A big smile covers my face now. Call me Jane (or Call me, Jane.) Address me as “sixth borough president and historian” if you like; I don’t cost taxpayers anything.
Three weeks ago just before I headed for work, an email popped onto my screen from Alexis Mainland. She explained she does a NYTimes column called “New York Online” and wanted to profile “Tugster.” The 30-minute telephone interview lasted for a fun hour, and Alexis Mainland’s good questions yielded a fine article here (already online and in the Metropolitan section of 2/20/2011 Sunday’s paper) . If you read it online and wish to leave a comment on the Times site, please do so.
Since the article mentions some of my “offices,” I pasted in this map; click on it anywhere to make it interactive. You can follow Richmond Terrace starting westward from the northeast corner of Staten Island, a locality called St. George. The dotted lines in the water leading to St. George reflect the Staten Island Ferry route to Manhattan’s Whitehall. Richmond Terrace offers great views of the Kill Van Kull, the curvy strip of water separating Staten Island from Bayonne, NJ. If you follow Richmond Terrace to the west, past the Bayonne Bridge and Shooter’s Island, you see a strip of green on the Elizabethport, NJ side called Arthur Kill Park, another of my “offices.”
Seriously, the article gets it and takes the “sixth boro” seriously, and I’m grateful for that. I think it’s important that we be cognizant of the seminal value of the harbor and its pivotal role in this becoming a metro area of 20 million people. Out of 192 countries on the face of the earth today, 135 have a smaller population than metro NYC!
Last summer thanks to a passage to Philadelphia I made on Gazela, I finally read Harvey Oxenhorn’s Tuning the Rig. Gazela fotos here and here (scroll thru). Here’s a favorite section of the book, in which Oxenhorn describes an encounter with a Greenland family in Nuuk (Gothab), and he locks eyes with a young woman standing with her daughter and husband:
“When those eyes met mine, she realized I was staring at her. She stared back and then began to laugh. That got me laughing too. My presence was a bit preposterous. But not unwelcome; they had joy to spare. Soon everyone picked up on the joke and joined in. They laughed at me looking; I laughed at their laughing while watching me laugh. I laughed. They laughed. We laughed together until the reasons for the laughing were forgotten and the only thing that mattered was the pure free pleasure of it all.”
Doing this blog and getting your comments and support gives me that “pure free pleasure.” And if you learn something from the blog, great because I learn several things every day from it as well. And if you wish to disagree with or add to anything I write, send a comment or a private email. And I love it when you send along fotos or suggestions about posts. Huzzah the NYTimes. Huzzah the sixth boro!
16 comments
Comments feed for this article
February 18, 2011 at 8:56 pm
John van der Doe
You sure made it big Will.
An article in The New York Times, Wow
Congratulations
Kind Regards,
John.
February 18, 2011 at 9:14 pm
D Merritt
Will, your blog is always a treat. When RSS shows me a new post, I visit. I learn something almost every time. Good job!
February 18, 2011 at 9:19 pm
eastriver
All Hail Tugster! All Hail Tugster! All Hail Tugster!
(May his tribe increase, may his flocks of sheep and goats be fruitful and multiply, may his enemies develop boils on their reproductive organs)
February 20, 2011 at 3:51 am
bowsprite
and I thought he was just happy with hits.
February 19, 2011 at 7:28 am
A Blog for the ‘Sixth Borough’ – Tugster in the New York TImes : Old Salt Blog – a virtual port of call for all those who love the sea
[…] of my favorite blogs is Will van Dorp’s Tugster : a water blog – part shipspotting, part anthropology and part wry commentary on life and the universe, Will and […]
February 19, 2011 at 7:56 am
RickSp
But Will, if you are Jane Goodall are the rest of us chimps? (Then again, not a bad description , come to think of it.) Great article!
February 19, 2011 at 3:23 pm
Mage Bailey
Delightful publicity for the sixth boro…and all that you espouse. Hurrah, hurrah! You are not just a Tugster any more.
February 19, 2011 at 4:48 pm
Allen Baker
Very nice!
Congrats Will.
February 19, 2011 at 6:11 pm
Bill Miller
A wonderful article, it’s fantastic to see you receiving the credit and acclaim that you so richly deserve for all of the hard work you put into this fine blog.
All hail Borough President Van Dorp!
February 20, 2011 at 11:11 pm
Capt Ken E. Beck
Wow, that’s great, not that we need the NYT to validate what we already know, that Tugster is a first rate blog.
February 22, 2011 at 11:11 am
Ken
Congratulations Wil. How far behind can the 6th Boro Wikipedia page be now?
February 22, 2011 at 9:48 pm
bowsprite
6th boro keychains, 6th boro mugs, 6th boro mousepads, “My grandparents went to the 6th boro and all i got is this lousy tshirt”…
February 22, 2011 at 9:50 pm
bowsprite
oooh!!! 6th boro snow dome! with flotsam!!! and visibility of 3″.
February 22, 2011 at 12:05 pm
Buck
Nice to see the Times give a little coverage to the lifeblood of the city.
As far as Wikipedia goes, that could be problematic. Basically, Wikipedia only wants encyclopaedic information that can be cited in a semi-permanent way. Books, magazines, newspapers and authoritative web sites like the Port Authority’s all count. Personal experiences and blogs paradoxically, do not.
On the other hand, there’s nothing stopping one of Will’s readers from hosting a wiki that properly appreciates the personal experiences of people on the sixth boro…
February 22, 2011 at 6:49 pm
Bonnie
woohoo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Congratulations!!!!!!!!!
All Hail Tugster!!!!!!!
Way To Go!!!!
Yup, that was definitely a worthy cause for breaking stupid New Year’s resolutions about overuse of exclamation points.
😀
February 22, 2011 at 9:46 pm
bowsprite
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!