CARL GLASSMAN
They are ships with a past. Sail, steam, and diesel-powered vessels that have hauled passengers, tended lighthouses, and pushed oil freighters into harbor. Together they conjure visions of a time when the Hudson River was not only a working waterfront, it was the city’s main artery.
They are the Lilac, Tug Pegasus and Clipper City, and they are expected to take up berths this month on the north side of Tribeca’s Pier 25, at the end of North Moore Street. Their arrival will be the fulfillment of a promise by the Hudson River Park Trust to bring history into the park.
“I think there are a lot of people who forget or never knew how vital a role the Hudson River played in the city’s history and development into the preeminent city in the United States,” said Noreen Doyle, acting president of the Trust, which selected the ships. “Historic ships can send that message in a way that is fun at the same time.”
Although the rebuilt pier is a barely recognizable vestige of New York’s maritime past (AstroTurf and volleyball courts where cargo and coiled lines might once have lain) the pier has bollards just as working piers did. And it will have ships.
“I guess what people are saying is that let’s not totally forget this was once a working harbor,” said Gerald Weinstein, president of the Lilac Preservation Project.
The Lilac, a 1933 Coast Guard lighthouse tender, will arrive first, docking in mid-May. The Clipper City, a 1983 replica of a pre-Civil War cargo ship, will follow soon after. Last to arrive will be the Tug Pegasus, built in 1907.
As part of the lease agreement with the Trust, all three ships will offer free public tours and a variety of free or discounted programs to enrich the pier’s offerings. The Clipper City, the only commercial boat offered a berth at the pier, will also run daily harbor tours.
None of the ships would be bound for the pier if not for the restoration efforts of four individuals with strong local ties and a passion for classic ships. Their stories follow.
The Lilac: Rare Vestige of the Steam Era
When Gerald Weinstein looks at old steam engines and industrial machinery he sees art: beautiful kinetic sculptures made of cast iron and steel.
Weinstein’s family made its fortune manufacturing tools in the 1920s. Now this third-generation owner of General Tools, located on White Street in Tribeca, spends his spare time moonlighting as an industrial archaeologist, going ahead of the wrecking ball to research and photograph objects that will be lost to time. But for his biggest project, documenting a vanishing technology isn’t enough; he wants to fully restore the Lilac, the last of the Coast Guard’s steam-powered lighthouse tenders.
“There is an incredible part of our history that’s rapidly going away,” Weinstein said, motioning to the replicas of steam engines and oil paintings of the Lilac that fill his office at General Tools.
Weinstein purchased the Lilac in 2003 and founded the nonprofit Lilac Preservation Project. His wife, Mary Habstritt, a former librarian and
CARL GLASSMAN
Top: Gerald Weinstein and Mary Habstritt with the Lilac. Above: Lilac volunteer John Zepp works on electrical wiring in the ship's engine room.
historical preservationist, joined the project as vice president and museum director in 2009.
Weinstein and Habstritt hope to get the 78-year-old ship running again, and put it to use as a traveling museum that teaches people about steam technology and waterfront history. At Pier 25, the ship will be open for free tours, have maritime photo exhibits and host cultural events.
The Lilac has seen better days. Its two giant propellers have been pulled from the water and sit on the main deck, rusting reminders of a time when the boat could head out to sea under her own steam. The wooden window frames in the pilot house are rotted and the ship’s grey deck paint is chipped. “Danger! Asbestos” warnings mark rooms closed to the public.
Still, the ship is in much better shape than when Weinstein and Habstritt brought it to New York.
“The first time I came on board for a work session, we were shoveling chunks of rust off the deck about the size of dinner plates,” Habstritt said.
The Lilac’s engine room is mammoth. Light filters through a skylight to reveal a labyrinth of pipes, gears, and crankshafts that extend down into the belly of the ship—where the slapping of waves against the steel hull is at its loudest.
Weinstein dreams of the day when steam from the boiler is moving through the engine’s triple expansion cylinders, powering the ship out of the harbor. But at 61, he’s a practical dreamer. He realizes it could take another decade to get the Lilac running again. He estimates that 70,000 volunteer hours and several million dollars will be needed for a full restoration.
“Since the average dedicated American volunteer can be counted on for about 300 hours of work a year, that’s two or three years of work for 70 volunteers,” he said, scribbling calculations on a notepad. Or eight years for 15 volunteers. Or 16 years for seven volunteers.
Right now the Lilac has five dedicated volunteers.
“That’s a problem,” he said, laughing.
Since 2003, the Lilac has been berthed on the isolated north side of Pier 40. The couple hope that the ship will attract more volunteers at Pier 25.
Weinstein confesses that he occasionally has “crises of hope” about the ship. His wife, who has tried to preserve a number of industrial buildings, is more optimistic.
“I have been fighting a lot of preservation battles where I feel like I am just beating my head against a wall,” Habstritt said, walking with practiced ease down one of the ship’s many passageways. “The Lilac is a preservation battle I can actually win.”
Tug Pegasus: Passion of an Artist Turned Mariner
CARL GLASSMAN
Pamela Hepburn with her Tug Pegasus.
It was the camaraderie mariners share, the comfortable feel of a ship moving beneath her feet, and the adrenaline of maneuvering mammoth barges with a tiny tugboat that first hooked Pamela Hepburn on a maritime life.
“All of your wits about you come to the fore,” Hepburn said of captaining a tugboat. “It’s like everything you’ve ever learned in your life surfaces and is utilized … it’s really thrilling.”
Hepburn, who is heading to Pier 25 this summer with Tug Pegasus, moved to New York to pursue a painting career and first set foot on a tugboat on a whim at age 29, following a friend to crew a tug along the Erie Canal in the summer of 1976.
The experience was a temporary sojourn for her friend, but Hepburn’s life changed course for good. The artist turned mariner would spend the next three decades on the water, one of the first women tugboat captains in the state. Eventually, Hepburn would dedicate her life to preserving an old tugboat that had been both her livelihood and her home.
Hepburn bought the Tug Pegasus in 1987 with $25,000 of borrowed cash. By that time an experienced captain, she was tired of working for someone else and knew she wanted an old ship. She had watched worn-out tugs getting towed to the scrapyard, and wanted to save one.
“The old boat dream is just like an albatross,” Hepburn said. “Everybody who has it, has it and they just live with it.”
For nearly a decade, Hepburn and her small crew used the Tug Pegasus, a 1907 boat converted from steam to diesel in the 1950s, to tow barges and guide oil freighters in New York and New Jersey. The single mom lived on the ship, trading in a loft on Murray Street for a dock in Jersey City until her daughter, Alice, was 9.
In 1997, when the Tug Pegasus had run its course as a working tug, Hepburn began transforming the boat into a restored educational vessel.
At first the project was personal: Hepburn loved the tugboat business and wanted to do something to honor it. These days, she sees the preservation work as something more.
“So much of our lives comes in by ship, and that’s just not understood,” Hepburn said. “I think it’s important to consider in your family, and as an individual, how our lives have gone. How dependent we are on faraway things.”
New York is the third-largest harbor in the nation, but most ships travel under the Verrazano Bridge and then turn west before passing the Statue of Liberty heading for a New Jersey port. The working waterfront, hidden from view for most New Yorkers, is something Hepburn wants to share.
Tug Pegasus is currently in Jersey City, hidden behind a drilling rig in a working shipyard that echos with the sounds of construction. The location has been great for restoration work. Tug Pegasus’ hull and pilot house are in tip-top condition, its black and red paint shiny. But the location has made it difficult to provide public programming, Hepburn said, as she maneuvered between cranes and piles of scrap metal with the ease of a woman at home in a shipyard.
“The opportunities at Pier 25 are pretty much limitless,” Hepburn said, beaming as she talked about the public tours she has planned for the boat’s new location and the maritime training program she hopes to start for high school dropouts. “I think if we provide the public with some wonderful programming, we will get back wonderful support. I am very optimistic.”
Clipper City: Setting Sail Daily from Pier 25
Tom Berton fell in love with the Clipper City because of its lines, the beauty of its sweeping deck and the way the ship’s bow lengthened above the water.
The vessel was in disrepair and condemned by the Coast Guard when Berton first considered buying it, but the Lower Manhattan native saw past the its decrepit condition and imagined whisking landlubbers around Manhattan and turning his struggling sailing business into a viable enterprise.
“It’s the scale,” Berton said of the ship, a replica of a pre-Civil War “extreme clipper,” a cargo ship designed for speed. “You look up, you look across, you just feel like, ‘Wow, this is big.’ It’s a grand feeling to be on a boat that’s this big and quiet and powerful.”
The fully restored Clipper City sets sail with a deck full of passengers three to five times a day during the summer, as does Berton’s first ship, the Shearwater. Together, the two Manhattan by Sail vessels employ about 60 people—not bad for a local boy from a family of bohemians
CARL GLASSMAN
Top: Tom Berton with the Clipper City, docked in Brooklyn. Above: Isabel Martin repaints the Clipper City's bulwarks for the sailing season.
with little connection to the water.
Berton grew up in Soho, wandering around warehouses and playing with bows and arrows at the vacant Battery Park City landfill. His first sailing experience was through a public school field trip, and it wasn’t until after college that he became a mariner.
Through sailing, Berton said, he truly realized that Manhattan was an island.
Berton was in the import-export business when he and friends bought the Shearwater, an 82-foot schooner, in the spring of 2001.
After Sept. 11, with business slow, Berton went through a period of soul-searching and decided to give his hobby a full-time go. He began running tours on the Shearwater. In 2008 he bought the Clipper City. The ship, built in 1983, had been so poorly maintained that it took nearly a year to repair her. Measuring 158 feet long, the ship can fit 148 people and sail at speeds of up to 17 knots.
It takes a winter’s worth of work to get the ship in condition for the sailing season, Berton said. On any given day, the owner has crew members stripping caulking from between wooden deck boards, stretching canvas, replacing railings, maintaining rigging and checking on the 8,000 square feet of sail.
“Houses are hard to maintain,” Berton said, standing at the back of his ship and surveying the five young crewmembers painting bulwarks and splicing lines. “Well, imagine a house that’s being shaken and beaten 365 days a year.”
Most of the ship’s repairs—from carpentry to welding—are done in-house.
“It’s a labor of love, because if you didn’t love it you would sink it,” Berton said.
Now that he’s moving to Pier 25, Berton has some new dreams to chase. He envisions his ships running enough profitable trips that he can afford to start a harbor camp, offering a new generation of city kids the chance to discover sailing. And he imagines a business operating so smoothly that he can get back to what drew him to the business in the first place.
“I would love to trade my laptop back in for a line,” Berton said.
