25 October 2001

‘The Right Stuff' meets ‘This Old Boat'

The National Trust for Historic Preservation finished up its annual conference in Providence on Friday.

The last time the trust held a conference in Rhode Island it came to Newport in 1953. Friday brought a little unexpected surprise.

The trust, notorious for its non-support of anything remotely maritime, gave "a special National Preservation Honor Award" to the retired New York City fire boat, John J. Harvey.

"Big deal, a plaque," you're probably thinking, but listen to the most recent chapter in the story of this 70-year old work boat.

On the morning of Sept. 11, the John. J. Harvey, now a private museum vessel, was sitting in her berth at Pier 63 Maritime on the Hudson. Her volunteer crew, alerted at their various work places about the carnage unfolding at the World Trade Center, rushed to man their ship.

One joined a police and fire department motorcade racing downtown at nearly 100 miles an hour. Another pedaled his bicycle from the Upper West Side, while yet another found someone to take him across the Hudson in a speedboat from New Jersey.

A couple of volunteers who lived nearby ran to the river. Hearing three short blasts from the ship's whistle, they barely made it aboard as she backed away from the pier.

Harvey's immediate task was to ferry ash-covered survivors away from the collapsed buildings. "About 150 people just hurled themselves over the gunwales," the crew reported. "Women were leaving their shoes behind."

But almost immediately a call came from the New York Fire Department: they desperately needed water pressure, the entire hydrant system in the area was dead.

A fire department officer handed them a radio. "You guys are Marine 2," he told them, and the Harvey was once again on active duty with her old designation. She pumped water from the Hudson River from Tuesday until Friday that week.

Harvey, when launched in 1931, was the most powerful fire boat in America. Her pumps were able to shoot water over the roadbed of the George Washington Bridge when it opened that year. And she was pretty historic before Sept. 11, too.

Among her glories, she was one of the two fireboats to throw lines aboard the loaded munitions ship el Estero burning at the pier at Bayonne in 1942.

Harvey and her younger sister Firefighter dragged the burning cargo ship out into the harbor and kept pumping water onto it to keep it cool.

Local radio stations were broadcasting warnings to New York and New Jersey residents to evacuate the coasts, but to leave their windows open first.

The two boats dragged el Estero as far as Robbins Reef where it filled with water from the fire hoses and sank. New York would have looked like Hiroshima (or Halifax in 1917) if it had blown.

The fireboat crews were given a parade in Bayonne and a special medal. And the Harvey fought the famous fire on the Normandy as well.

So of course the National Trust has done the right thing in recognizing the John J. Harvey and her people, but one has a lurking suspicion that the trust, having so shamefully ignored our country's maritime heritage in the past, has no real or tangible plans for any true support in the future.

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