There’s gold in them
thar hills of junk automobiles and other scrap. Ferrous and nonferrous metal can be changed into some gold, but
this season, it needs to crush its way through the export-of-a-previous-century to get there. That export was
ice, the gold of days before refrigeration. Here’s an article about Hudson River ice harvesting with lots of statistics, photos, and drawings.
See the piles and cranes in the distance to the right? That’s where scrap metal gets consolidated in Jersey City before being shipped out.
Many thanks to Dennis Willard for fotos 3 and 4 above, showing Atlantic Salvor towing scrap through the ice in Coxsackie. I wrote about scrap metal and my old Subaru about four years ago.
As to the long-gone global ice trade, savor these articles on ice from the Northeast traveling all the way to Brazil, and India. There used to be gold in them thar lakes and ponds.
And while we’re talking of cargoes southbound on the Hudson, the foto below,
again thanks to Dennis Willard, shows Atlantic Salvor pulling scrap past relics of the ice trade: the chimney used to channel smoke for the steam engine at the R. & W. Scott Ice House in Nutten Point. Many thanks to Dennis for capturing and explaining this. Click here for Michael Cooney’s Upstate Earth for further info.
tugster: a waterblog 
4 comments
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January 31, 2011 at 11:07 am
SeaBart
I have been in Jersey city, at the same scrapyard……that must have been the worst pier I have ever moored a ship on. With some very expensive & posh looking apartment buildings on the other side of the water.
Arrived on a friday we did however spend a very nice weekend in the Big Apple before starting to load the vessel on monday.
(this was approx. 12 years ago……….time flies when you’re having fun!).
January 31, 2011 at 11:28 am
tugster
when you’re here, we can check if the piers have improved over there. well, maybe just enjoy the big apple.
January 31, 2011 at 11:42 am
Mage Bailey
That tug makes me think it should be far out to sea towing something really big. It seems to have come down in the world. I hate to ask, but why did you get rid of your Subaru?
January 31, 2011 at 12:18 pm
tugster
ah . . . 10 years ago i “totalled” it in a competition with a lincoln continental; i rearended the continental at 25 mph when the driver decided to abruptly stop at a yard sale. i swerved but the rightmost 6 inches on my front bumper caught the leftmost of his rear . . . and that was all it took to bend the backbone of my almost 200,000-mile baby. as to the tug, last year it crossed the atlantic once for a salvage job AND it also headed out a few hundred miles to bring an engine-disabled tanker in the harbor here. so it’s working at whatever until a call arrives for its special talents.