The party may be over for a group of liveaboards on Newtown Creek, a now toxic piece of waterway between Brooklyn and Queens in New York City. The federal government declared it a Superfund site in 2010, and about 13 million gallons of oil have been removed since then. Now the cleanup may go at a faster pace.
But the 130-foot Schamonchi, a former ferryboat operating between Martha’s Vineyard and New Bedford, Massachusetts, is still there, as are a handful, or more, of other boats, with liveaboard owners. There’s no marina. The city owns the land, and they don’t pay any dockage fees or rent.
Now the creek is being cleaned up ahead of the next wave of gentrification, and the Schamonchi and the other boats will probably have to leave. It seems like the end of an era. “It was really refreshing to keep something that had a little bit of rawness and, I don’t know, illegality,” Sam Sutcliffe, an artist who kept his office on a boat on the creek, told The New York Times. Read The Times entire story, complete with video, here:
At the most toxic end of Newtown Creek is a 130-foot, 270-ton vessel moored off a crumbling wall, floating near an oil boom and an open sewage pipe. Built in 1978, it was a ferryboat for 25 years, carrying some 100,000 vacationers each summer between Martha’s Vineyard and New Bedford, Mass. After being replaced by newer vessels, it was sold in 2005 and eventually made its way down to this dead-end waterway.
In its second life it became an illicit party boat, the site of Burning Man-style raves, and a home to artists and other off-the-grid types. Now, as the creek is being slowly cleaned up ahead of the next wave of gentrification arriving in this part of Brooklyn and Queens, the boat — the Schamonchi — is a rusting symbol in the middle of a multimillion-dollar fight that’s pitting environmentalists, artists, and heavy industry in a fight for more control of the waters.
The Schamonchi is also very slowly sinking.
Boaters there remember it as an early squatting favorite. It predated the few dozen New Yorkers who would come and go over the last decade to take advantage of the quiet that came with living on Newtown Creek, a tidal arm between Brooklyn and Queens that is part of a larger estuary (and also a known former dumping ground for wastewater, oil, PCBs, and other toxic chemicals). “It was way more of a small-scale home, a little weirdo family-type of vibe,” said Tory Censits, a Rockaway-based metalworker who used to stay on the boat around 2009 and 2010. “It was communal. Everyone shared, everyone would bring food.” Read more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/nyregion/newtown-creek-houseboats-superfund-schamonchi.html
