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New York Architecture
Images- Lower Manhattan NATIONAL
WESTMINSTER BANK |
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architect
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Fox & Fowle |
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location
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175
Water Street, between Fletcher and John Streets. |
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date
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1983 |
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style
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Post-Modernism |
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construction
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The building has a symmetrical plan of twin
glass-walled cylinders peeking out from the rectangle facade with
horizontal bands of glass and brown stone cladding. |
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type
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Office Building |
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notes
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| The
Water Street Wreck:
An 18th-Century
Merchantman in Manhattan
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| Co-Directors:
Warren C. Riess and Sheli O. Smith.
Excavation date:
Winter 1982.
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| During
an archaeological investigation of a construction site in January,
1982 at 175 Water Street in lower Manhattan, the hull of an merchant
ship was discovered in colonial era landfill. The developer of
the site, Howard Ronson, for whom the wreck has also been named,
made possible a recording of the hull by personnel from INA, the Nautical
Archaeology Program at Texas A&M University, New York-based
archaeologists, and a number of volunteers.
The hull dated to
the 18th century, the first such find of a merchant ship from that
period. The ship, 25 m. (82ft.) long between perpendiculars,
was constructed oak with a sheathing layer of softwood overlaying a
mastic of animal hair and pitch.
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Inside
the hull.
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The ship was a
British merchant frigate, built to sail in shallow as well as deep
water, and probably constructed in Virginia or the Carolinas between
1710 and 1720. She possibly served as a tobacco carrier
between the Chesapeake colonies and Britain. Artifacts in the
hull suggest she was buried in Manhattan in mid-century. The reasons
why this southern vessel wound up in New York are unclear, but she
may have spent her last years as a storage hulk before being turned
into cribbage.
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The
hull during excavation.
View forward to aft.
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As the entire hull
was too expensive to remove, conserve, and display, the bow of the
ship was saved for conservation. It is now housed in the Mariner's
Museum in Newport News, Virginia.
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A
view of the bow inside, and out.
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| See:
"Rosloff
Model Displayed at Mariner's Museum," INA Newsletter, 13.4
(1987): 9. |
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Photographs
from the Peter Throckmorton Collection, INA Archives.
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| For
further reading:
Warren Riess and
Sheli O. Smith, "The Ronson Ship," Sea
History (Summer 1983): 20-22.
Warren Riess, "The
Ronson Ship: The Study of an Eighteenth Century Merchantman
Excavated in Manhattan, New York in 1982,"
Dissertation, University of New Hampshire, 1987.
- Jay
Rosloff, "The Water Street Ship: Preliminary Analysis of an
Eighteenth-Century Merchant Ship's Bow." Master's
Thesis, Nautical Archaeology Program, Texas A&M University,
1986.
J. Richard Steffy,
"The Thirteen Colonies: English Settlers and Seafarers,"
in Ships and
Shipwrecks of the Americas, ed. G. F. Bass (Thames and
Hudson, 1988), pp. 107-128.
J. Richard Steffy,
"The Ronson Ship," in Wooden
Ship Building and the Interpretation of Shipwrecks (Texas
A&M University Press, 1994), pp. 168-70.
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contact
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nyc-architecture.com
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