Lows on Brooklyn Heights

Note:  Since I overdo the links sometimes, the two most important background ones here and this on the China Tea Trade and this on the China clippers.

I start this post with five older fotos; the one below showing crew tidying up lines on McAllister Responder dates from January 2007.   Until now, I’ve always focused on the foreground, not the background.  Of course, all those blue warehouses are now being replaced by Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Another example–Francis E. Roehrig (now Aegean Sea but ex-Jersey Coast and John C. Barker and as Francis E. a hero post-Bouchard accident) has always been focus of this foto for me rather than what’s in the background.

Again, I’ve focused until now on the foreground, on the 140′ icebreaking tug Sturgeon Bay instead of on the rich architecture of Brooklyn Heights,

in summertime obscured by a jungle of foliage, making it easier to focus of East River traffic like Express Marine’s Duty, below.  However, what I learned last week is that Brooklyn Heights has fascinations all

its own.  Like this house standing on Pierrepont Place, the house of Abiel Abbot Low, son of Seth Low of Salem, Massachusetts.   A. A. Low moved to Brooklyn Heights after spending six years in Canton’s markets dealing with Wu Bingjian aka Howqua.    From Brooklyn Heights, Low could observe

the goings and comings of his fleet of China clippers over at South Street when it was a seaport in the years between the First and Second Opium Wars.  Finding out more about the Lows ( and in subsequent generations their connections to the mayor of Brooklyn, Columbia University and FDR . . . ) those are adventures and work that lie ahead.  Last week I learned that what’s in the background might as well be an interesting focus as what is background.

Meanwhile . . . the drum calls to Coney Island, with the parade just four days off.  Here and here are links for 2009; first and second for 2008.  More tomorrow.  Plan to be in Coney on Saturday?

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.

Commodities

Socrates left the harbor under a golden sunset pulling an empty

Sugar Express;  they headed south from the Yonkers plant (to where?) for a refill.  Who can live the sweet life

without the stuff?  From Florida, as the reader suggests?

Stolt Perseverence, a parcel tanker built in Croatia in 2001, delivers assorted chemicals, escorted by James Turecamo and Marie J Turecamo (?).

I’ve no clue what these vital assorted chemicals might be, or what their journey is.

These mounds get me to work on time:  Express Marine hauls the coal into the PSEG Hudson Generating Station, which provides juice to the Northeast corridor trains.

West Virginia coal

gets Escorted into the sixth boro by this vessel.

Jill Jacob . . . moves global industrial life blood.

There’s so much that does NOT meet the eye and is NOT easily discovered about in/outflow of commodities in the boro.  Of course, petroleum products  and containers dominate, along with an occasional elixir of orange.  Some months back I posted my fantasy about sailing goods into the boro from the agricultural north.  Bowsprite reflects on overlapping ideas  here.

All fotos above were taken this week by Will Van Dorp.