Once in a while it occurs to us that there might be other ways to see New York Harbor than by kayak.
And so, on Tuesday evening, we traveled down to the South Street Seaport and boarded the yacht Zephyr, for one of the Hidden Harbor Tours organized by the Working Harbor Committee. Our appetites had been whetted by the recent Tugboat Races, also organized by the Committee. And reading the description of this tour, it promised to be another highlight:
This tour passes by the Red Hook Container Terminal and visits Erie Basin, home of Hughes Brothers Barges and Reinauer Tugs before crossing the harbor toward Staten Island. It then enters Kill Van Kull, the area’s busiest waterway dividing Staten Island and Bayonne, passing tug yards, oil docks and marine repair facilities. It then passes under the Bayonne Bridge and visits the giant container ports of Newark Bay, Port Newark and Port Elizabeth where the world’s largest container ships tie up. On the way back, we pass by Military Ocean Terminal, the 9/11 Teardrop Memorial, the Robbins Reef Lighthouse and another container port, ending up at the Statue of Liberty for a moment before returning to Pier 16.
Ailsa’s travel-themed photo challenge this week is Multicolored (or Multicoloured, but let’s not get into that…).
That theme sends me straight to this past summer’s Coney Island Mermaid Parade, the most multicolored event I ever saw. Here are just a few of the multicolored highlights.
Ailsa’s travel-themed photo challenge this week is Hidden.
In our kayaks, we can poke into the most obscure corners of New York Harbor. And we do! And over the years, we’ve found there many fascinating hidden things.
Here is another strange, intriguing structure. It’s located a little out of the way, in Port Reading, NJ, on the Arthur Kill behind Staten Island. It’s not exactly hidden—as you paddle up the Kill you can see it in plain sight from a long way off. But you have to notice it particularly, as it blends rather well into the general decayed industrial look of the shoreline. And, on the first visit, the pink wreck of the Major General William H. Hart just in front of it (in the first photo below) completely steals the show.
So, although we’ve paddled past many times, we’ve only once taken a few minutes for a closer look. This was in September 2010, when these photos were taken (since then, the structure has reportedly deteriorated even more).
At that time, we didn’t really know what we were looking at. Now that we do, we must go back for a careful inspection!
So, what is it?
It’s a McMyler Coal Unloader. Built in 1917 and operating until the 1970s—according to some accounts, until 1983—it’s the last remaining one of its kind in the New York area. Originally there were at least eight of them along the shoreline of New York Harbor, each operated by one of the railroads that brought coal in from Pennsylvania and the Alleghenies. One, described in loving detail here in a 1951 article, apparently was located on Jersey City’s Pier 18, a now completely vanished 900-foot quay extending into the Hudson River between Liberty and Ellis Islands!
In operation, an open-topped railroad car full of coal was pushed into position inside the unloader’s tower. It was then grasped by the machinery, bodily lifted up, and turned upside down so that the coal spilled down a chute into a waiting barge (moored about where the tug Turecamo Girls is moored in the photos above). The empty car was put back onto the rails and given a little shove, so that, like on a roller coaster, it rolled away by gravity down an incline while the next full car was pushed into position…
The Garden State Central Model Railroad Club has built a working model of a McMyler Coal Unloader, seen in action here:
No dainty opening of little hopper doors here. This was a crude, brute-force approach that worked. The McMyler Coal Unloader could empty a 100-ton car every minute or so, continuously. A fascinating relic of the heroic industrial age—it might have been built by giants!
Each morning of a multi-day kayak camping trip, this unusual point of view becomes more and more usual. We laze in our sleeping bags for just a few more precious moments, idly studying the airy patterns of the tent above that begin to glow as the sun climbs higher in the sky—
Sigh… now it really is time to get up, or we won’t get far today…
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(This was actually only Day 2 of our 2012 Long Island kayak circumnavigation :-))
We were stunned, blown away, and delighted by the experience.
So it’s only natural that this year, we were conflicted. On the one hand, we were eager to go again; on the other hand, how could it possibly live up to the previous time?
A couple of weekends ago, we set out to visit our friends and fellow kayakers Alex and Jean, who are also fellow bloggers at 2 Geeks @ 3 Knots (check out their lovely blog!). They live in New Rochelle, just outside New York City, and just off Long Island Sound.
Heading out to the Sound on a summer weekend is pretty typical for New Yorkers.
What’s a little less typical is getting there by kayak.
But hey—we’d been there quite a few times before and knew the route pretty well. And this time we’d have the luxury of spending the night with our friends—so we’d have the chance to explore more than we usually can on an out-and-back trip. We’d been eagerly anticipating this trip for several weeks.
Vladimir Brezina (RIP)
... kayaked the waters around New York for more than 15 years in his red Feathercraft folding kayak. He was originally from (the former) Czechoslovakia and lived in the U.K. and California before settling down in New York. He was a neuroscientist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. He died in 2016.
Johna Till Johnson
... is a kayaker and technology researcher at Nemertes Research. She's an erstwhile engineer, particle physicist, and science fiction writer. She was born in California and has lived in Italy, Norway, Hawaii, and a few other places. She currently resides in New York City.
Once in a while it occurs to us that there might be other ways to see New York Harbor than by kayak.
Vladimir Brezina (RIP) 
Johna Till Johnson
Wind Against Current 