Van Houten’s Landing
Oral History Project
Bryce Kirk
(Photo of Julius Petersen Boatyard – Bryce Kirk sitting at a picnic table on the dock)
We’ve operated the crane at the boatyard about 15 years I would say – that’s not a precise time, but about 15 years. We came here first to bid on a job of installing the boat hoist – the traveler – and we were successful in getting the job and since then we have done all the work here. We came here to work for Mr. Craig Carle, who was the grandfather of the 2 boys who own the yard today – Tom and Jeff Beneville.
Craig Carle was a wonderful gentleman and it was almost like a club here. If you were a customer and you walked into the office or stood in the outer office and he saw you, he would beckon you to come in, and you felt like a king because he asked you to sit down and talk with him. I guess people waited quite a while to find a spot in the yard here for their boats. It was a very, very wonderful place to be. Everybody here felt that they were part of a family.
There were 2 girls – not teen-agers, but probably in their 40s and 50s – who worked here for years – Sandy and Ranie. They were twins and they handled all the work in the yard – the time sheets and things like that. And on their common birthday the yard would shut down shortly before noon and they would go up to the home of Mr. Craig Carle in Upper Nyack, and all the employees would have a picnic for the two girls in honor of their birthday – and that’s the type of place it was.
We took some boats off the beach after a major storm. A lot of boats that were out here on moorings got scattered all up the river – some of them on Sing Sing wall and a place up above Ossining called Crawbuckie beach – which is a sandy outcropping that comes out from the railroad tracks above the Shattemuck Yacht Club. One of the boats that broke loose ended up on the Crawbuckie beach and its shoal about a quarter of a mile out. There’s all this level bottom.
The boat lay with its masts overhanging the railroad tracks. The owner was trying to move it offshore so that he could bring it into deep water and eventually have it fixed in one of the boatyards. But in the meantime the kids were smashing into it and taking the hardware and so on. Mr. Carle sent us up there to take the boat off – I think there were 13 boats that went up on various beaches. He sent us up there to take the boat off – and we did. We brought it back to the yard and we hauled it.
The man who owned it – Mr. Carle naturally notified the owner that the boat was hauled and in the yard here – the man who owned it came down here and said, “I didn’t tell you to take the boat off the beach.” Mr. Carle said, “Well, you were shortly going to have no boat at all if they kept on stripping it.” “Well, I’m not going to pay.” Mr. Carle said, “You’ll pay us - otherwise your boat will not go back in the water. We saved your boat for you.”
He would pay us for whatever boats we took off the beach. We didn’t have to wait for the owners to pay. He was just a fine gentleman!
Connie DeMaio worked here and he placed and picked up all the moorings all by himself with a hand winch. He worked here until I guess he dropped – and that’s the way it was. Connie washed the bottoms of the boats as they came out of the water here. And if a fellow complained about the cost – because Connie was old, and he wasn’t a speed demon any more. I guess he was about 80 years old and still working here. One of the owners complained about the cost: “You know, I’m paying that man by the hour, and it’s costing me a lot of money to get my boat’s bottom washed.” Mr. Carle said, “Well, Connie washes the bottoms of all the boats, including yours, and if you don’t like it, you can just have the boat taken somewhere else and have someone else wash the bottom.” Mr. Carle stood behind every man here – and properly too, because they were all good men.
Karl Shreiber was another one who worked for years and years – came here as a young boy, and started in the carpentry trade. Karl would – well they had their own little pile driver here and they used to do some dock work and Karl would go out and do that. He moved every boat once it was hauled, Karl would move every boat all by himself – never allow anybody to help him. He would put it on a trailer and move it to its final destination. He would jack it up and put all the wedges in just so, and that was that.
Another one was Will Knudson. Willie Knudson is the electrician, and he’s worked here for years and years. I think there was a meeting up here – some sort of legal discussion as to what was going to happen in the yard, and they asked Willie to come here and discuss something – what he knew about the yard – some sort of establishing a grandfathered act for the use of some place – I forget what it was. But Willie started off by saying, “Well, I was working here during the early stages of World War II, and I went up in my car to the upper parking lot and sat in my car to eat my lunch. I turned the radio on and I listened to the announcement of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.” Willie comes down every once in a while here, and he’s also an amateur blacksmith.
We first came here to – we bid on the job of building the traveler finger piers – and that’s the first job we had here. We had been working across the river at Tarrytown and down at the Nyack Boat Club and so on, but we were asked to bid on this job – and we did. And that’s how we came to work here first.
Jane: Did you grow up around here?
No, I did not grow up around here. I grew up on Long Island and my partner grew up in Garrison, New York. He’s thoroughly familiar with the entire area of the Hudson River.
Jane: What’s your partner’s name?
My partner’s name is Bob White, like the bird – bobwhite. Both of us now live in City Island in the Bronx. I come up here every day to make sure that everything is still as good as it can be.
Jane: How has the neighborhood changed in the years since you’ve been here?
This neighborhood? I would say this neighborhood has changed very little in the time that I’ve been here. It’s not like the rest of Nyack – the rest of Nyack changes from time to time, I guess because of economics and politics. You know, parking is a major problem there, but it doesn’t seem to be a problem here. You know, people are probably a little bit more considerate up here, and they don’t have the pressures up here that they do down in central Nyack.
We’ve been working at this “hobby” of ours – because we never made any money – we’ve been working at it for about 50 years. We started in New Rochelle and New Rochelle changed and we had to move from there because people don’t want our type of stuff around. They like to have the service of it, but it should be garaged somewhere else. So we moved to Long Island – Fort Washington – and were there for a couple of years. Then the residents didn’t like to look at it, and they called the Coast Guard and the Corps of Engineers. We moved from there to City Island where we worked for some of the boatyards for a number of years. Eventually, as the boatyards began to disappear all over - condominiums and restaurants and parks pushed them out – there was no longer any room for us there, and in City Island there isn’t a postage stamp piece of property that’s left.
Anyway we then moved up to Hastings-on-Hudson and that was a good place for us because it was central to a lot of work that we did. It was the Anaconda Copper Company dock and it was a protected place, an industrial site, and nobody minded us being there. None of the residents could see us because we were tucked in behind the buildings. It became a Superfund site. People became aware of the dangers of PCBs, and that site was loaded with them. So everybody was told to move out of there.
Then we came up here. We spoke to Mr. Carle after doing this job and he said yes, we could tie up here. As the years go by, every industrial site has to be vacated and the municipalities appeal to state grants and things like that to develop an industrial site into a park. Usually what they do is they dump riprap rock along the shore because it’s costly to maintain a bulkhead or something like that – and with the riprap that destroys the use of the waterfront.
The railroad – when the New York Central put the first 4-track railway in the world on the east shore of the river here, it took the waterfront away from the people. They used riprap in order to stabilize the banks, but they gave us the best railroad in the world – but it was a trade-off. When the villages all put riprap in front of their park, you can’t use the waterfront any longer. All you can do is stand on the landward side of the riprap and look at the river, but as far as the very verge, you can’t tie a boat up to it, and you shouldn’t let your kids stand on it and go fishing, and you can’t swim from it, and you can’t do anything with the very margin. To my mind they are destroying the river as far as the use of the river is concerned.
Originally I think there were 12 railways that came up into this yard. All the boats were hauled on railways, and there were about 5 of them over there, and they came up to probably 80 or 90 feet further than the riprap. There were sheds over the railways.
Nelson Rockefeller had his boat hauled here on one of the railways. That was his railway – it was reserved for him. It went in the shed – a PT boat design, but it was built, not out of wood, but out of aluminum of aircraft construction. It had 2 big gasoline destroyer engines in it and he changed them to General Motors diesels. Of course after that it wouldn’t make the speed that it did with the gasoline.
My partner and I had worked for another contractor prior to this, and we knew that in those days there were very few small contractors in this business. Most of the contractors were big businesses, because almost every steamship pier in New York had 8,000 piles in it – so there was a lot of pile driving work in New York harbor. The big contractors couldn’t be bothered with small estate work and yacht club work, so sometimes they would call our old boss and say, “Look, Connie, would you go out there and do that job? If you want us to, we’ll bankroll the job, or you can negotiate with the contractor or owner yourself.” But we worked for him – we saw that he had the best of everything – never worried about how he was going to pay for it. It was a very romantic business. You could learn a lot from him, because he was a stickler for everything in perfection. He never drove a pile that wasn’t absolutely plumb and straight, and he would drop $2,000 just to make that pile be perfect. And he had all good men, because there were a lot of good men around in those days.
We went into business for ourselves knowing that it was going to be an automatic thing, that we would become rich. But… (he shrugged). It didn’t matter – we liked the work, and that was all that was important.
The last vestiges of people who were – it has a different meaning now – but people who were weathermen then – or the hangover from the sailing ship days – when people were really boatmen. My old boss was a thorough boatman. A weatherman is a fellow who won’t leave Oyster Bay or the cove when the tide is going to change before he gets to the Connecticut shore, because the severe changes in weather usually occur with the change of tide. You could learn things like that from our old boss. As far as any kind of construction, engine work, timber work – anything at all. He knew it, he knew it so thoroughly, and he actually came up here during World War II as an enemy alien. He was from Schlessig, Holstein and the government hadn’t caught up with him. By that time he had earned a Navy E for floating launching ramps for Consolidated in the Harlem River. He came up here to tow some of the air-sea rescue boats and patrol boats that were completed. He would tow them in a flotilla tug down the river to be accepted by the Navy.
Equipment is different now. Everything is diesel, and on our rig here there are hand capstans – there are 5 hand capstans where we wind in the anchor lines by hand. We also have steam winches that we can pull the anchor lines in with also. We don’t anchor on wire because wire is unforgiving. Line stretches and the anchor doesn’t drag. You have to be familiar with handling lines and splicing and tying the appropriate knot in the time that is allowed to you. Sometimes you don’t get too much time. When you turn the barge around, all the anchor lines have to be walked around the barge – and so on and so forth.
The steam that we use to operate the crane is piped down through a swivel, goes through the deck and comes up in various locations to power the winches. Also, the steam that powers the crane – there’s a hose that hangs from the boom – that hose hooks to the hammer. The hammer can be operated with air, compressed air. We operate it on steam because we have it. That’s one less machine we have to have. We don’t have to have the compressor. The fact is the steam is more dense and therefore there’s more energy to the hammer than with air would. Everybody likes compressed air because it’s easy now. Some day we’ll smarten up, I suppose.
The crane was ordered new by an outfit called Farrier and McLean. They were in Yonkers. They ordered the crane in 1930, not as a crane, but as a steam shovel for the excavation of the Radio City Music Hall and they kept that crane for a number of years. Eventually they took the shovel front off it and put a crane boom on it. They did a lot of work with it. Eventually demands for contracting changed and the front end loaders and the back hoes and things like that took over, so this crane was sold. We bought it from them. 1930 was about the last of the years that they built these machines. After that they went into diesel machines. We’ve operated that crane for probably 25, maybe 30 years. We’ve never had to do anything with it except re-tube the boiler. The boiler tubes only last a certain amount of time. We only get about 10 -12 years out of them. About 2 years ago we had to have some of the bushings renewed. That cost us about $15,000. That’s not bad, since 1930.
The modern machines with a gasoline or diesel powered machine, you engage clutches while the machinery is turning. While the machinery is turning, the gears are wearing. Just as in your car, you put the thing in gear and let the clutch out. The clutch wears. With a steam machine, nothing is in motion until you want it to be in motion, but before you put it in motion, you engage the clutch and then turn the steam on. The clutches are all engaged at a stop and they don’t wear as quick. You can reverse the engine – if you are hoisting a thing and you want to lower it, you don’t have to lower it on the brake only. You can just take your foot off the brake without disengaging the clutch – and if the load is heavy enough, you can overpower the engine slowly and then just feather the brake. So there are a lot of advantages to steam.
Most people don’t understand it and they are afraid of it, but like a horse – when you get up to the horse the first time, it’s intimidating, but after a while you learn to like the horse.
The city has one of these, and I guess there are a couple of more around. A lot of people feel it’s too costly to operate, and some of the people have powered the steam machinery with compressed air. The only thing is that’s more costly in fuel. We have a compressor that will power this, but we can run through, easily, a hundred gallons of fuel a day with that compressor, whereas with the steam, when we generate steam with the oil burner in there, it’s maybe $40 or $50 a day – plus the fact that with the air compressor, we could not get that 12 years that we get out of the boiler tubes. We’d have to overhaul that air compressor about every 2-3 years, so actually the steam is – if you discount the inconvenience of carrying fresh water with you for the boiler – the steam is less expensive than the diesel.
When you go up the river farther, you can pull the water out of the Hudson River – so that cuts down on your problem. We have two tanks down below – we carry 7,000 gallons of water, and that usually lasts us a month.
Our rig was considered as more capable of doing any range of work years ago. We couldn’t do the huge jobs - the 8,000 pile jobs for the steamship piers and that. But we always put whatever money we had in equipment. We have a range of pile hammers from very small to very large.
The people who go into the business today go in with modern equipment and work is usually of a smaller nature. They have smaller barges and smaller cranes. Someone told me that if you have a concentrated goal you’ll be successful. We didn’t have the concentrated goal of making money. We had the concentrated goal of doing work that we were not ashamed of, and we like our machinery. But the people who go into this business today have a lot of investment – you know, even a small rig costs a lot of money. The smallest of the barges is going to go $50,000; whatever type of crane you want is going to go thousands of dollars, and all the other equipment. Their concern is money, and with the concentrated goal of money you can make out.
Now one of our biggest problems in the business is the environmental business with the waiting a year for permits. Who wants to wait a year to have his dock built? It’s stifling, and that plus the fact that all the industrial sites are gone - the market is diminishing all the time.
Have there been women on the barge?
There has been a lady on a barge – a lady by the name of Arden Scott McKaney. Arden Scott McKaney – you might refer to her as an adventuress – she has gotten grants to go to China to study Chinese mushrooms, to go to Scotland to study wooden covered bridges and various other grants like that. She built her own schooner. She lives out in Greenport now, and she got interested in steam – and steam whistles – and we had a collection of about15 steam whistles here. So she got the state of New York to supply steam for a concert of various toned steam whistles.
Then one time she had Conrad Nelser who’s - I guess he’s the curator of a museum down in Brooklyn, and he takes care of the steam plant down there, and every New Year’s Eve he borrows the steam whistle from the Normandy and pipes steam to it and they pull the whistle cord and the great wonderful reverberations of that whistle! One time he wanted to photograph some of this stuff, so Arden arranged for him to come out with audio and video equipment and she had all the steam whistles laid out and we piped the steam to her. So that’s about the only woman that has been on the barge – other than Pamela Hepburn.
Pamela Hepburn is – well, she doesn’t like the term Wonder Woman, but in a way, she is. She got interested in tugs and towing and she hooked up with a fellow by the name of Dick Foster who used to work for us. Dick Foster is an excellent boatman. He had tugs and many, many feats. She went to work for him as a deckhand and eventually she caught on and he put her in the pilot house and had her handle some of the barges going across from Jersey City to Manhattan and Brooklyn – oil barges and railroad car floats. He would stand on deck, just below the pilot house and say to her – not too loud, but he would say, “A little bit of right rudder” and “Okay, back her now” and so on. So she learned by doing, with instruction.
Eventually she wanted her own tug, and she went down to, I believe it was Norfolk, and bought her tug called The Pegasus, that had been a Standard Oil tug years and years ago as a steamboat. They had dieselized it. She went down, and she brought with her Dick Foster and Arden Scott. So Pamela Hepburn now brought the boat up and that’s what she has been doing until the railroads stopped paying her. They owed her over $100,000.
My feelings are probably not economic about what the Hudson River is like today and what it used to be. The river – the water - was the first avenue of commerce in this nation. And it was commerce that made the river important. It wasn’t ecology or beauty or anything else then – it was the commerce. And all the industries built along all the rivers – protected place where they could freight stuff back and forth. There were foundries and lord knows what else up here and some of them were objectionable, and some of them died a natural death, like the brick industry – there’s a very well-documented history of the Haverstraw brick business.
There were tows going down here behind Cornell Steamboat Company, tows of sixty barges – loaded – behind one tug – even after World War II – and that’s all gone. And the romance of the navigation of the Hudson River - it’s just finished. There isn’t anything left of it. And there are no more – when you went up the Hudson, even today, you go up the Hudson and you look back in through the trees – and you see an old chimney and you wonder what sort of business it was.
To me it’s very romantic - you know old history is good, new history is modern, and sometimes it’s very unpleasant. But old history, all the smoke and the smells and all that is gone, so it’s very interesting. All the jobs are gone…
How many men worked in Haverstraw – in the brick business? We worked in Kingston, for Terry Brick Corporation, which at the time was run by Leo Schwartzstein. The Terry brothers sold out and that was the last of the old, old brickyards where they manufactured brick the same as they had 100 years previous. They had – you‘d take the clay and you’d put dye on it and then you’d put it in the steam room and you would dry it out and then you’d build the actual kiln out of brick – it’s just a huge mound of brick with archways through where the bricks went, and the middle was open. The fires would go out the top. This was all inside a wooden shed. And the wooden shed has planks on it, that run up the line of rafters and as the fire gets hotter, you just turn back a plank or two and let the heat go out – otherwise the roof would catch fire.
When you went by at night it looked like the gates of hell. I mean the fire, all of it. They built – the modern brickyards went into steel ovens and things like that. But Terry was still 100 years in the past – except that they now had instead of burning wood and denuding all the forests along the river, they’d burn coal and eventually they went to oil. They put the oil burner right into a forced draft.
Then the fire would burn for 5 days and nights and eventually when that was all done, the outside of the bricks was done and the insides were overdone, and the ones in the middle were marketable. The men would get up there and they would take some bricks, 6 at a time and a man down there would catch the 6 bricks and put them on the wheelbarrow, one like you never seen before. They were special wheelbarrows built for the brick business.
So the whole thing was just a romance of difference types of industry. The blacksmith industry was the same. Where do you find a man who fashions something and puts the iron together and beats it with a hammer and then when he’s finished, he throws it in the dirt as if he’s disgusted with it? But that allows it to cool slowly.
I had an adze. When you have the adze, it’s made out of miled steel, but the lip of the adze that does the actual cutting is tool steel. That’s laid into the miled steel and after a while that tool steel gets worn back. You sharpen it and sharpen it and sharpen it. Finally it gets so thinned, so short along the length of the adze, that you bring it to the blacksmith and he puts it in the forge and he draws that tool steel out – so that it’s actually thinner, but it’s longer. I took my adze to Hans, and I said, “Hans – stretch the tool steel out,” and he said, “Alright”, and he put it in the forge and he hammered the lips of the adze out flat. He drew it out and then he curled the adze back up and I said, “Hans, it looks just like I bought it in the store.” And he said, “Who in the hell did you think made that adze in the first place?”
When you come to the blacksmith and you want something done, you ask him, “Hans, how is your “temper” today?”
Old Man Traverson, who owned the Wooden Indian Restaurant up here – you know, he died a few years ago – Old Man Traverson was sitting at lunchtime and we were talking about things like this – he looked around to the 5 or 6 of us who were all in the 60s or more – and he said, “Well, boys – I think we’ve seen the best of it….”
(Photos of Bryce Kirk’s steam crane on the dock at Petersen)
Recorded at Petersen’s Boatyard
May 1, 2004
Copyright 2005 Jane cooper, Jeff Berman, Mort Korn. All rights reserved
