PortSide NewYork, is a community of people on one part of New York harbor’s waterfront, and the dream of one woman, Carolina Salguero to keep local maritime history alive.
She does that through her work on the Mary A. Whalen, a small oil tanker built and launched in Camden, New Jersey in 1938 for Ira S. Bushey & Sons, a maritime company that operated a shipyard, fuel terminal and fuel delivery service in New York Harbor. The Mary A. Whalen is the last of her kind in the United States and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
After the Mary A. Whalen successfully rode out Hurricane Sandy tied up on the Brooklyn waterfront, Ms. Salguero then set up and ran a pop-up aid station for the Red Hook community.
PortSide NewYork’s work includes hosting educational programs in the arts and preservation, and assisting in the creation of a working model app for vehicle flood evacuation. Ms. Salguero and her team have just launched a digital museum that covers 400 plus years of Red Hook’s history. It’s all in Red Hook WaterStories and can be found on the web at https://redhookwaterstories.org/