The Water Log

New York Press

August 29, 2007

For a day, harbor tugs push against each other, not super cargo carriers

“We generally take home one or two a year,” says the white-bearded owner of Reinauer Transportation Company, pointing at more than twenty burnished trophies lining a wooden shelf in his handsome office headquarters.
Like Bert Reinauer himself, the room conveys an aura of some consequence, owing in part to the mounted cups, whose slight dissimilarities suggest they were long in the gathering. The shelf is a bit high, so you’d have to stand on tiptoe to understand that the cups are not exactly as consequential as they appear. In fact, it’s all kind of a big game.
One day a year, the tugboat industry dresses up its hardworking vessels and parades them before judges, showing off fresh paint jobs, displaying horsepower in nose-to-nose pushing competitions and a one-mile sprint up the Hudson. Tug operators play rodeo cowboys, demonstrating their skill by roping a cleat from a moving vessel coming toward a dock.
And those are the earnest categories. Equally coveted are the trophies for best tugboat pet and best dressed crew, best crewmember tattoo (that can be legally displayed), and best mascot.
The event’s lightheartedness in no way means it is not taken seriously. Reinauer compares it to a tractor pull, and anyone who’s ever been through the middle of the country knows how the heartland loves its diesel. It would not be going overboard for a crewmember to get a tattoo specifically for the competition. “I don’t know for a fact" whether that has happened, says Reinaur, "but it wouldn’t surprise me. Some of the tattoos are really ornate and pretty unique.”
“For our industry, it’s the highlight of the year.”

The Sunday of Labor Day weekend was not always a maritime holiday.
In 1992, Jerry Roberts, who then worked at the Intrepid, decided to bring back the tugboat racing that had ended in the 60’s or 70’s when big companies started buying out family-owned tug operations, tugs started striking, and camaraderie in the business went downhill. He started calling around, and got a lot of maybes.
Companies were concerned with insurance issues, but mostly, about taking a loss by taking a day off. Cargo comes into the port every day of the year, so there are no industry-wide holidays.
“It’s difficult to pull a working vessel out of your fleet, and come in here and dedicate to a day’s events that are really non-revenue producing,” says Reinauer. “It just depends on how your schedule works out.”
Only a little bit daunted, Roberts kept plying the phones. “I really called everybody, sent out letters, and I got a bunch of them to say, ‘You know what? If we have a tugboat that day, with a standby crew, that doesn’t have a job that morning, we’ll send it. But no guarantees.’”
The night before the first race was tense.
“So that first year, I waited on the dock in the morning. We had already alerted the press, we already had some publicity. My reputation was kind of on the line because, you know, a bunch of people coming to watch a tugboat race, and if in fact no tugboats showed up, or only two tugboats showed up, I knew it would be the last year of the event.
“And I sat there watching. First one or two, and then more, and McAllister Towing Company sent five McAllister tugs. In combination with the other tugs that showed up, I think we probably had eight to ten tugs that year, which certainly was enough to have an event.”
Five years later, hundreds of tug-loving spectators were attending and tugboat companies were calling Roberts, instead of vice versa. “Because what it quickly evolved into was a great – forget the spectators for a minute – it became a great celebration within the tugboat community. And it was a chance for the tugboaters to bring their families on their tugs, deck them out with flags and stuff.”
On September 2nd, the 15th annual New York Tug Boat Race & Competition will begin at 10:30 a.m. at Pier 84 (at West 44th Street) with a parade of tugs, a fireboat spraying water and a Coast Guard Cutter.
Roberts is expecting between 10 and 20 tugs, but big as the event has gotten, the roster will never be set in advance. “They can’t tell two weeks out necessarily which tug will have gotten a job working at this pier or taking a barge to Boston or something,” says Roberts. “They’re not going to turn down a $20,000 job to race. But, they may have another tug. Or they may have a tug visiting from Galveston that they can throw into the race. So until the day of the race, you don’t know for sure.”
“Whoever can spare the tug power,” says Reinauer, “we’ll go out, rain or shine.”

New York Press

August 22, 2007

A seaport tradition lingers though the fish guts are gone

An unread Daily News lies folded in half on the bar. I slide into a seat, order a coffee from the bartender, pick up the paper and flip through it, but not with the same Yankee-loving, Lotto-playing gusto as the guys it’s really for.
When it opened in 2004 on Beekman Street, Fresh Salt entered into a tradition as old as the seaport itself.
In October of 2004, recalls Sara Williams, the bar’s co-owner, some guys came in one morning at 8 a.m. for coffee. Then they noticed that “I was standing in front of a lot of liquor.” They ended up asking sheepishly for margaritas. Thus was born the Friday morning happy hour, a celebration of the end of the fish market’s nocturnal workweek.
There was a time, affectionately recorded in a photo album behind the bar, when twenty guys would pack in, grappling hooks over shoulders, some already on their third vodka-soda as suits headed to work on nearby Wall Street.
That was almost two years ago now. When the 180-year-old Fulton Fish Market was booted from its waterfront site in the fall of 2005 and relocated to a new facility in the Bronx, Friday mornings at the seaport got a lot tamer. “We don’t do that anymore,” says Sara, of the extra-early happy hour. Now Fresh Salt opens at 10 a.m. every day of the week. “Not too long after they moved, we were like, alright, ten o’clock.”
Which is not to say that Friday mornings at Fresh Salt are suddenly sober. It turned out that the move to the Bronx was quite a buzz kill for the guys who liked to jumpstart their weekend with the unfailing combination of many drinks on no sleep. While the new $85 million, 400,000-square-foot indoor facility is spacious and climate controlled, Hunts Point lacks any sort of early morning drinking infrastructure. As one fish guy put it: “Where can I get a margarita at 8 a.m.?”
So while it goes without saying that the numbers of early morning drinkers at Fresh Salt are of course nothing like what they used to be, it is a testament to something – perhaps the strength of friendships forged over decades, or the lure of alcohol, or both – that there is still a core that makes the weekly pilgrimage from the heart of the Bronx to the lower tip of Manhattan every week, or just about.
“Vinny’s been coming, kinda,” says Sara. “Shadow, I haven’t seen in awhile. And Bobby usually gets here around eleven.”
It may be a sign of the beginning of the end that last Friday morning, not a single one of the regulars showed up. All the patrons at Fresh Salt had clearly been to bed the night before. All were utilizing the café, none the bar, and many were typing away industriously on laptops hooked up wirelessly.
But Sara’s not concerned. It’s summertime, she says, and the guys are probably spending their weekends away at the beach or somewhere.
On a rainy Friday morning a few months ago, the scene was similar – Sara running around accepting keg deliveries and setting out muffins – but the clientele, different:
“Where’s the Daily News?” asks Bobby Lobster, as Sara pours him a glass of red wine. “I forgot it,” Sara confesses, for the second time this morning. (Shadow had wanted it, too.) Like many things, this causes Bobby to groan good naturedly. Sarah offers to go out in the rain to pick it up, but she knows they don’t want her to go anywhere. It’s clear they all enjoy each other’s company.
Shadow throws Bobby Lobster – a lobster wholesaler – the Post. Bobby Lobster turns it toward Sarah and shows her “your boyfriend,” Yankee Johnny Damon. He’s heckling her, as Yankee fans tend to do to Red Sox aficionados: Sarah is from Boston originally.
Shadow, or Spider, or Michael (but no one really calls him by his Christian name) has been at the fish market since he was 20, which was about twenty years ago. He hoists fish from 10 p.m. to 9 a.m. Monday through Thursday, and on Sunday from 7 p.m. to 9 a.m. He looks wan after his 11-hour shift loading and unloading fish, half of which was spent outdoors in the rain. Mostly, though, he looks happy to be here, sipping his second Bud Light.
He’s still got the second leg of his commute home to Marine Park, Brooklyn in front of him, but he couldn’t care less. “Don’t have to be back at work ‘til Sunday,” Shadow smiles.
“Friday,” he says, sipping his second Bud Lite, “there is no bedtime.”

New York Press

August 15, 2007

The birth of a very local holiday

“You can see the density of the towers here in the downtown financial district,” a woman’s well-rehearsed voice booms onto the decks of the Zephyr, Circle Line’s 143-foot touring yacht. “They would all develop around a tiny little street called Wall Street.”
“Too loud!” Sam Dao winces. Like 90 percent of the passengers aboard the Zephyr last Wednesday, Dao, 74, speaks too little English to be able to make out what this disembodied voice is conveying. He brings his hands up to his ears. “A little bit too loud!”
This hour-and-a-half long tour is clearly designed for American tourists, but today the sunburned father and son in Tevas make up a tiny minority. The Zephyr’s deck is crowded with almost 150 local seniors, almost all Chinese, decked out for the occasion in sunglasses and beach hats. That’s “seniors” as in old-timers, not students in their last year of school, although the energy level – the noisy chatter among cliques and the unceasing taking of photos of one another – might be expected from a group whose average age was closer to 18 than 70.
By the end of the day, a grand total of 1,200 old folks, most of them hailing from lower Manhattan, will have taken a version of this tour, on one of six outings on three different boats.
It’s not the Chinese New Year or anything. No one is celebrating their independence or even a birthday. This big to-do is the second annual Senior Sail, sponsored by Council Member Alan Gerson. Notwithstanding all the elbowing in line, it’s really just a PR event…
But what, after all, is a holiday? According to my dictionary, it’s “a day of festivity or recreation when no work is done.”
Granted, these folks are by and large retired, so a day of rest in and of itself is not much cause for celebration. But a free cruise with a couple hundred of your closest friends? In this community, that’s a holiday.
Sure, it’s unfortunate that no one can understand the narration. “Which one is which one?” asks Dao, waving his hand from one imposing skyscraper to another. He and his wife Hee Yann, 73, went on the first Senior Sail last year. They enjoyed themselves immensely, but didn’t learn anything.
Dao points north at the Empire State Building. “My wife and me, we know only that one. The name of this building,” his finger aims at a skyscraper with a clock in its tower, “can you tell me?” I shake my head. I haven’t been listening, either. Dao giggles a high-pitched giggle, covering his mouth with his hand.
And yeah, it was annoying that they had to wait around for an hour and a half in ninety-plus degree heat, on account of the flooded subways, for the Zephyr’s crew to assemble. “We waited so long!” says Roger Wong, a retired senior analyst for Shell Oil Company. “Originally the schedule is 12:00. Now it’s 1:30. First we wait outside, then inside Pier 17, looking around the store.”
Was it worth the wait? “Oh yes, indeed,” says Wong. “I guess so. Yes, indeed.”
The Zephyr’s first- and second-story decks crawl with hobbyist photographers who seem to think the Statue of Liberty is Kate Moss, and it’s standing-room only in the air-conditioned indoor seating area. The only vacant block of seats is in front of the shiny black bar. The bar stools are deserted; no one’s about to blight a free holiday with the purchase of an overpriced beer.
In their anticipation, the day trippers have thought of everything, from backpacks and fanny packs containing brown bag lunches and water bottles to colorful umbrellas to shield the sun. One man even has a rolling suitcase.
Finances can be hard on retirees, says Wong, who lives in Brooklyn with his wife. “But I manage okay because I watch every dollar.”
“A long time ago, I rode on Circle Line around Manhattan,” Wong recalls. “That was over 15 years ago. You know how much Circle Line cost round trip? It was over $15 before, I guess. No, it must have been $30, I guess. I don’t know. It’s a lot of money for a retired person. This is the good deal!”
“For free!” echoes Kee, a friend of Wong’s from the City Hall Senior Center, busily taking pictures of the group. “For free!”
There is one white-haired white man in denim shorts, part of a small group of non-Chinese seniors from the Montclair Senior Center, who has splurged on a glass of white wine. Thomas Bowden gazes out a porthole in the ship’s stern. “I’m looking,” he says. “I don’t really listen too much.”
Bowden lost his son on 9/11. The body has not been found. When we passed Ground Zero earlier, “it felt a little… I didn’t want to look at it,” he says. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been to the site.”
But Bowden’s memories today are mostly pleasant. “This reminds me of my Navy days,” he smiles. He was a seaman on a destroyer from 1960 to 1963 in Newport, Rhode Island. The blue ink on his arm reads “DD 943 / USS BLANDY.”
He, too, is in the holiday spirit, feeling spryer than his years. “I’m 66,” he tells me when I ask his age, then leans in confidentially: “which I can’t believe!”

Our Town downtown

July 23, 2007

The accidental making of a model shipwright

Dan Pariser has no end of options, but he’ll probably end up bringing the HMS Bounty to the South Street Seaport Museum’s 15th annual New York Ship & Boat Model Festival on August 4th and 5th.
Displayed in a glass case in the bedroom, Bounty holds the place of honor in Pariser’s apartment – and in his heart. “I have a fascination with Bounty,” he admits. “I remember building a plastic model of Bounty with my father. And the story – do you know it? – it’s tragic, and ironic.”
We sit and gaze at the wooden replica, accurate down to the varying thickness of the rigging lines, as Pariser tells the strange and terrible saga of Captain Bligh. After Bligh was set to sea by mutinous sailors in “that little boat” – Pariser points to the miniaturized 28-foot launch lashed to Bounty’s deck – he performed one of history’s great sailing feats by navigating the vessel 3000 miles to Australia, only to be court marshaled for losing control of his ship.
Pariser knows exactly how the flock of tourists will react to the model.
“They’ll say, ‘Is that a pirate ship?’
And I’ll say, ‘Nooooo, it’s the Bounty.’
And they’ll say, ‘Boy, you must have to have a lot of patience!’
And I’ll tell them, ‘I use nothing but instant glue and fast-drying paint. What I have is perseverance. It doesn’t take very long to build any one part, but there are thousands of parts.’”
Whatever it is that makes a great model ship builder, Pariser’s got it.
It started as your typical lawyer’s hobby. Twenty years ago, Pariser was a successful trial attorney with his own law firm in New Jersey. He played tournament racquetball on the side. And on the side of that, he did some woodworking.
Then Pariser tore the muscles in one knee, and racquetball was out. So was using the woodworking machines, which required him to stand. Still, Pariser had to do something wholesome: “Lawyers need a hobby that’s so engrossing it keeps you away from thoughts of trial,” he says.
He fished out a wood model ship kit that someone had given him and put it together. It was fun. He bought some more kits, and then got annoyed with the kits because he realized they were inaccurate. “I’d rather make my own mistakes than fix someone else’s,” as he put it. So he started doing “scratch builds” – drawing his own plans and making everything by hand, down to miniature nails and rivets.
It’s not every day that a person finds an occupation that draws on every one of their talents and speaks to all their inclinations.
Not only was Pariser already an experienced woodworker, but he had grown up playing flute, so he had the manual dexterity to do things like lace together toy-sized planks, pin a broken mast one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter, or replace horsehair rigging with museum-quality linen.
The conservation instinct ran in his blood, along with perhaps a little obsessive compulsiveness. Pariser had grown up in a pre-revolutionary home in western New Jersey, which his mother had fanatically refurbished, turning it into one of the best private restorations in the country. She even hooked her own period-appropriate rugs for each room. Like her son, she wasn’t a fan of out-of-the-box patterns. She’d design her own patterns, practice the more technical aspects on small squares (two of which are hanging in frames in Pariser’s bedroom) and then create her wall-to-wall masterpieces.
And Pariser’s background in law had inured him to the monotony of slogging through fine print. When he started drawing his own plans for models, he bought all the back issues of two magazines devoted to historically accurate shipbuilding and read each issue cover to cover. He’s gone to England to do research and has corresponded with museums and libraries in Rotterdam, Oslo, and Stockholm.
Pariser quickly made a name for himself in the shipbuilding fraternity, but for decades it remained an enthusiastic hobby. “Then one day I looked around. Our overhead was very low. The step-kids had graduated from grad school and I was very, very tired of being a lawyer. In 2004, I retired, and started a career as a model ship builder and restorer. That’s what I do.”
Pariser is now secretary of the Shipcraft Guild and the South Street Seaport Museum’s ship model conservator. His office is a converted walk-in closet in his Brooklyn Heights apartment. “It’s so small, I have to go outside to change my mind,” he quips. Everything has its place: thirteen cans of wood stain, fifteen pairs of tweezers and pincers, a band saw, a miniature table saw, two drill presses, sanders, linen lines, metal grinders, the hand-powered machine Pariser invented that makes miniature rope, and the magnifying goggles that hang on a nail behind Pariser’s head.
When Pariser is wearing those goggles, the tiny ships expand to fill his entire field of vision, which explains how he’s able to fashion plank pins that, at ten thousandths of an inch, are nearly microscopic. “I tell people, I don’t work in miniature,” he says, leaning forward confidentially. “I miniaturize myself, and I work in full size.”