Shooter’s Island: Obstacle

The foto I posted yesterday dazzled my image of Shooter’s.  Sure  . . . I knew it once saw shipbuilding operations beginning with David Decker’s yard, but I never imagined the scale.  And when that industry collapsed, the island was reduced to a speed bump.  Obliterate it was the solution proposed by a politician half a century ago.

If I try to put myself in the head of a Standard Shipbuilding employee there 90 years ago, I imagine he would wonder how many vessels the Shooters yard would be turning out a century hence, what cargoes they’d carry, and  to which ports.  Possibly he also wondered what part of the operation would employ his sons.  Never in his wildest dreams–I suspect–would he imagine a scene like the one passing earlier today.

He would never envisage such a ship from China with cargoes like the dominoes stack here.  Click here for fotos of Shanghai a little over a century back.

Xin Chang Sha, although barely a medium-sized container ship–is twice the loa and carries eight times the cargo deadweight than a Shooters vessel such as the 1919 San Teodoro.

On a given Saturday morning from sunrise to noon, Xin Chang Sha is one of  . . . half a dozen vessels bound for sea through the KVK.

Doubleclick enlarges.  This foto taken at the pool, just east of the Bayonne Bridge, looking toward Shooters.

Besides being a bird sanctuary, the island margins are also home to over a dozen ruins deemed “nationally significant” by the NPS Archeology Program for abandoned shipwrecks.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.

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