Fruits of Preservation

Once these were wooden barges, which

were towed around the harbor with a wide range of cargoes.  In the foreground … disintegrating … is one a tug that once could have done the towing, now unidentifiable and impotent.

The sixth boro has many such tugs and barges, although given the efficient advance of decrepitude, fewer each season.

Once there was even a sixth boro barge called Periwinkle, no doubt painted in that color, a popular nightspot.

Here’s another barge called Driftwood, whose paint scheme and additional storage transformed a coffee (or whatever else commodity)  transporter into an off-off-Broadway-even-off-the-island entertainment palace.  Only stories remain and can be told by David Sharps, who

created the Waterfront Museum out of a wooden barge he literally dug and pumped out of the Hudson River mud, saving it from the fate of those barges above.    The two fotos above come courtesy of David Sharps.   Now the barge, the 1914 Lehigh Valley 79 tours with 1907 tug Pegasus, and other

vessels like the 1901 Urger, featured in many posts on this blog, help us visualize what those ruins in the top fotos once looked like and serve as places of entertainment even today.   Here’s one set of fotos of Urger high, dry, but cold.

Anyhow, with five minutes of your time, you can help  LV-79 and Pegasus collect a $250,000 grant for ongoing repairs.  Just click here–AND each day until May 21 on the icon upper left side of this blog to vote.  Partners in Preservation has chosen to award $$ by grant applicants demonstrated ability to use social media.  So please vote . . . and ask a handful of your friends to do so as well . . . .

Unless otherwise attributed, all fotos by Will Van Dorp.