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Back from New Haven
Kristin Poling returned from a run up to New Haven with the Eva Leigh Cutler barge on Tuesday afternoon and took anchorage in the relatively sheltered North River off Guttenberg overnight. Gale warnings went into effect Tuesday evening, with gusts above 30 knots observed at Robbin’s Reef in the Upper Bay.
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Substitute
Norfolk Tug’s George Holland was bringing empty Buchanan Marine stone hoppers up the North River and passing Weehawken’s Port Imperial on Sunday morning. We more often see Buchanan’s own Buchanan12 on this route, but that tug was further north bringing a barge to a shipyard in Kingston on Sunday, as captured by Glenn Raymo’s feed. It looked like George only brought the tow as far as Haverstraw Bay where she may have left the hoppers near the Haverstraw quarry rather than traveling all the way up to Clinton Point.
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After the wind
Vane Brothers tug Choptank had the DS-54 tank barge on the hip heading down the North River for the harbor midday Thursday. A gale had come through overnight toppling trees on land, including a willow in Riverside Park South, but winds had settled down by morning.
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Pushing paper
Don Jon tug Paul Andrew was taking the recycling out on Thursday, maneuvering a DSNY waste paper scow into the channel at North River Pier 99 amid still-heavy winds. Waste paper collected in Manhattan is brought from here to a paper mill on the Arthur Kill shore of Staten Island where it is made into cardboard boxes and other cardboard products.
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All in the family
Both of Boston Marine Transport’s tugs and two of the company’s three barges were moving oil products on the North River this week. On Thursday afternoon, the 3,000 HP Quenames was heading for Newburgh with a cargo loaded on the New England 29 barge. The next morning, the bigger 4,200 HP Pinuccia was Albany-bound with the New York 30 barge.
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Bronx bound
Sound Marine of Nyack’s 680 HP tug Matthew G brought a hopper barge loaded with aggregate down from the quarry dock in Hudson NY. They were heading for Hunts Point in the Bronx and the location of the new Con Agg terminal being built at that site, making this one of the first or perhaps the first shipment to that new stop on NYC’s Blue Highway. For more on the new terminal, see gCaptain story from April.
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Getting metal
Kallisti GS, a 575-foot Portugal-flagged bulk ship, came up the North River Tuesday afternoon with her hatches vented. She was arriving from Turkey after first calling in Providence and was heading for the scrap dock in Rensselaer where she will likely load metal for export back to Turkey. The metal may return to us some day as rebar or other products.
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Back to Yonkers
The Dann Marine tug East Coast headed up the North River running light, heading back to the Yonkers sugar refinery to rejoin a barge left there as the tug visited Bayonne, probably to refuel. The Yonkers plant is scheduled to close by the end of this year but seems to still be receiving regular deliveries by barge from Florida.
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Contemplating Guttenberg
I was looking across the North River at the lovely condo townhouses and walking path arrayed below the 1976 vintage Galaxy Towers in tiny Guttenberg, NJ as I photographed the Coast Guard Cutter Katherine Walker passing by this morning. I found myself thinking about what the area must have been like in its industrial heyday and subsequent decline. I stumbled upon a January 1973 NY Times article on the town by the novelist Norman Kotker, written not long after my fifth birthday.
It’s of course meant as an exploration and travelogue, but winds up being an incredible time capsule of the town still in a different era, filled with small embroidery factories run by the descendants and in at least one case the actual still living Swiss immigrants who established the place half a century before. Surely none of these remain today, 50 years later. Kotker’s description of the area by the river where the condos now sit is really vivid, and I have included it below. I found an obituary that indicates he died in 1999, around the same time that the Bull’s Ferry townhouses began construction, so I don’t believe he would have seen how the space was reinvented.
From the article:
“Three blocks wide and 12 blocks long, “Gut (rhymes with mutt) faces the 79th St. Boat Basin.
“The Mayor, the three commissioners and the burghers of the township of Guttenberg govern 200 feet of the Hudson shore. Maybe some day, when the Hudson is cleaned up, they’ll work up a little ceremony in celebration: a procession, led by the Mayor in velvet robes, walking along the river bank, reaffirming‐the town’s ancient riparian rights. A swan could be let loose to swim in the river, a fish taken out, and then everyone, including the Mayor, could jump into the Hudson for a little swim. But today 175 feet of the riverfront is taken up by the oil depot, leaving only 25 open to the public, and that’s the unused marina, almost all of its area covered with junk. It is nice junk, however, homey: an old playpen, the remnants of a scooter, a rusty port‐a‐crib, a baby’s bouncing chair. The child who scooted, bounced and slept on them is probably a sophomore at Princeton now. There is an old stove or two among the weeds, an upholstered chair, a pile of good‐sized rocks. But mostly abandoned boats.”
The full article is here: https://www.nytimes.com/1973/01/28/archives/guttenberg-on-hudson-terra-made-cognita-if-grunjy-nondescript.html
©2024 Daniel Katzive Uncategorized -
Help from the locals
The small cruise ship Hanseatic Inspiration arrived at North River Pier 90 with assistance from a pair of Moran tractor tugs this week, and then was refueled by a barge brought alongside by Vane’s Fort McHenry. We see smaller cruise ships like this more often in the autumn months as leaf viewing cruises up to Canada are underway. Perhaps counterintuitively, the smaller cruise ships sometimes need more assistance than the new very large cruise ships, which have directional props and thrusters and can often dock without assistance. Inspiration arrived from Halifax but after leaving New York was heading for the Bahamas and the Panama Canal enroute to southern hemisphere summer cruising territory in the Antarctic.
Observations on the Hudson River as it passes through New York City. The section of the Hudson which passes through New York is historically known as the North River, called this by the Dutch to distinguish it from the Delaware River, which they knew as the South River. This stretch of the Hudson is still often referred to as the North River by local mariners today. All photos copyright Daniel Katzive unless otherwise attributed. For more frequent updates, please follow northriverblog on Facebook or Instagram.
North River Notes 