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wrote Thoreau of the East Shore water- front when nearby in the 1840s, and noth- ing about that has changed. Street maps continue to show the old Staten Island Piers, from Tompkinsville to Rosebank through Pier 18. So does the newly-inscribed floor of the freshly- rebuilt ferry terminal at St. George. The piers were removed in the mid-1980s, leaving a large, underused upland parcel. It's still known as the Homeport, built for the Battleship Iowa and its Surface Action Group. The parcel, previously remodeled by Mayor Koch into a waterfront park, remains gated and guarded after the Navy's departure. The vast parcel contains one nautical resident, the Fire Fighter of the NYFD's Marine 9. It ties up to a structure that dwarfs it in scale — the sole pier of the ex-homeport, a massive construction, a single imposing finger jutting at an angle from the Stapleton shore. It's one of the few recent piers in New York built for ships that sail the oceans. It continues to host vessels in the services of many nations. In a city whose waterfront struggles to host sixteen visiting ships, the big pier at Stapleton represents an impor- tant fixture. The record describes the spacious East Shore and the cramped North Shore col- lectively as "the jagged, crowded, oily northern shoreline of Staten Island, a stretch extending from just north of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, past the ferry terminal, along the Kill Van Kull to the Howland Hook Marine Terminal." Intelligent Design? The East and North Shores do have things in common, including the gaggles of fat geese that paddle about. The tugs that tie-up at one shore can be seen earn- ing their keep off the other, escorting ships and bunkering and moving things wherever they go. Not all of the tugs come from Tugboat Alley, for there's a lot of coast along New Jersey and Brooklyn, too, where New York tugs tie-up. Distinctive tugs are regularly seen working the Stapleton Anchorage, includ- ing Conoco-Philips' Empire State, distin- guished by the its large reel on the stern. Between operations, the Jersey-based tug is as likely to bide its time at a Penn piling as anywhere, that being the point on Tug- boat Alley closest to the anchorage. It's an intelligent layout, though not always by design. But it demonstrably works. The Empire State was among the first on the scene at a January, 2006 • MarineNews 21 TUGBOAT ALLEY Tug Normandy, at almost $4 million, is the priciest of the newbuilds to join Tugboat Alley since 2003, but like all the others pictured its existence would come as a surprise to future readers of the record. (Photo: Don Sutherland.) K-Sea's Falcon and Lincoln Sea pose for comparison. The ex-S/R Everett represents state-of-the-art tow- ing equipment, joining Tugboat Alley's population in 2003. Not a word of it in the record. (Photo: Don Sutherland) JANUARY MN2006 3(17-24).qxd 1/4/2006 7:38 PM Page 21
