46. W. O. DECKER (tugboat)

A.K.A.: Russell I, Susan Dayton
Location: Pier 16, off Fulton Street
Built: 1930
Builder: Russell & Co.
National Register Number: 96000962
Listed: September 13, 1996
Visited: November 11, 2007 and January 12, 2008



The W.O. Decker is the other tugboat in the South Street Seaport Museum's collection. It's less cute than the Helen McAllister, but still dandy-handsome, its wooden body decked out in ketchup and mustard colors. It seems far older than the other tug (I would've guessed circa Gilded Age), but in fact it's a good thirty years younger, having been built for a Queens towing company in 1930. Like the non-landmarked Peking and Pioneer, W.O. is available for private use: in this case, four-to-six-hour tours of New York's waterfront, from wildlife to industrial sites. Since I rarely get a good, close look at the edges of urban life, these tours are awfully tempting but mad expensive. For me, anyway. At $125 to $180, that's the kind of money I can't part with easily. It's also tempting and expensive enough for New York Magazine to position these trips as a choice for the discerning, Circle Line tours for people who have no patience with fat sweaty tourists and their fat sweaty fanny-packs. Ugh, is there anything NYM can't infect with its aspirational cooties?

45. ADMIRAL DEWEY (tugboat)

A.K.A.: Georgetown, Helen McAllister
Location: Pier 17, off Fulton Street
Built: 1900
Builder: Burlee Dry Dock Company
National Register Number: 02001619
Listed: December 27, 2002
Visited: November 11, 2007 and January 12, 2008



For the first fifty or so years of its life, the Admiral Dewey used to carry coal barges around New York Harbor. After a stint in Charleston, the boat was purchased by the McAllister Towing and Transportation Co., who renamed it the Helen McAllister. (Nearly all of the boats in the company's fleet get the McAllister last name, like they were a maritime Ramones.) It was donated to the South Street Seaport Museum in 2000. Although the museum already had a tug in its collection (the W.O. Decker), you can see the wisdom in getting a second. Tugs are likeable, almost cute. They've got family appeal.



There is a striking number of children's books about tugboats on amazon.com. Virgina Lee Burton's books for children (Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Katy and the Big Snow) suggest that even the most ungainly machine can be not just anthropomorphized, but made loveable. Tugboats, though, have quite a lot with which children can identify, however unconsciously: even though they're little boats in a world of big boats, sometimes the big boats need the little boats to get around. The look of the Helen McAllister, its Cat in the Hat stack and the huge beard-like mass on its prow--it's impossible not to see a content face in it.