Miles 2877-2886, Betty Wahler in Memory of Richard Wahler. Thank You!
After cruising down the West side for five miles, this 15-mile run continued around Battery Park and back up the East side past the South Street Seaport.
Though the Seaport's chintzy shops and restaurants are geared for tourists, Rich, as a navy veteran, would have appreciated the Seaport's maritime museum which has several historic ships on display. One of them, a steel-hulled windjammer dubbed the Peking, once served as a floating orphanage in England. There's also the Ambrose, a lightship that marked the shipping channel into New York Bay and the Pioneer, a schooner built in 1885 that, on clear days in summer, still sails the waters around Manhattan.
I sailed up the bike path to Delancey Street, crossed over FDR Drive and headed up onto the Williamsburg Bridge. The weather seemed to be improving as the run progressed. I started in a light rain, but after an hour of running, the clouds were thinning out.
Running over the bridge, I looked down on the East River and over to Wallabout Bay in Brooklyn. The bay gets its name from the Walloons, or french-speaking Belgians, that settled in the area around 1635. The Dutch took to calling the place Walloons Bay or Waal Bocht, which was later anglicized into Wallabout. Back then, the bay was just a broad, silty inlet which, at low tide, gave way to stinking mud flats. During the revolution, the British moored prison ships at the bay's mouth. Prisoners were packed into the stinking hulks and left to suffer through biting cold and blistering heat without adequate food, water, or sanitation. They died by the hundreds. Dead bodies were simply thrown into the river and more prisoners loaded in to fill up the space. One ship, the HMS Jersey, claimed over 11,500 lives by the war's end, more than twice the population of 1770's New York. A decade later, bones could still be found washed up on the nearby shore.
A small, private shipyard was established here in the late 1780's and in 1801 the facility was purchased by the United States Government. The site was expanded many times throughout the 19th and 20th centuries until it overtook the natural landscape of the bay. During the Civil War, the Yard was a major supply depot as well as housing the Navy's main hospital and laboratory. In 1904, battleship Connecticut cruised out of the yard to take it's place as flagship of Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet. Also built here was the ill-fated battleship Maine, whose sinking in Havana Harbor touched off the Spanish-American War.
The yard's workforce topped 70,000 during WWII and saw construction of the USS Missouri, the battleship on which the Japanese signed their instrument of surrender. During the Korean war, the yard produced three aircraft carriers, the Independence, Constellation and Saratoga, before it was closed in the 1960's and re-developed as an industrial park.
Once I'd crossed the bridge into Williamsburg, I followed the usual route along Kent Avenue up into Greenpoint. The Pulaski Bridge offered a nice view of Manhattan and behind the skyline I could see the sun pushing away the last of the clouds. By the time I jogged into Sunnyside, the day had completed its transformation from brooding drizzle to a clear, pleasant evening.