98. LETTIE G. HOWARD (schooner)

A.K.A.: Mystic C.; Caviare
Location: Off Pier 16, off of Fulton Street
Built: 1893
Builder: Arthur D. Story
National Register Number: 84002779
Listed: September 7, 1984
Visited: December 14, 2008
Official Documentation: NRHP Nomination Form; NHL Form



An annoyance. As it rarely stays in one spot, this boat resisted all my attempts at capture, wintering at Kings Point when I did my first batch of Seaport posts back in January and February, and off on all sorts of mad adventures the rest of the year. Impromptu drop-ins, inquiries into the museum, even trying to befriend this ship via its MySpace page still led me to a blank spot by Pier 16 where a ship should be. So when the MySpace page announced "alongside the Lightship Ambrose in her winter berth," I was less in a mood for discovery than getting the damned thing done, a feeling abetted by the ship's temporary under-wraps and sail-free condition. Not the optimal setting for blog excitement, I must admit.

One Toronto website, offering cruises and "team building challenges," explains that "Schooners were popular in occupations that required high speed and windward ability," a statement so mild and factual that it does not prepare you for "such as slaving, privateering, blockade running and"--going back to mild--"offshore fishing." Well, not that mild, as fishing was always a nasty occupation, and even today has with the highest fatality rate in the United States. The Lettie G. Howard is one of the last surviving fishing schooners of its kind, but if you're hoping it has ripping yarns, stories that wake us up to the blood-and-wounds business of nation-building, you're shit of out of luck. The online historical record for the Lettie G. does not offer too much in the way of specifics--the NHL form linked to above is even missing every other page. What I can tell you is that it was born in Essex, Massachusetts, worked the Gorton's Fisherman territory around Gloucester for its first eight years, then later moved to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico before getting purchased by the South Street Seaport in 1968. It does not appear to have deep New York roots, though the South Street Seaport Museum website notes that it is "similar to the schooners that carried their Long Island and New Jersey catches to New York City's the Fulton Fish Market"--a fine thread of historical continuity between the ship's and the seaport's pasts and present severed when the market relocated from South Street to the Bronx. Today the museum offers sail training courses and the like on the ship which, at $150 and up, is too rich for my blood.

47. AMBROSE (lightship)

A.K.A.: Lightship No. 87, Relief, F-LS512, Scotland
Location: Pier 16, off Fulton Street
Built: 1907
Builder: U.S. Lighthouse Service; New York Shipbuilding Co.
National Register Number: 84002758
Listed: September 7, 1984
Visited: February 2, 2008
Additional Documentation: NRHP Registration Form



In the olden days, locations deemed impractical for a lighthouse were instead serviced by permanently-anchored lightships. Lightships are often named after their charges, and so No. 87 was known as the Ambrose when it guided craft through the Ambrose Channel, the shipping channel that leads into New York Harbor. Its career as the Ambrose lasted from 1908 until 1932 during the era of the Cunard and the White Star Lines, back when ships weren't the also-ran to planes in the international transportation sweepstakes they way they are today. (It also became the first permanent radio beacon in the United States in 1921, this at the very beginning of commercial radio broadcasting.)Other light stations, before and since, have also called the Ambrose; and after No. 111 took its place, the No. 87 later served various locations throughout the Northeast until it was decommissioned in 1966, then donated to South Street Seaport in 1968. (The Ambrose Lightship was replaced by a "Texas Tower" lighthouse--sort of a lighthouse on an oil rig--in 1967, and became fully automated and people-free in 1988.) In its retirement, No. 87 has great stories to tell and all, yet here at the seaport, it's something of a fabulous unicorn in captivity, incongruously docked at a maritime museum-mall when it spent most of its career out stationed in the Atlantic hinterwaters.

I now know more about lightships than I ever imagined I'd know.

Until Saturday, every time I visited the Seaport in service of this blog, something prevented me from boarding the Ambrose. Usually the metal ramp that led to the boat had a puny piece of rope blocking its threshold, signifying it was off-limits. I went to the Seaport early hoping to get this responsibility out of the way, but no, the rope was still there. The water was a little choppy for some reason and in my mild disappointment I stood by the ship mesmerized by the way such a huge thing--488 tons--could bob up and down so gently. And weirdly, out of the corner of my eye, I could just barely catch somebody peeking out of one of the boat's portholes. Thinking somebody might come out, I wait a while and still, nothing. I come back after twelve, which is when the boats are supposed to open, I think. No, it remains blocked off. There are open doors on the top of the boat, the Peking has visitors, but there's nothing on the Ambrose--an oasis of ghost ship in the middle of one America's great tourist traps. I sit and wait outside on Pier 17 for about a half an hour. (I've got nothing better to do.) No sign of life. I go inside and eat a meal in one of the mall's better restaurants. I have a window seat so I can nervously check the Ambrose every so often. Eventually, in the middle of my meal, I notice a family boarding it, unencumbered by any rope. The weirdest thing. I haven't taken my eyes off the boat for more than a minute (probably less) and yet, somehow...whatever. So I rush my meal and pay my bill and finally board the thing, after six months of waiting, wondering if I'M ACTUALLY NOT ALLOWED TO BE ON THIS AND I'M GONNA BE IN TROUBLE and such. I take pictures of nothing in particular. I take pictures to take pictures. Then I see a guy's there, sitting down. Dude doesn't even acknowledge my presence, doesn't look at me. A gnome. Then he goes back into the ship. And that's it. I don't even bother going below deck to check out the details of the monotonous, lonely life lightship tenders must've lived. I'm not sure who was being weird here: sea people, museum people, or blogger people.

This is the last of the South Street Seaport ships I'm covering for now. There are two other landmarked ships connected to the Seaport, both I'll have to cover when it's not so cold: the Lettie G. Howard, which according to her own Myspace page (!) is wintering in Kings Point, New York, and the John A. Lynch, whose miserable story is recounted here.

44. WAVERTREE

A.K.A.: Southgate, Don Ariano N.
Location: Pier 17, off Fulton Street
Built: 1885
Builder: Oswald Mordaunt & Co.
National Register Number: 78001887
Listed: June 13, 1978
Visited: November 11, 2007 and January 12, 2008



Uh...ships! Yeah! I keep protesting that I'm fairly ignorant about wide swathes of architecture, but ships? If my brain goes limp at the vocabulary of Gothic architecture, it shuts down when faced with things as simple as "starboard" and "port." Skimming through the 1969 book The Wavertree: An Ocean Wanderer makes me regret this somewhat. "The Wavertree was in the jute trade from Chittagong, first: that meant plenty of Trade Wind sailing--where the flying fish roam--and just getting past Good Hope outwards..." This line is a drop in the ocean of facts, but the waves it produces builds and builds with suggestion of a lost world until there is no shore it doesn't touch. And that's only the foreword. Most of the book is devoted Captain George Spiers' personal account of his trip on the Wavertree as it sailed from Port Townsend in Washington to Chile to Portland, Oregon to tiny Runcorn in England, passing through rotten weather and rundown seaports no doubt transformed by time. This was from 1907-08, this when the cast-iron ship was already a relic and only a few years away from decommissioning. The book has pictures of it in its incarnation as a sand barge in Buenos Aires, its rigging gone. Even knowing just fragments of its tiny role in an industrious world gone by, you could genuinely be saddened by this emasculation--and touched (yeah, touched) by its loving restoration by the museum.