In the fall of 1979 I sold my two ramshackle houses in Portland to the Oregon highway department so they could build a freeway offramp. I went looking in Seattle and Vancouver and across the northlands to NYC before I found the kind of small ship I was looking for as a replacement home and studio. It was a small oil tanker built in 1937 with ample quarters and spaces for shops and studios, a badly damaged 22 ton engine and a steel hull that turned out to have some pretty thin spots. I bought it for a song and had it towed from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where it had most recently served to store oil from ships being worked on in drydock, to a pier on top of the Holland tunnel in Jersey City.
The wharf was 1,000' long and a remnant of a vast universe of railyards, ferry terminals, docks, transfer bridges and maintenance sheds in various states of abandonment and decay. The Hudson's slips on both sides of the North River held all manner of floating, sunken and in-between boats, barges and ships, while the hundreds of acres of uplands were home to scattered blocks of buildings we mined for steel and equipment, and wide open fields we used as our dirt bike race tracks. A dramatic backdrop to our five years of rebuilding the ship there was the knockout panoramic view of the west side of Manhattan from midtown to the trade towers. They had to look at us...and the old Magic City tanker truck body on our neighbors' pier said it all.
We cruised and explored every inch of those shorelines day and night and in every season in a variety of small sail and powered craft in search of stuff for our project and for exploratory diversions. The scale of hundreds of years of crumbling left-behind wood, concrete and steel infrastructure seemed overwhelming and insurmountable. We guessed it would take decades and untold millions for it to be reclaimed, but once it got underway it happened fast. After we had reduced our acculmulated collection of spares and rolling stock, it still took three trips with the now re-built ship to transfer our operations upriver to Hastings-on-Hudson before eventually sailing down the coast one icy February morning to relocate amongst the porpoises & palmetto trees in Charleston, SC for awhile.
Luckily we photographed and filmed that crazy scene constantly, even as it became the last glimpse at the end of an era. Piers were torched and burned for days, demolition crews and scrappers dynamited whole blocks at a time and then the new glass and steel towers went up.
The five paintings in this series are some of the many images I've begun to mine again as painting sources, thirty five years after the fact. A few photos of the ship and our exploits can be seen in the slide show here: ABOUT
My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram