November 29, 2007
Brooklyn Navy Yard helps launch 'Graving Dock'
The GMD graving dock in the Brooklyn Navy Yard was open to the public on Tuesday night for a rare cultural event set among the working shipyard workers: a launch party for Gabriel Cohen's new NY-based thriller "Graving Dock."
Aside from the drama, the book is fleshed out with notable New York crime facts, such as in this passage:“When the water warmed up, bacteria released gasses into the corpses and they rose to the surface, usually around mid-April. It was known as Floater Week. There was a strange poetry to it, all those submerged bodies rising up: the drunken boaters, the bridge jumpers, the victims of mob hits (who often escaped their concrete shoes or chains as their bodies softened and frayed).” Floater Week is real, Cohen told the audience, and it usually comes right around Tax Day.
The event, held inside the tailshaft and valveshaft, was organized by Portside New York, which plans to make GMD the temporary home of its retired oil tanker Mary Whalen, which is being restored with the plan to turn it into a floating cultural center. In September, it staged a Puccini opera on its deck while tied up in the Red Hook container port.
While Monday's event offered a rare glimpse into the Navy Yard, both GMD and Portside representatives said they may be able to start offering tours sometime ater the New year. "Send us an e-mail," said PortSide's Carolina Salguero.
While the book reading was held in the shed --complete with a podium the GMD crew built just before the event, the working graving dock was just outsde, where a night crew was working on the integrated tug-barge USS Philadelphia. See the Tugster blog for more pictures of the graving dock during the day and the cranes at dusk.
Image credit: Top image of the Philadelphia by Will Van Dorp of Tugster, used with permission. Other pictures are NewYorkology.
Related: Nathan Kensinger Photography of the graving dock (via Gowanus Lounge)
Brownstoner's inside the Navy Yard video
More pictures after the jump.
Earlier: 'Graving Dock' launch party set for Brooklyn Navy Yard
Down in Brooklyn's Dry Dock No. 1 with Mary Whalen
November 29, 2007 02:21 PM in Cheap Stuff, History, Out of Manhattan, Sightsology, Tours
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