Surfaced

Mapping the Bottom of the Hudson River

Maritime Archaeology

Last month, Dr. Frank O. Nitsche, of the Lamont Doheny Earth Observatory at Columbia University, gave a fascinating talk about his work on the Benthic Mapping Project, a collaborative endeavor that mapped the bottom of the entire Hudson River using sonar technology. Among the maritime phenomena discovered during the project were over 170 shipwrecks whose identity, for fear of looting, must remain a mystery.

Below are  some of the sonar images taken by Dr. Nitsche and his colleagues. Can you imagine a story behind one of these ghost wrecks? Or an encounter with their treasures or remains? Their actual locations might be top secret, but everything is fair game in fiction. Dive in and tell us what you find! Our Shipwreck Story Contest, launched in collaboration with the American Folk Art Museum’s Thomas Chambers exhibit, ends February 12, 2010. So get writing!

Shipwreck sonar

Above images courtesy of Flood, R.D., Merwin, D.E., Cohn, A.B., Bell, R.E., Nitsche, F.O., Vandrei, C., and Peckham, M. 2005. Exploring the Maritime Archaeology of the Hudson River: Looking Beneath the Surface to a Revolutionary Past. Final Report for NOAA Office of Exploration Grant.

WreckSamples3

WreckSamples2

Black and white images courtesy of Nitsche, F.O., Bell, R.E., Carbotte, S.M., Ryan, W.B.F., Flood, R.D., Ferrini, V., Slagle, A., McHugh, C.M.G., Chillrud, S., Kenna, T., Strayer, D.L. and Cerrato, R.M., 2005. Integrative acoustic mapping reveals Hudson River sediment processes and habitats. EOS Trans. AGU, 86(24): 225, 229.

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Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 Body of Water, Hudson River, Objects, Shipwreck No Comments

Surfaced: Dreamland Bell, by Tricia Vita

These photos of people ringing the Dreamland Bell were taken just a few days after it was raised from the ocean after ninety-eight years underwater. It was on display for Labor Day Weekend at the Coney Island History Project’s exhibition center under the Cyclone. In one of the photos, you’ll catch a glimpse of an archival image of the Bell welcoming visitors at the Iron Pier of Coney Island’s original Dreamland Park (1904-1911). Both Dreamland Park, which was on the site of the New York Aquarium, and the Pier, were destroyed by fire in 1911. Coney Island diver Gene Ritter, who had been searching for Dreamland artifacts for two decades, found the Bell twenty-five feet underwater, about one hundred yards offshore.

In these images, joy and optimism about the future of Coney Island is reflected among the many friends and acquaintances who made a special trip to see the Bell.  The discovery of the Bell symbolizes and presages the rebirth of Coney Island; it marks the return of something that was thought to have been irrevocably destroyed. No one expected the return of an artifact lost nearly one hundred years ago in a fire, and certainly not such an important artifact as the Dreamland Bell.

The Bell came to the History Project with just a few days’ notice. I had anticipated that Labor Day Weekend would be a sad occasion since it was the first anniversary of the closing of Astroland.  I brought a bouquet to commemorate the closing, and a few of us even wore our Astroland T-shirts. What happened instead was that Bell helped heal our sorrow over the lost Astroland.  The Bell marked the return of the real and eternal Dreamland, as opposed to the so-called “Dreamland Park,” a temporary assemblage of rides and attractions brought to the former Astroland site in the summer of 2009.

About the Artist

Tricia Vita spent the first 17 years of her life traveling through New England as a carny kid.  A scholarship took her to Sarah Lawrence College, then to an independent study program in Kyoto, Japan.  She is the translator of Inagaki Taruho’s One Thousand and One-Second Stories (Green Integer). After working as a freelance magazine writer for a decade, she took a sabbatical from journalism in 2007 to work with the Coney Island History Project. Photo credits (c) Tricia Vita/Coney Island History Project.

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Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 Artists, Body of Water, Coney Island, Dreamland bell, Objects, Tricia Vita No Comments

You Will Not Find Her at the Bottom of the River On Whose Shores Your Life Has Been Squandered, by David Hollander

Well then down you go.  Spiraling into darkness with the regulator hissing and the funk of the Hudson clinging to your suit like rime, the spotlight held at arm’s length and advancing its bad joke into a slurry of black mud and pollution, the bubbles racing from your mouth toward a theoretical surface as you penetrate deeper into that living darkness which cinctures the earth and makes a mockery of your personal ephemera, of the husband you no longer recognize, of the advanced degrees that belie your fecklessness, of the psychotropic prescriptions that mediate your pain, of her empty crib with its bone-white spindles, of the lewd smile of the young man at the dive shop, of the dappled morning sunlight outside your bedroom window and the ferocious joy it has occasionally instilled, of your fear of spiders and your fear of bridges and your fear of stained glass cathedrals—the darkness making a mockery of love.

Your heart punching at the wetsuit as you sink to the bottom of this urban river on whose shores your life has been squandered, this river which preserves that original conundrum from which the entire cosmology was birthed in an unfathomable instant of fire, pushed from some icy womb of Nothingness so as to spread out virus-like and then die its slow death.  The depth gauge glows green in the murk, fifty feet, then sixty and then yes, as promised, here is the oily bottom rising up to meet you and you lay your belly down in the earth’s black blood, indulging in the deep gulps of air you’ve been counseled against taking, your body hot and electric within the suit as if the neoprene enclosed only pulsing organs and circulatory twine.  You peer out across the riverbottom and down a corridor of visibility above which the particulate matter hovers like smoke in a housefire, then you kick hard once and glide out above the planet’s bottom where creatures deformed by metropolitan poisons live out their sorry half-witted lives.

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Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 Authors, David Hollander, Freight train, Good Humor Ice Cream Trucks, Grand Piano, Objects, Teredos & Gribbles, The Princess Anne No Comments

Adrian Kinloch at Coney Island Creek

Adrian Kinloch, UNY’s intrepid designer, goes back again and again to Coney Island Creek, where his lens finds treasure among the reeds and rotten drift. Adrian’s work at Coney Island Creek is integral to the visual identity of Underwater New York, as he explains here:

“The look I created for Underwater New York developed from my photographic work along the littered, muculent edge of Coney Island Creek. Cracked and faded fiberglass, rusted  rivets, shards of old boats, the creek water—all of these colors, textures, and layers of history became design elements. Returning visitors to the Underwater New York website will notice that the graphics will rust over and decay before being restored.”

We ourselves will be returning visitors to Coney Island Creek, and after seeing Adrian’s work, we’re guessing you just might want to go searching for stories there, too. Or you can create stories for the objects in his photographs. Either way, be sure to tell us if you do!

Abandoned Buoy by Adrian Kinloch

Abandoned Buoy by Adrian Kinloch

Flying Fish Washed Ashore by Adrian Kinloch

Flying Fish Washed Ashore by Adrian Kinloch

An Island Growing from a Submerged Barge by Adrian Kinloch

An Island Growing from a Submerged Barge by Adrian Kinloch

White Boat by Adrian Kinloch

White Boat by Adrian Kinloch

About the Artist

Adrian Kinloch, UNY’s designer, has been taking photographs since age seven, when his grandfather gave him a 1930s folding-bellows Kodak camera. He grew up in Suffolk, England, and has degrees in visual art and third-world development from Staffordshire University. Adrian currently lives and works in Brooklyn as a graphic designer and photographer. His pictures run regularly in The Brooklyn Paper and have also appeared in New York Magazine, O Magazine, and on BBC.com. He also maintains the photo blog Brit in Brooklyn.

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Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 Abandoned buoy, Adrian Kinloch, Artists, Body of Water, Coney Island Creek, Flying fish (kite), Objects, Shipwreck No Comments

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