After journalist Jessica DuLong was laid off from her dot-com job, her life took an unexpected turn. A volunteer day aboard an antique fireboat, the John J. Harvey, led to a job in the engine room, where she found a taste of home she hadn't realized she was missing. Working with the boat's finely crafted machinery, on the waters of the storied Hudson, made her wonder what America is losing in our shift away from hands-on work. Her questions crystallized after she and her crew served at Ground Zero, where fireboats provided the only water available to fight blazes. Vivid and immediate, My River Chronicles is a journey with an extraordinary guideâa mechanic's daughter and Stanford graduate who bridges blue-collar and white-collar worlds, turning a phrase as deftly as she does a wrench. As she searches for the meaning of work in America, DuLong shares her own experiences of learning to navigate a traditionally male world, masterfully interweaving unforgettable present-day characters and events with four centuries of Hudson River history. A celebration of craftsmanship, My River Chronicles is a deeply personal story of a unique woman's discovery of her own rootsâand America'sâthat raises important questions about our nation's future.
Frequently asked questions
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on âCancel Subscriptionâ - itâs as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time youâve paid for. Learn more here.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access My River Chronicles by Jessica DuLong in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Social Science Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
SEVENTY-TWO YEARS later, nothing more than a pegboard forest of disintegrated pilings remains of Pier 42, where pilot John Harvey met his fate. Today is Memorial Day 2002, and we, the crew of retired New York City fireboat John J. Harvey, are preparing to pay homage to our boatâs namesake.
Pilot Bob Lenney, who steered this vessel for more than twenty years while the boat still served the FDNY Marine Division, noses her slender bow toward the stubby remnants of the covered pierâa grid of timbers, their rotting tips sticking out just a foot or so above the waterâs surface. Chief engineer Tim Ivory swings a leg over the side, clutching a small bouquet of all-white flowers that he has duct-taped to the end of a broken broom handle. A crowd gathers on the bow as he leans out over the water, holding on with just one leg, to stab the jagged handle-end into the top of one of the crumbling piles.
I know all this only by way of hearsay and pictures. From where I stand belowdecks, my fingers curled around the smooth brass levers that power the propellers in response to Bobâs commands, I canât watch it unfold. Because I, fireboat Harveyâs engineer, stand in the engine room the whole time weâre under way, this ceremony, like all the rest, is to me just another series of telegraph orders: Slow Ahead on the starboard side; Slow Astern on the port.
Between shifts of the levers, I steal glimpses of the harbor through the portholesâround windows just above the riverâs rippled surface. Above decks, pilots use the Manhattan skyline for their points of reference, to know where they are or where theyâre headed. Here, belowdecks, I use low-lying landmarks: the white tents where fast ferries load, the numinous blue lights in South Cove, the new concrete poured to straighten Pier 53 (which firefighters call the Tiltinâ Hilton) where, on February 11, 1930, FDNY Marine Division pilot John Harvey signaled his deck crew to drop lines and shot south at the helm of fireboat Thomas Willett on his final run.
Nearly three-quarters of a century after his death, as the fireboat named in his honor leaves the pegboard forest, I hold my own private memorial service, issuing a silent prayer. Itâs something of a thank-you and something of a nod of acknowledgment: We remember. I whisper about the work weâve put into preserving the boat over the past year. I tell him about rewiring shorted-out circuits. About our efforts to dis- and reassemble failing, rusty pump parts. About coating her steel surfaces with protective epoxy paints. All this, I explain, is done, in part, to pay homage to himâthe man who lives on through this fireboat.
As the boat pushes through the water, I stand at my post, sweating. Though I canât hear the slosh of bilgewater over the growl of the engines, I can watch it through gaps in the diamond-plate floor. Like every steel vessel, this boat fights a constant, silent battle with the salt water that buoys her. The river seeps through little openings in her seventy-one-year-old skin. It trickles, etching burnt orange stains into the thick white paint that coats the riveted hull. Sometimes the boat rolls and sways and a splash of green overwhelms my porthole view. Thatâs when I remember that Iâm underwater. Less than a half-inch of steel plate separates me from the river.
Only after weâve pulled away can I make out, through a porthole, a small speck of white where the flowers stand tall in the May sunshine. As the speck disappears against the muted gray of the concrete bulkhead at the waterâs edge, the significance of the ceremony fades into the everyday rhythms of the machinery.
When I moved to New York City from San Francisco in 2000, I had never heard of a fireboat. Now I have found a home in the engine room of a boat born four decades before I was. During long stretches at the controls, when the drone of engines drowns out the mental clutter of my landside life, I wonder about the men stationed here before me. Did they feel left out of the action down here in the cellar? Did they chain-smoke, read, play cards to pass the time while they waited for the pilotâs next command? Career guys, most of them. Firefighters, with an engineering bent. Irish and Italian. Their uncles, fathers, and brothersâfirefighters before themâhad laid down the paving stones that marked their nepotistic path.
There were no paving stones for me. My father is a car mechanic in Massachusetts. Iâm here only by blissful accident, having stumbled aboard in February 2001âa naive young upstart with a university degree. A bubble-salaried dot-commer. A striving, big-city editor. A woman.
When I look at the black-and-white photographs of old-time crewsâranks of short-haired men, some young, shirtless, and grinning; others defiant; a few older ones, impassive, their stern expressions suggesting what a handful the younger ones can beâI want to know them. But Iâm not sure the feeling would be mutual. These men probably never imagined that someone like me would be running their boat, their engines. All my compulsive investigations began as an attempt to bridge that gap. The distance between us is what first fueled my fascination with the fireboatâs historyâa fascination that escalated to obsession, then swelled to encompass the history of the Hudson River, whose industries helped forge the nation. Iâve since fallen in love with workboats, with engineering, with the Hudson.
As American society continues to become more virtual, less hands-on, Iâm a salmon swimming upstream. I have come to view the transformation of our country through a Hudson River lens. More and more, my days are defined by physical workâshifting levers, turning wrenches, welding steel. As I work and research, a picture begins to form of the history of American industry mapped through personal landmarks. As the United States faces economic upheaval that challenges us to rethink who we want to be as a nation, I have discovered that it pays to take stock of who we have been: a country of innovators and doers, of people who make things, of workers who toil, sweat, and labor with their hands.
My own, personal compulsion to understand the countryâs progression was born out of the ashes of the steamship Muenchen. Maybe not being able to witness, firsthand, the leaving of the flowers is what drives me to dig up the details.
Classic Fireboats in Action 1900â1950 isnât available on DVD, so when it arrives in a brown padded envelope, I have to pull the TV down from a shelf in the closet instead of just sliding a disc into my laptop. Perched in front of the twelve-by-eight-inch screen that Iâve wired to an old VCR, I rewind the tape over and over again, playing back the same scenes, dredging for details. I slow it down, letting the video advance frame by frame, watching the billowing smoke head toward heaven in a sequence of awkward jumps. The boat Iâm straining to find is fireboat Thomas Willett.
The raw footage is grainy. Long scratches gouged into the original film squiggle across the television screen. Abrupt lighting shifts flash every few seconds, casting the images in new shades of black, white, and gray. At the center of the frame, the SS Muenchen lists precariously to port. The North German Lloyd passenger and cargo ocean liner is not only afire, itâs sinking under the weight of all the water the firefighters are using to try to save her. I scoot my chair in closer and squint, my face inches from the screen. Even though I know how this story ends, it doesnât diminish the knot in my gut as I prepare to watch it unfold.
According to newspaper reports, the Willett (named after New Yorkâs first mayor, who served in the 1660s) was the first of New York Cityâs fireboat fleet to respond to that morningâs alarm call from her station, fewer than ten piers away. The court records I dug up at the National Archives revealed that the Willettâs pilot, John Harvey, a forty-eight-year-old career firefighter with nearly twenty-four years on the job, was unmarried and lived at 82 Jane Street with his âpermanently crippledâ brother William F. and his unwed sister Sadie V.; John J.âs salary, it seems, supported them all. But itâs the Classic Fireboats narrator who reveals that February 11, 1930, happened to be Harveyâs last day before retirement.
Alongside Pier 42, at the foot of Leroy Street in Manhattanâs West Village, the Muenchen sits tipped disconcertingly close to the building on the pier. Her masts, taller than the two-story pier shed beside her, disappear in cumulus clouds of smoke. Firefighters pummel her with water from all sides. Multiple streamsâat least five, maybe moreâsurge through pier-shed windows. Where the water makes contact with the fireâs heat, bursts of smoke leap out, then head for the sky. Less than a hundred feet off the ocean linerâs starboard side, a fireboat delivers still more water, sending ferocious jets of spray onto the shipâs superstructure. But through the haze of the smoke, I canât tell which boat it is, and the narrationâgeneralities with no play-by-playâoffers little assistance.
In the next shot, I watch a few nameless, faceless, helmeted firefighters shifting equipment on the aft deck of a fireboat positioned off the Muenchenâs stern. This low-quality footage has the film-speed hiccups characteristic of early motion-picture photography, which makes it hard not to assume that people actually moved all Chaplinesque and chicken-like back then, in an age before color existed. The entire shaky video has a security-camera quality to it. Even my frame-by-frame viewing isnât enough to bear witness. But at least I can make out the nameboard on this boat thatâs just moving into view: the James Duane, sister ship to the Willett. Iâm getting closer.
But then, as quickly as it begins, the two minutes of tape just ends, midblaze. The video skips ahead to 1932, to the next big fireâa five-alarmer at the Cunard Lineâs Pier 54, at the corner of Eleventh Avenue and Fourteenth Street, that was one of the worst pier fires in New York City history. This was the first chance the rookie fireboat, the new flagship of the fleet, had to demonstrate that the $582,500 invested in building the largest, most powerful fireboat in the world was worth every city penny. Making her on-screen debut is the FDNY Marine Divisionâs first internal combustionâpowered vessel, âmyâ boat: fireboat John J. Harvey. My chest fills up at the sight of her. But with her arrival, I realize that the story Iâm so hungry to see has happened off-camera.
Instead, I will hunt down the details of that day in the electronic databases, on microfilm viewer screens, and in archives, with their dusty docket books of tissue-thin pages filled with elegant, slanted script.
Before the Muenchen departed Bremen, I learn, dockworkers had loaded the shipâs cargo spaces with thousands of different items: thirty-five cases of hosiery, five cases of artificial flowers, thirteen cases of hollow glassware (pharmacy vials for Eli Lilly), an entire householdâs worth of goodsâfrom linens to bric-a-brac, belonging to a Mrs. Hilda Schaperâand seven thousand canaries.
Back then this assemblage of mismatched break-bulk cargo was the norm. Uniform products like coal or grain that could be sent tumbling loosely down into shipsâ holds constituted bulk cargoes. But break-bulk comprised diverse items of all shapes, weights, and sizes packed side by side, one on top of the other, in the gaping maw of a shipâs holdâeverything from easels to kid gloves to crockery.
Newspaper articles offer some clues about the fire. Short âreactionâ snippets tell about the thousands in New Jersey who âgathered at scores of vantage points along the Palisades [to watch] huge billows of smoke rising from the liner.â Feature stories reconstruct events in full, lurid detail. It is in one of these longer pieces, tucked into a little sentence at the end, that I first read about the canaries. Along with Harveyâs fate, the birdsâ story has me transfixed. I can picture the birds in the dark hold, lonely for their lost mountain home.
More details surface at the National Archives, where my big break comes, by chance, in one of the docket books on the rolling cart that the researchers drag out to a special pencils-only (to protect the documents from ink) room. The docket book leads to an extensive paper trail: files full of court claims for lost-property damages or, in Harveyâs case, a loss of life. Sadie Harvey filed a claim for her brother, and stacks of other documents reveal innumerable quotidian details about the lives of Muenchen passengers: masons, housewives, barbers, carpenters, and tailors with names like Otto, Heinrich, Kasper, Barbara, August, and Paul. Along with foreign tourists and returning American vacationers, the steamship carried scores of immigrants planning new lives in the United States. These pages catalog the lives and property that pilot John Harvey had been called upon to save.
Reported by wireless:
February 10. S.S. Muenchen, Bremen to New York (North German Lloyd Line), was 500 miles east of Sandy Hook, due 11th, 9 a.m.
Landfall was still a night away when the Muenchen steamed past New Jerseyâs Sandy Hook, through the Narrows, and into the open mouth of New Yorkâs Upper Bay at nine thirty p.m. on Monday, February 10. According to law and tradition, Captain Feodor Bruenings dropped anchor at New Yorkâs Quarantine, the public health station where, for decades, inbound steamers had been stopping for inspection by immigration and public health officials. In the predawn darkness, a mail tender tied up alongside, and 1,757 mail sacks shot down canvas chutes onto the tenderâs deck for delivery to the General Post Office the following morning. In their cabins, vacationers savored their last night aboard, enjoying the calm seas inside the protected harbor, while immigrants tossed and turned with anticipation, knowing that no familiar bed awaited them ashore. All the while, Gothamâs lights twinkled in the distance.
When dawn broke on Tuesday morning, the weak winter sunlight did little to warm the frozen air. As engineers down below fired up the shipâs two triple-expansion steam engines, a rhythmic throb and hiss vibrated up through the decks, telling passengers their wait was over. A pack of assist tugs, with their snub-nosed bows and tall, cylindrical stacks puffing white steam and black coal smoke, shepherded the Muenchen into New York harbor. Upon entering the mouth of the Hudson, passengers could see the moss-green Statue of Liberty standing guard on the left as they passed Governors Island on the right. Straight ahead, at the very tip of Manhattan Island, a squat, round fort at the waterâs edge, Castle Clinton, came into view. Built for the War of 1812, Castle Clinton served as Americaâs first official immigration center from 1855 to 1890, before passing that torch to Ellis Island. Here, at the tip of Manhattan Island, the feet of ten million immigrants first touched American soil.
Sitting in the glow of a microfilm reader, I scan the shipâs manifest, silently pronouncing passengersâ names, wondering which of them braved the wind on the deck to watch the seemingly endless expanse of ocean give way to the bustle of New York harbor as they followed a path taken by millions before them. How long did they plan to stay in the United States? inquired immigration of...
