![]() ![]() The Coast Guard also does pier sweeps: “If someone puts something on a piling”-say, an electronic device-“we find it,” says USCG gunner’s mate Dave Boles. The gear pings signals out, and displays hits-indicating unidentified people or boats-on a video screen. Coast Guard operates anti-swimmer sonar systems, which are moved around as they’re needed in the harbor. “The skin was peeling back.” He scuttles his fingers up his arm. “The worst one I ever saw was half in the mud, half out,” says John Drzal, a veteran of the NYPD scuba team. They then bob up, and currents have been known to drive them to nooks near the Seaport and Manhattan Bridge. When homicides and suicides end up in the river during winter, they often stay underwater until April, when decomposition speeds up, bloating them with gases. One notable wreck, which Ryan will place only “near Yonkers,” includes not one ship but two: A cabin cruiser sits atop the flattened remains of a much older vessel, probably a nineteenth-century sailing ship. “They’re archaeological sites,” says William Ryan, one of the group’s senior scientists, and the state (which funds his research) has concerns about amateur treasure-hunters who can’t handle the currents. The LDEO researchers know of at least 300 wrecks in the lower Hudson below Troy, but they won’t tell you where most of them are. ![]() Since 9/11, the points where it comes ashore have been patrolled daily. (Gas takes roughly a week to make the trip.) This pipeline and another at 134th Street supplied 367 billion cubic feet of gas last year-about half of what we used. That groove on the riverbed is a pair of 24-inch gas mains, laid down in the fifties, that-believe it or not-constitute the business end of a network of pipes that runs all the way from the Gulf of Mexico. “I never said this wasn’t a war,” says Speregen. The city has tried jacketing pilings in heavy plastic to keep the critters out, but it hasn’t worked well: Floating ice tears up the jackets in winter. Speregen says he’s seen fifteen-inch-diameter columns that have been gnawed down, hourglass style, to three inches. “gribbles,” are bugs about the size of a pencil dot that look like tiny armadillos, and eat not only wood but also concrete. Like underwater termites, they devour wood. Teredos, which start life looking like tiny clams, grow up to be worms “as big around as your thumb, and nearly four feet long, with little triangular teeth,” says commercial diver Lenny Speregen. school on East 25th Street, and the Con Ed plant at 14th. Two kinds of hungry pests gnaw away at the pilings that hold up structures like the FDR Drive, the U.N. The Port Authority is studying solutions. If the tubes ever became exposed, they would be at risk for shifting, cracking, and terrorist threats. That current is scraping mud off the top of the Lincoln Tunnel where it never did before the underwater traffic tubes have lost 25 percent of their soil coverage in some spots. Battery Park City, built in the seventies, juts out into that flow, and since then, the current has been cutting a new channel, out toward the center of the river. The Hudson’s main current has, for all of recorded history, clung to lower Manhattan’s edge, skimming along the West Side. Here and on the following pages is your guide. Frank Nitsche stitched together their data, along with several other researchers’ work, into this elegant color-keyed map, which we’ve supplemented by talking with sea captains, historians, and the divers pictured above. This first GPS-era picture comes from the team at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who have methodically swept the lower Hudson with state-of-the-art sonar. What we did know came largely from random anecdotes, and depth soundings done the way Henry Hudson did them-by rope and lead sinker. That can lead a person to wonder: What, exactly, is down there? Until recently, we had patchy knowledge of what lies beneath the surface of one of the world’s busiest harbors. The steady transformation of New York’s waterfront from wasteland to playground means more of us are spending time along the city’s edge. ![]() Illustrations by Mark Nerys Photo: Matt Hoyle Commercial diver Lenny Speregen and NYPD detective John Drzal. ![]()
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