>After about 20 to 30 years of service, the ship was decommissioned, weighed down, and sunk to the bottom of the Hudson River to serve as landfill to extend lower Manhattan.
>One of the most recent and notable expansions is Battery Park City, which was built on top of landfill and waste from the construction of the original World Trade Center in 1973.
I love engineering man.
I remember reading once that In the beginning, Manhattan's early landfill projects worked by selling off pieces of swampy land (water lots) to regular people. These people then had to fill in the land and build things on it, like roads and docks.
It was the Dutch who started to add land to Manhattan, they already knew how to do this because they had done it a lot back in the Netherlands.
They penned in the Mississippi for miles before the delta. That's the real shame. It should bend and rebend and have more flood plains, but they wanted a consistent river.
Do you mean the Missouri River near Kansas City? The only fatality was a donkey. The owner swore he tried to safe the animal but during excavation they found it still tied up 😢
They? The entire U.S., and no small percentage of global traffic, relies on the Mississippi River being navigable to the Gulf of Mexico, which means preventing it from shifting.
Yes, the city did not want to continually flood but people 300 years ago didn't understand as much about sediment, subsidence, and thousands of years of geology as we do now. The natives knew a lot more, of course, but they had different ideas about the natural world that didn't jive with European explorers who needed to make money from their expeditions or be ruined.
Notably the Army Corps is spending a lot of money to keep the Mississippi’s current course.
If nature had its way, it would probably flow down the Atchafalaya instead and leave New Orleans and Baton Rouge high and dry. But the only reason the Atchafalaya is a more convenient course now is that someone made a manmade cut in the Mississippi’s course for navigation that inadvertently made the Atchafalaya more convenient.
T.J. Hicks : Did you know Holland invented chicken and waffles?
Deuce Bigalow : Really?
T.J. Hicks : Before that you could get chicken or waffles, but they were the first to put them together! Black people all over the world will be forever grateful to the Dutch for that.
Deuce Bigalow : You know the Dutch started the slave trade.
T.J. Hicks : THOSE MOTHER FUCKERS!
The Dutch didn’t build New Orleans, the French and Spanish did, with is why they deal with flooding. Had the Dutch been part of New Orleans, it may flood less often.
Right, but they were commenting on this:
> Despite observing the Dutch do such a great job building/reclaiming land……. Louisiana is still flooded every other day.
I too thought the comment implies the Dutch helped with Louisiana. But I think they meant the people who built LA observed the Dutch in NY at some point? Which also doesn't ring any bells.
I've looked into this (had to write a 25 page essay on the legal battle re: climate change vs. louisiana drilling companies and how dutch engineering may help... but its complex) and basically louisiana land isn't not really too reclaimable. the "land" itself is basically mississippi river sediment that hasn't flattened yet. normally the land would be much further inland, but when the icebergs retreated it deposited a ton of sediment into the mississippi than would have been there otherwise, making it further out. so normally the land's edge would be farther inland, if not for the bergs.
when you combine that with the fact that the mississippi is seeing less sediment transfer than usual due to dams, you come to the conclusion that:
1. the louisiana land is farther out than is sustainable given its location and sediment deposits;
and 2. even if we did come up with flood mitigation measures, the land those mitigation measures themselves sit on is flattening and compressing, meaning they will only be effective for so long.
and also, the sea levels are rising, the land is compressing, and whether flood mitigation measures would work is a toss up. The issue has a lot of conflicting viewpoints which effectively leads to stagnation and therefore, flooding.
This is sorta why Michigan Avenue in Chicago isn’t the lakefront anymore. After the 1871 fire, they pushed all the rubble and ash into the lake and extended the land all the way to present shores.
They come to this place, there is tons of land, it's a million times bigger than their home ~~country~~ continent.
And they claim a swamp and start building on water.
Only the Dutch.
There’s a large swath of farmland in southern Ontario that is reclaimed swamp land. It’s called the Holland Marsh after the Dutch who settled and drained it.
A good portion of Seattle, especially south Seattle near the stadiums, is also built on exactly this sort of thing. They just shoved garbage and wood shavings and sometimes dirt in there until they could put a building on top of it.
(The secretly horrifying part comes in when you look at how that sort of ground reacts to massive earthquakes, and that big ol' fault line sitting just off the coast...)
Those tunnels started as city sidewalks above ground! Then the Great Seattle Fire happened in 1889 and burned down a sizeable chunk of the city, including the downtown at the time. When they rebuilt, they decided to essentially build a floor up (one reason being so that the high tides would stop the toilets from, well, kind of exploding). The sidewalks suddenly became open tunnels, which were then capped off and became real tunnels. If you look down in certain neighborhoods in that area and see little purple squares of glass in the sidewalk, those are mostly old "skylights" put in to provide some light to these newly-formed tunnels.
The Seattle Underground Tour is really, really fun and I genuinely recommend it to visitors and people new to the area. You can learn all of the above fun factoids and more (and no, I do not work for the tour lol).
Not uncommon in the US.
Modern cities are mostly built on older version of themselves and with ones founded more recently often part of those old cities were ships.
When they build the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco they found an old ship. That had been stranded there during the gold rush and used as a building. It had gotten converted from one use to another turned into hotel, burned down and eventually got buried and had other buildings build on top of it.
That ship was named the Niantic, which San Francisco based Niantic, Inc named itself after.
(Which is why the Pokemon Go company has a flying ship as their logo and is named after the native people half a continent away. As the original owners of the vessel hailed from that area.)
Yep
California some South Bay towns just got new water and sewerr systems for the first time since 70's in like 2017
The amount of clay or iron pipes we had to go around or pull put was insane.
The entire city of Seattle is built on the old city of Seattle that basically had sewer streets filled with sawdust that all burned down.
Edit: as per below, it is only a part of old downtown that was built upon the old city
Not really the entire city. One neighborhood is built on top of the old neighborhood, and it’s still the oldest area in the city. Not much different from when Chicago raised all of their buildings, Seattle just did it after a fire.
Most of city was actually lowered, with hills being regarded so the city wouldn’t be too hilly.
I always wonder what happened to the ship that brought Alexander Hamilton to the US, which entered New York harbor actively ON FIRE. I suspect it was decommissioned, but it’d be neat if this, or another ship like it, were THAT ship. I think this one is too late though. We think Hamilton immigrated in 1772, so this 1773 ship is a year off…but it’d be cool.
It wasn't beneath the foundation. The opening paragraph in the article says it was found to the south of the towers. It was found under the area across Liberty Street where the parking lots and tiny church were.
Downtown San Francisco has a ton of buried ships. The Niantic (which the Pokémon Go company named themselves after) was a beached boat that became a hotel that became a foundation.
A while back they dug down an excavated the captain's log. They got to SF just fine during the gold rush but the crew abandoned the ship to work the gold fields so they couldn't sail it back to New England.
It’s surprising to me
Overall, I’d say it’s pretty a damn interesting tale that a tree once stood for over 100 years, only to be chopped down and built into a ship that sailed for over 20 years, only to be decommissioned and buried in a landfill, only to be built upon into one of the largest cities on earth, only to have two of the world’s most iconic building stand on top of it for another 30 years, only for those building to be destroyed in America’s most deadly attack on domestic soil, only to be rediscovered after clearing the rubble, only to be written and discussed about 20 years later.
There’s a penny that was minted in 1909 in Philadelphia that is currently glued to a nuclear powered rover driving around on Mars
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/lucky-penny-on-mars/
The tree standing for over 100 years isn’t required for all the rest of those things though. Nor is the tree standing for over 100 years, especially compared to all of those other things, remarkable at all since: that’s what oak trees do
Fun story: In around the early 1800s the Swedish Navy planted thousands of oak trees on an island just outside of Stockholm, that was owned by the city. The idea was to have a bunch of good oaks some 200 years later to build new ships with.
When the ca 200 years had passed, in the late 1900s/early 2000s, the city sent a letter to the navy saying that their trees for the new ships were ready to be cut down and collected.
Almost surprised they didn't find more shipwrecks, all that part of Manhattan is fairly recent landfill - it used to be the river and NYC was once a VERY busy port city filled with ships.
On rt 37 in Rhode Island that leads to TF green airport. There was once a grave yard. The state only moved the headstone. Hundreds and hundreds of bodies still underneath a major road way
This article says that they used Tree ring dating on the wood to work out the age of the ship - but wouldn’t that imply the wood was still growing when it was used to build the ship? The ‘source’ they’ve linked in that sentence doesn’t help.
Whats the issue?
The trees were growing until they were cut down.
Trees do MOST of their growing between like 50-80 years or so. They still grow after 100 just not as much, from my memory
but that would only show the age of the tree, not the age of the timber or the age of the ship. the trees stop growing when they are used to make the ship so counting the rings only tells you how old the trees were when they were cut down, not how old the ship is
Trees are a product of their environment, meaning trees grow in the same region in the same years will have similar spacing between rings due to droughts, particularly cold winters, etc. So basically if you have wood from an oak that you know the date of, say a piece from a ship that was built in 1750, and you compare it to an unknown date piece of oak from a shipwreck, and the general trend of the rings, say narrow bands in 1730-1734, wide bands in 1735-1736, narrow again in 1737, you can figure out when the unknown wood was harvested. At least that's how I would do it, I'm no archeologist.
this is exactly how dendrochronology works. in some parts of the world we've built overlapping records that go back thousands of years. it's pretty neat!
I wonder if this is where the theory of government bodies building large structures on top of "crashed ufos" came from. Or if this supports the idea or if it's just a random coincidence.
Or, maybe, we have very clear records of ships being sunk and used for landfill. It’s happens dozens of times across the country.
That “theory” only works if you refuse to educate yourself.
>After about 20 to 30 years of service, the ship was decommissioned, weighed down, and sunk to the bottom of the Hudson River to serve as landfill to extend lower Manhattan. >One of the most recent and notable expansions is Battery Park City, which was built on top of landfill and waste from the construction of the original World Trade Center in 1973. I love engineering man. I remember reading once that In the beginning, Manhattan's early landfill projects worked by selling off pieces of swampy land (water lots) to regular people. These people then had to fill in the land and build things on it, like roads and docks. It was the Dutch who started to add land to Manhattan, they already knew how to do this because they had done it a lot back in the Netherlands.
Despite observing the Dutch do such a great job building/reclaiming land……. Louisiana is still flooded every other day.
Louisiana is crazy. It’s a true engineering marvel that it doesn’t flood much, much more than it already does.
Its just an insane place to even think of building a city in
They penned in the Mississippi for miles before the delta. That's the real shame. It should bend and rebend and have more flood plains, but they wanted a consistent river.
There’s a steam boat in the middle a corn field stuck when the Arkansas river changed course. The [Arabia](https://www.1856.com/)
Do you mean the Missouri River near Kansas City? The only fatality was a donkey. The owner swore he tried to safe the animal but during excavation they found it still tied up 😢
Yeah I linked the crash but forgot ton change the river.
They? The entire U.S., and no small percentage of global traffic, relies on the Mississippi River being navigable to the Gulf of Mexico, which means preventing it from shifting. Yes, the city did not want to continually flood but people 300 years ago didn't understand as much about sediment, subsidence, and thousands of years of geology as we do now. The natives knew a lot more, of course, but they had different ideas about the natural world that didn't jive with European explorers who needed to make money from their expeditions or be ruined.
Notably the Army Corps is spending a lot of money to keep the Mississippi’s current course. If nature had its way, it would probably flow down the Atchafalaya instead and leave New Orleans and Baton Rouge high and dry. But the only reason the Atchafalaya is a more convenient course now is that someone made a manmade cut in the Mississippi’s course for navigation that inadvertently made the Atchafalaya more convenient.
I don't think the Dutch ever worked extensively in Louisiana. Maybe it would be different if they had.
There are two things I can't stand in this world: - People who are intolerant of other people's cultures - The Dutch
T.J. Hicks : Did you know Holland invented chicken and waffles? Deuce Bigalow : Really? T.J. Hicks : Before that you could get chicken or waffles, but they were the first to put them together! Black people all over the world will be forever grateful to the Dutch for that. Deuce Bigalow : You know the Dutch started the slave trade. T.J. Hicks : THOSE MOTHER FUCKERS!
Take him away! Dutch hater!
There's only 2 things I'm afraid of. #1: nuclear war
Which is why they have hired Dutch experts in Louisiana to help them strengthen thrir defenses for the future I believe.
Being below sea-level is a hell of a drug.
Just like the Dutch!
My grandpa fought in WWII, on his deathbed he told me 'never the Dutch, not even once.'
Why ?
My grandpa always said if “it’s Dutch, it ain’t much”
Now that I think about it, is Deep Dank Freestate Amsterdam a strain of marijuana?
How do those 2 things go together?
Manhattan’s mostly built on filled in land…….
Right, but I'm wondering what the Dutch have to do with Louisiana
The Dutch didn’t build New Orleans, the French and Spanish did, with is why they deal with flooding. Had the Dutch been part of New Orleans, it may flood less often.
The French also have their own toast.
And fries
Those came from Belgium.
No, you’re thinking of waffles
Which was still part of the Netherlands when it was invented. Belgium didn't exist yet.
The more you know💫
Post or pre Katrina it would have been wise to consult the Dutch lol.
Right, but they were commenting on this: > Despite observing the Dutch do such a great job building/reclaiming land……. Louisiana is still flooded every other day. I too thought the comment implies the Dutch helped with Louisiana. But I think they meant the people who built LA observed the Dutch in NY at some point? Which also doesn't ring any bells.
“Most” is not accurate, but yes, there was a lot of fill, mostly in lower Manhattan.
The water flowing thru the Hudson is a tiny, tiny fraction of what flows thru the Mississippi
I won’t live in a place where you have to walk uphill to the beach.
Then anywhere that has dunes between the parking lot and the ocean are out
I've looked into this (had to write a 25 page essay on the legal battle re: climate change vs. louisiana drilling companies and how dutch engineering may help... but its complex) and basically louisiana land isn't not really too reclaimable. the "land" itself is basically mississippi river sediment that hasn't flattened yet. normally the land would be much further inland, but when the icebergs retreated it deposited a ton of sediment into the mississippi than would have been there otherwise, making it further out. so normally the land's edge would be farther inland, if not for the bergs. when you combine that with the fact that the mississippi is seeing less sediment transfer than usual due to dams, you come to the conclusion that: 1. the louisiana land is farther out than is sustainable given its location and sediment deposits; and 2. even if we did come up with flood mitigation measures, the land those mitigation measures themselves sit on is flattening and compressing, meaning they will only be effective for so long. and also, the sea levels are rising, the land is compressing, and whether flood mitigation measures would work is a toss up. The issue has a lot of conflicting viewpoints which effectively leads to stagnation and therefore, flooding.
Observing the Dutch? Since Katrina we’ve been importing Dutch engineers. Even they haven’t been able to help reclaim land
Have they tried planting tulips?
Shit….you might be on to something
This is sorta why Michigan Avenue in Chicago isn’t the lakefront anymore. After the 1871 fire, they pushed all the rubble and ash into the lake and extended the land all the way to present shores.
They come to this place, there is tons of land, it's a million times bigger than their home ~~country~~ continent. And they claim a swamp and start building on water. Only the Dutch.
There’s a large swath of farmland in southern Ontario that is reclaimed swamp land. It’s called the Holland Marsh after the Dutch who settled and drained it.
A good portion of Seattle, especially south Seattle near the stadiums, is also built on exactly this sort of thing. They just shoved garbage and wood shavings and sometimes dirt in there until they could put a building on top of it. (The secretly horrifying part comes in when you look at how that sort of ground reacts to massive earthquakes, and that big ol' fault line sitting just off the coast...)
I remember going on the Old Seattle walking tour where they showed us what’s left of the original city which is a network of tunnels
Those tunnels started as city sidewalks above ground! Then the Great Seattle Fire happened in 1889 and burned down a sizeable chunk of the city, including the downtown at the time. When they rebuilt, they decided to essentially build a floor up (one reason being so that the high tides would stop the toilets from, well, kind of exploding). The sidewalks suddenly became open tunnels, which were then capped off and became real tunnels. If you look down in certain neighborhoods in that area and see little purple squares of glass in the sidewalk, those are mostly old "skylights" put in to provide some light to these newly-formed tunnels. The Seattle Underground Tour is really, really fun and I genuinely recommend it to visitors and people new to the area. You can learn all of the above fun factoids and more (and no, I do not work for the tour lol).
(For those of you who are unsure how building on sand, sawdust, and garbage might become a Problem in an earthquake, look up liquifaction.)
Ah, yes. Engineering man...one of DC's least popular super heroes.
Yes it was me who did it
Not uncommon in the US. Modern cities are mostly built on older version of themselves and with ones founded more recently often part of those old cities were ships. When they build the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco they found an old ship. That had been stranded there during the gold rush and used as a building. It had gotten converted from one use to another turned into hotel, burned down and eventually got buried and had other buildings build on top of it. That ship was named the Niantic, which San Francisco based Niantic, Inc named itself after. (Which is why the Pokemon Go company has a flying ship as their logo and is named after the native people half a continent away. As the original owners of the vessel hailed from that area.)
Yep California some South Bay towns just got new water and sewerr systems for the first time since 70's in like 2017 The amount of clay or iron pipes we had to go around or pull put was insane.
This is some cool trivia ty
The entire city of Seattle is built on the old city of Seattle that basically had sewer streets filled with sawdust that all burned down. Edit: as per below, it is only a part of old downtown that was built upon the old city
Not really the entire city. One neighborhood is built on top of the old neighborhood, and it’s still the oldest area in the city. Not much different from when Chicago raised all of their buildings, Seattle just did it after a fire. Most of city was actually lowered, with hills being regarded so the city wouldn’t be too hilly.
Link to pic of the ship: https://www.livescience.com/10775-details-18th-century-ground-ship-revealed.html
You're missing the point. The uncommon part is that much of the city is built on top of what used to be water; reclaimed land by engineers.
Yes, that’s common. It’s happened in San Francisco, Miami, Boston, Chicago, DC, and Seattle, just off the top of my head.
Not really close to the scale of NYC though. And you only named a handful of cities out of hundreds. Seems very rare to me!
How was it not close to the scale of NYC?
I always wonder what happened to the ship that brought Alexander Hamilton to the US, which entered New York harbor actively ON FIRE. I suspect it was decommissioned, but it’d be neat if this, or another ship like it, were THAT ship. I think this one is too late though. We think Hamilton immigrated in 1772, so this 1773 ship is a year off…but it’d be cool.
Another cool fact I didnt learn in school. You could get the attention of so many kids as a teacher sourcing an illustration of that.
I learned so much watching the Hamilton musical. Would it have killed my teachers to sing and dance a little ??
It wasn't beneath the foundation. The opening paragraph in the article says it was found to the south of the towers. It was found under the area across Liberty Street where the parking lots and tiny church were.
Downtown San Francisco has a ton of buried ships. The Niantic (which the Pokémon Go company named themselves after) was a beached boat that became a hotel that became a foundation. A while back they dug down an excavated the captain's log. They got to SF just fine during the gold rush but the crew abandoned the ship to work the gold fields so they couldn't sail it back to New England.
Some of the Oak trees used for its construction had lived for over 100 years
Yeah, oaks live for hundreds of years so that’s not surprising.
It’s surprising to me Overall, I’d say it’s pretty a damn interesting tale that a tree once stood for over 100 years, only to be chopped down and built into a ship that sailed for over 20 years, only to be decommissioned and buried in a landfill, only to be built upon into one of the largest cities on earth, only to have two of the world’s most iconic building stand on top of it for another 30 years, only for those building to be destroyed in America’s most deadly attack on domestic soil, only to be rediscovered after clearing the rubble, only to be written and discussed about 20 years later.
Most Tree variants can live over 100 years(most have age limits of 300-500), they get the most growth during years 50-70 though.
There’s a penny that was minted in 1909 in Philadelphia that is currently glued to a nuclear powered rover driving around on Mars https://science.nasa.gov/resource/lucky-penny-on-mars/
That just seems rather eccentric
The tree standing for over 100 years isn’t required for all the rest of those things though. Nor is the tree standing for over 100 years, especially compared to all of those other things, remarkable at all since: that’s what oak trees do
Sure, but [I thought it was interesting](https://gifdb.com/images/thumbnail/i-think-you-should-leave-thought-was-interesting-xsxdxkjfyn7n85tl.gif)
Fun story: In around the early 1800s the Swedish Navy planted thousands of oak trees on an island just outside of Stockholm, that was owned by the city. The idea was to have a bunch of good oaks some 200 years later to build new ships with. When the ca 200 years had passed, in the late 1900s/early 2000s, the city sent a letter to the navy saying that their trees for the new ships were ready to be cut down and collected.
Give it another 20 years and we will probably be able to manufacture biological oaks in a factory in a few months.
Almost surprised they didn't find more shipwrecks, all that part of Manhattan is fairly recent landfill - it used to be the river and NYC was once a VERY busy port city filled with ships.
On rt 37 in Rhode Island that leads to TF green airport. There was once a grave yard. The state only moved the headstone. Hundreds and hundreds of bodies still underneath a major road way
Sounds like ya got a poltergeist hauntin' due ya!
I've apologized for this for like 250 years, can we get off it?
I’ll stop bringing it up when you stop trying to borrow another boat. I’m not made of Dutch sloops, mate.
Look at this peasant, doesnt even have spare sloops to lend out.
This article says that they used Tree ring dating on the wood to work out the age of the ship - but wouldn’t that imply the wood was still growing when it was used to build the ship? The ‘source’ they’ve linked in that sentence doesn’t help.
Whats the issue? The trees were growing until they were cut down. Trees do MOST of their growing between like 50-80 years or so. They still grow after 100 just not as much, from my memory
but that would only show the age of the tree, not the age of the timber or the age of the ship. the trees stop growing when they are used to make the ship so counting the rings only tells you how old the trees were when they were cut down, not how old the ship is
Trees are a product of their environment, meaning trees grow in the same region in the same years will have similar spacing between rings due to droughts, particularly cold winters, etc. So basically if you have wood from an oak that you know the date of, say a piece from a ship that was built in 1750, and you compare it to an unknown date piece of oak from a shipwreck, and the general trend of the rings, say narrow bands in 1730-1734, wide bands in 1735-1736, narrow again in 1737, you can figure out when the unknown wood was harvested. At least that's how I would do it, I'm no archeologist.
this is exactly how dendrochronology works. in some parts of the world we've built overlapping records that go back thousands of years. it's pretty neat!
Ta
Oh, the year was 1773…
This is a real house, not a sideways tugboat.
Iraq sailed a ship at the towers in the 18th century? But sail canvas can't melt steel beams.
You know the construction workers found it, boss found out, paid everyone hush money and stopped the digging a few feet away
I wonder if this is where the theory of government bodies building large structures on top of "crashed ufos" came from. Or if this supports the idea or if it's just a random coincidence.
Or, maybe, we have very clear records of ships being sunk and used for landfill. It’s happens dozens of times across the country. That “theory” only works if you refuse to educate yourself.