(Jonathan Baskin)
Every day, millions of people cross the waterways surrounding Manhattan to get to their jobs in the concrete canyons of New York City. But for another small, tight-knit community of workers, those waters mean far more than a bridge or a tunnel to cross.
Much of the city’s commerce once revolved around maritime trades — Manhattan was ringed with working piers, and the rivers were thickets of masts. Today, most of the active piers have moved to New Jersey, and the age of highly computerized mega-ships has put an end to the career of many a local worker.
Even so, a hardy breed still plies our waterways, driven by a love of the water, of hands-on labor, of the variety and unpredictability of maritime work. Here are three of their stories.
Capt. keeps fuel flowing
When Capt. Rich Naruszewicz shakes your hand, you have no doubt about whether your hand was truly shaken.
These are the stout fingers that release the mooring ropes from his 63-foot fuel tanker, Captain Log, when it leaves its berth at 3 a.m. These hands play out 150 feet of hose to pump diesel into ships, tugboats, dredges and yachts all over New York Harbor. And they grip the wheel as Naruszewicz steers the tanker across the harbor an average of seven times a shift in his job for American Petroleum.
Naruszewicz (“pronounced like Manischevitz”) grew up in Bayonne, NJ, and has worked on the water since he was a teen. Watching tugboats pull massive ships into the harbor and seeing tankers refuel them, “I always wanted to get into it,” he says.
He was painting tugs for a summer job when he got his chance.
“Someone quit a job as a deckhand,” he recalls. “They told me to go home, pack, and be back in two hours.” The tug took a load of jet fuel to a Pratt & Whitney plant in East Hartford, Conn., and “a two-week trip turned into a lifetime career.”
During three years as an able seaman, Naruszewicz learned captaining on the job, thanks to some benevolent skippers who let him watch them in the wheelhouse after his shifts. He earned his license and took a job as a pilot for NY Fast Ferry, the city’s first high-speed ferry company. He spent eight years there, but was not fond of the vessels’ high degree of automation.
“It was like a Nintendo game,” he says.
He’d been doing a little refueling work on the side, and when Fast Ferry merged with another company, he decided to make it his full-time job. Things are very different on the forest-green Captain Log, which Naruszewicz docks at Pier 83, at the foot of West 42nd Street.
“On this boat, everything is old school,” he says, standing in the small cabin and holding the wooden wheel.
Naruszewicz’s favorite part of the job is “coming here and having a different scenario every day.” During a shift, he may fuel one or ten vessels, just himself and one deckhand, doling out 20,000 gallons of fuel to a World Yacht boat, a harbor pilots’ vessel, a construction barge sandblasting the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Every couple of days he restocks at oil terminals in New Jersey, and he works year round, through all weather, six or seven days a week.
“In winter sometimes it looks like you could walk across the river to Hoboken, but we go through ice easily,” he says.
Now 54, he has captained for 30 years. “New York Harbor has changed a lot,” he observes, pointing at some condominiums across the sun-spangled Hudson. “Maxwell House and Tetley Tea used to have their factories over there, and that’s where Bethlehem Steel had its own shipyard.”
As Naruszewicz recounts one of his most unpredictable moments, he acts it out so dramatically that it’s clear the memory will never fade. He was dropping ferry passengers near Wall Street one morning when one told him a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers. His was the second ferry to reach the seawall near Ground Zero, and he started taking on fleeing office workers as part of a massive maritime rescue operation.
Working amid the dust and smoke, “it was like the evacuation of Hanoi, plus Mount St. Helens,” he says. “We did nine trips in 21 straight hours.”
The teamwork that flowered during that operation comes naturally to those who work on the water, who tend to be a tight-knit bunch, says Naruszewicz.
“It’s a good group within the maritime community,” he says. “If I have something you need, I’ll give it to you or trade for it. You meet people of all nationalities, but you have a common goal of getting the job done.”
Building fine motor skills
For many maritime workers, part of the allure is the chance to enjoy broad panoramas of sea and sky. But for someone whose job can take her out on the water for a week at a time, chief engineer Jessica DuLong sees surprisingly little of it.
That’s because she works below decks, in the engine room of the John J. Harvey, a retired FDNY fireboat, now a floating museum and historic preservation project that docks at the foot of West 26th Street. As she stands at a pedestal facing a panel of gauges, small portholes two feet above the waterline provide only glimpses of passing pilings and seawalls.
As chief engineer, DuLong must be at her post whenever the boat is in motion. A bell clangs, pointers on two pizza-size discs convey commands from the pilot up in the wheelhouse, and she shifts worn brass levers to bring the engines to the correct throttle.
DuLong’s workspace is a warren of catwalks between massive battleship-gray machines. The engine roar is so loud that ear protection is a must, and the heat can reach 130 degrees. The smell of diesel fuel won’t wash out of her clothes, andasign over the forward electrical panel shouts “DANGER: ALIVE.”
So what makes her love this job so much—especially as someone who once only saw the Hudson from a desk high in the Empire State Building, where she managed Web site content and for a dotcom?
“For me, it’s the machinery,” says DuLong. As a child, she watched her mechanic father repair foreign cars and grew enchanted with his work.
“I love the physicality and the challenge of operating and maintaining antique equipment,” she says.
Aside from her Web gig, the Stanford grad previously worked as a cook and a teacher, and is now also a magazine journalist and the author of a 2009 book called “My River Chronicles,” in part a memoir of her years afloat.
An office mate at her dotcom job was a co-owner of the Harvey. He invited the staff to a volunteer day in 2001, and DuLong fell in love with the boat. When she got laid off soon after, it occurred to her that her love of machines might translate into a new career, and she convinced the chief engineer to take her on as an apprentice.
Working with a 1931 vessel— in use as a fireboat until 1995—is like taking on the ultimate fixer-upper house, but DuLong relishes the challenge.
“One of the coolest parts of working in the maritime industry is that if—no, when—something goes wrong, everything depends on your ability to figure out what to do in a split second.”
As if on cue, a deafening hiss breaks out—an air hose has ruptured. DuLong and Browne spring into action.
As part of its educational mission, the Harvey—which is operated by a nonprofit, Save Our Ships New York— might bring a group of school kids out onto the river to teach them how boats float, or take a group of architecture students to examine the skyline along the waterfront.
These days DuLong juggles her duties with piloting a tugboat for a private owner, caring for her newborn baby and writing a new book about the maritime evacuation of Manhattan on 9/11—when her retired fireboat was called back into service, pumping water at Ground Zero.
Though she’s one of the world’s only female fireboat engineers, she’s not interested in being singled out for her gender. “When I show up to do my job every day,” she says, “that’s irrelevant.”
Working with her hands, repairing big machines, and being quick on her feet all bring DuLong joy in her job—as do the sheer physics of the situation.
“I’m fascinated that this 268-gross-ton vessel can float, and that it can generate huge quantities of electricity to propel it through the water,” she says. “That’s still magical to me.”
Delving under the surface
Gene Ritter unzips a black valise, removes a bright yellow, 26 lb. fiberglass helmet and hoists it onto the stern of his 23-foot Chris-Craft. The commercial diver wears this “hat,” as he calls it, for 5 to 7 hours a day as he works beneath the waters of NYC.
As a freelance member of Local 1556, Ritter drops beneath the waterline — with a long hose bringing surface air to his helmet — to pour concrete jackets around rotting wood pilings, rebuild old piers and form seawalls. He also does pipeline work, demolition and welding.
There are some 200 divers qualified to do such work in the New York area, he says, with “about 100 out there really working.”
Ritter docks his boat at Brooklyn’s Marine Basin Marina, not far from his boyhood home of Coney Island, where growing up he knew he wanted a career underwater by the age of seven.
“My mom saw that I was interested in the movie ‘Namu, the Killer Whale,’” he recalls. “When I was 14, she paid for me to get scuba lessons. I’ll never forget that absolutely cool moment when my head went under and I took my first breath. I lay on my belly and pretended I was Superman.”
At 53, he retains that enthusiasm and a rather boyish look, despite his sun-weathered face and a scar that curves across his left cheek. “Coney Island in the ’70s was a very rough neighborhood,” he says by way of explanation. “Everything was fighting.”
Ritter took a job at Nathan’s to earn money for scuba gear, and soon began working for a Manhattan dive shop. One day a call came in about a line tangled around a propeller at the 79th Street Boat Basin.
“They said ‘Why don’t you handle it?’ I made a lot of money in half an hour.”
For over a decade he did freelance ship husbandry, scuba diving under boats to clean and repair them. But in 1998, looking for better pay, he moved into wearing a helmet, going to work for a commercial dive firm.
Since then Ritter has toiled in the Erie Basin behind the Red Hook IKEA, in the Bronx River and beneath South Street Seaport. During his career he’s seen local waters improve dramatically.
“Back in the 70s, visibility was only about three inches to three feet.” And now? He points off the marina pier at seaweed waving in clear waters, and notes that he “can usually see from 8 to 15 feet.”
In the Gowanus Canal he found ceramic bottles from the 1700s, and he’s seen blue-claw crabs, sting rays, sea horses and even tropical fish carried in by the Gulf Stream. He’s seen his share of dead bodies, too—“they shut the job down while the police come in.”
He acknowledges that the job can be hazardous—hypothermia is a danger, and of course he relies on a tenuous air supply— but he compares it to that of a tightrope walker or airline pilot.
“We say, ‘How can that guy do that?,’ but it’s based on skills.”
In addition to his building and repair work, Ritter has developed a second underwater life. In 1987, he founded Cultural Research Divers, a firm specializing in marine archaeology.
That pursuit has led him to a submerged submarine in Coney Island Creek, a cache of ammunition shells lost from a barge off Bay Ridge during WWII, and his prize find, a 500 lb. bronze bell that once rang on a Coney Island pier.
“It was the last dive of the season in November, 2008,” he remembers. He was 25 feet down. “My dry suit started leaking but I said the hell with it and kept going. I saw some wreckage, and then the bell just emerged. I said holy crap! and tried to put my arms around it.”
As he nears retirement, Ritter—whose wife and stepson also like to dive—is creating yet a third diving life for himself. Eight years ago he launched a venture called Coastal Classroom, for NYC schoolkids.
“We put them in a tent on shore with a live video feed and they can watch me dive and talk to me, saying Go right! or Stop! They can get involved in an actual archaeological search.”
Though many might find his day job claustrophobic and isolating, Ritter enjoys his work beneath the waves. He rarely has time to stop and relax, but when he does, he finds the underwater world “very comfortable and quiet and surreal. There’s a feeling of total peace.”