper Huntley Gill connections, ranging from an exhibi tion brought her south from her berth at the we arranged in the World T rade Center for Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, first to the American Society of Marine Artists in pick up people, and then to put the H arvry's
SEA HISTORY 99, WINTER 2001-02