A SHORT HISTORY OF GRAVING DOCKS NO. 1 & 2, ERIE BASIN

Mary Habstritt & Gerald Weinstein

01/09/05, revised 09/25/05

BACKGROUND

With the building and expansion of the Erie Canal and associated development of the Atlantic and Erie Basins, Red Hook was transformed into a major shipping and warehousing center.  It also became an important ship repair area.  The investment made by paving contractor, William Beard, in the Red Hook shoreline bore fruit when he sold his property there to the Erie Basin Dock Company in 1864. [1]

During and just after the Civil War, some shipbuilding moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, but a steady decline in shipbuilding in the area soon began.  Several causes have been blamed including the move of wooden shipbuilding to Maine, where timber was cheaper; the rise of iron shipbuilding, which was centered on the Delaware River; subsidized foreign steamer lines between Europe and New York, which annihilated American lines to Europe; as well as increased real estate values and high labor costs in both Brooklyn and Manhattan.  By 1882, there were ten shipyards in Brooklyn and, although they built some small vessels, they were primarily supported by repair work. [2]   The Erie Basin shipyard changed hands several times in the 1870s and 1880s until, in 1886, it was purchased by John W. Handren and John N. Robins.  In 1892, Handren withdrew and it became the John N. Robins Company. [3]

William H. Todd was hired as a foreman boilermaker by Robins in 1895.  By 1909, he had become president of the company.  British interests made an offer to buy the yard in 1915, but Todd and other employees banded together to make a counteroffer which was accepted and Todd Shipyards Corporation was born. [4]   It was then New York’s largest ship repair facility with 29 acres of real estate and three floating dry docks in addition to the two graving docks. [5]

World War I saw an intense period of activity with over 2,500 people at work in the Erie Basin yard converting ships to wartime use and repairing damaged vessels. [6]   During World War II, nearly 20,000 people were employed at Todd Shipyard alone, to repair and refit ships for the Navy.  Some of this work was done on land owned by the Navy and leased back to Todd Shipyards. Todd bought in the Navy property in 1965 and operated it as New York Shipyards until 1983.  The entire Todd property was sold to United States Dredging in 1985 and that company owns it today. [7]

 

THE DOCKS

The construction of 540-foot long (or 510 feet inside the caisson) Graving Dock No. 1 in Erie Basin was completed in 1866 for the Erie Basin Dock Co.  It was quickly followed by Graving Dock No. 2, which, at 630 feet (600 feet inside the caisson), was large enough to take any ship then sailing but one (The Great Eastern). [8]   Perhaps unaware of these recent developments in America, a British engineer listing the largest graving docks in 1867 cited the “double docks” at Brest (721 feet long) and Portsmouth (636 feet) and one of the largest single docks in the world at Malta (415 feet). [9]   In 1883, little had changed as Scientific American called the graving docks at Erie Basin the largest dry docks in the country and possibly the world. [10]

Graving Dock No. 1, originally built of timber, was enlarged in 1880/81 to a length of 600 feet and may have been further re-built in 1896. [11]   When the country’s shipbuilding situation was assessed for the World War I effort, the two graving docks were listed at 510 and 620 feet, respectively. [12]   No. 1 was completely re-built in steel and concrete and enlarged to 750 feet for Todd Shipyards in 1928/29. It was then said to be the largest privately owned dry dock on the Atlantic Coast. [13]   In the 1940s, Todd advertised its ability to handle vessels up to 730 feet in length at what it could still claim was the “largest privately owned dry dock in New York Harbor.” [14]

Graving Dock No. 2 was lengthened in 1928/29, but not otherwise substantially altered.  It was buried under landfill in the late 1970s. [15]   It may be one of the few large wooden graving docks left in New York Harbor. [16]

Some have suggested that the term “graving” comes from the dock’s resemblance to a grave, but one 19^th-century engineer suggests that the name comes from “grève,” the French word for a flat sandy beach where ships were originally worked on before dry docks were developed. The location where the work was done led “graving” to mean cleaning the ship’s bottom. [17]   In the days of wooden ships, this included scraping, painting, and replacing the caulk and pitch that sealed the seams between the planks in the ship’s hull. “Dry dock” refers generally to any enclosure into which a ship can be moved and its bottom exposed for cleaning or repairs.  It encompasses both stationary, or graving, docks, which are built into the shore, and floating docks, which are buoyant and can be lowered underneath a ship to lift it out of the water.  A graving dock, such as the one in Erie Basin, was built by excavating a basin along the shore and making the bottom watertight by lining it with wood, stone, or concrete, then adding either a gate or a caisson (floating gate) to close the open end. Pumps were installed to pump out the water after a ship had entered. [18]

 

THE PUMPS

To empty water from, or “dewater,” the Erie Basin graving docks, each was originally supplied with a very large (seven feet in diameter) Andrews centrifugal cataract pump in the pumphouse, which still stands, partially demolished, on Beard Street.  The Andrews centrifugal cataract pump was patented by William D. Andrews, 414 Water Street, Manhattan, in 1854.  He seems to have been the first to introduce centrifugal pumps to the United States. [19]

A centrifugal pump works by pulling water from an intake, in this case the dock’s drain, through the center of its rotating impeller, consisting of several blades arranged in a circle. Using centrifugal force, it spins the water to the periphery of this wheel and forces it out through the discharge pipe, in this case an open box drain in the outer side of the dock. This type of pump was particularly well-suited to use in dry docks because of its capability of raising large quantities of water.  The pumps in the Erie Basin graving docks had a capacity of twenty-three thousand five hundred gallons per minute each.  Each pump was arranged at the top of a pit with a pipe leading from it underground to the drain of the dock. [20]

Each pump was driven by a vertical single-cylinder steam engine.  Steam was generated by what was probably a bank of fire-tube boilers.  An underground steam pipe and flexible hose from the pumping engines’ boiler carried steam to the pumps on board the caisson so that no boiler was needed on board the caisson, which needed to pump water out to control its own flotation. [21]   When in place on its sill at the opening of the dry dock, the caisson allowed water to flow into the dock through gates in its sides to re-float the completed ship.

The centrifugal pumps in the pumphouse were electrified prior to 1916 when all shop tools were also converted to electric motors. [22]   They were replaced by electrically driven spiral screw pumps in a pit nearer to the docks during the 1929 expansion.  The pumphouse was converted to house an electrical generator and switchboard. The original pumps, located in a pit, were reportedly floored over, then buried in 1943 when the pump wells were filled, and are presumably still there. [23]