This, along with another section of the ship uncovered last week, PLUS an excavated seawall
 |
| The red mark is where the ship was uncovered--the greyish blurry areas west of the purple line are reclaimed shoreline, added to make the island bigger. |
added up to an embarrassment of riches for students of New York City maritime history.
I was able to see the uncovered seawall last summer, and even get some pictures.
Walking through Lower Manhattan is like an andante journey through time--as you cross 14th Street and all the streets start going haywire, it becomes easier to envision what the city used to be before the grid was laid down in 1811.
And as the island narrows, you start to hear the sound of gulls and feel the whip of the breeze. You appreciate more and more that yes, Manhattan IS an island--a patch of land forming part of the Hudson archipelago and laid down “like a smelt in a pan,” as one New York writer put it, surrounded by its life’s breath, the Hudson River. What do the river and the grid have in come? One word--trade. The river brought trade, and the grid facilitated it, with its many cross-streets that lead directly from the waterfront to the center of town, thus making the offloading of merchandise that much quicker. Washington DC’s elegant constellation of wide state-inspired avenues was designed by a Parisian specifically to highlight its new status as the seat of the new federal government,
but New York City‘s brutally efficient grid is much less high-minded!
And how poetic that this ship was uncovered under the World Trade Center? Like a huge beast come to earth, two hundred years ago an aged vessel was laid to rest, helping to build Manhattan one last time, a literal layer of the past serving as a foundation for future trade.
