Spring Saturday Special

How many of these tugboats cruising through along the Brooklyn waterfront here can you identify?  One might be as rare as a Mississippi kite soaring over New York.  Answers and more info follows.

And what’s this?  Also a rare film Manhatta (click here to watch the entire 10-minute 1921 silent film) by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand greets gallery-goers at the Whitney entering “modern Life:  Edward Hopper and his Time.”  Only a few weeks remain to see this, as it closes on April 10.  In this capture from the video, a half dozen steam tugs wrestle RMS Aquitania into a finger pier.  The film becomes tugboat-intensive at the 6:25 point.

Also, Working Harbor Committee presents a rare and exciting documentary followed by a panel discussion THIS Wednesday in New York;  tickets are available here.  I have to work elsewhere that night, but panelists will include my friends Ann Loeding (below) and Jessica Dulong (scroll through), but also

but also many others like Cmdr Linda A. Sturgis.

If you haven’t checked bowsprite’s latest work, check it out here.  What caught my attention other than the actual fantastic drawing was her use of the term “wooden freighter.”  Well, Marion M was built in 1932, and that–from this collage of fotos–was a very different era, a time when freighters could still be wooden vessels.

Back to the first foto of this post:  from left to right and excluding the white vessel in the foreground, it’s Sea Raven, East Coast, and Penn  No. 4 . . . all of which you’ve seen on tugster before . . . and can relocate by typing each name into the search window.  But that black-hulled, white and blue trim vessel in the foreground . . . is Hercules.  I believe she’s a 2011 launch from Washburn & Doughty.

Is it possibly this is her first voyage and that she’s not yet seen the GOM waters where she live?  If so, these are some rare snaps?  Here she heads for the Narrows, Miss Gill behind her and Amy Moran in foreground.  And why do I not recall having seen Amy Moran before?

Fotos of Ann Loeding and Linda A. Sturgis are used by permission from Jonathan Atkin.  All other fotos by Will Van Dorp.