Bill Murphy's Kreischerville paintings featured in 'Ins & Outs' mag

 

    From the moment Peter Minuit anchored his ship on May 6, 1626 and purchased Manhattan from the Canarsee for trinkets worth approximately twenty-four dollars, the shores of the island were ports of trade and commerce.
    They were as busy as they were ugly, and remained that way until the twenty-first century, when bridges and tunnels began to make shipping redundant. The ports slowly became vacant, so that New York City’s waterfront property, typically highly coveted real estate, was a slum of decaying ports. In the past few decades, developers have gone to work as New Yorkers decided that it was acceptable to live in industrial areas. The transformation has made its way to other boroughs like Queens and Brooklyn, where manicured parks and skyscrapers have begun to populate the shoreline.
    The one exception to this waterfront facelift is Staten Island, where sometimes it seems that all the ships were scuttled as they fled from the thankless island that bore them. They litter the shoreline in a dilapidated shrine to nautical history. Staten Island is slowly stirring from an un-hip slumber, as low rents are encouraging a culture of expat Manhattanites. Based on Brooklyn’s redevelopment, this may eventually give way to high-rise condominiums and shoreline parks. But for now, Staten Island’s tranquil burial ground for the commercial kings of the past can still be explored. These ship graveyards look like the set of a film or a novel, something dreamed up. Their accidental beauty is a nearly impossible challenge to describe.
    “No one really knew these sites were here. You get the sense of a place that’s been cut off from time, for a really long time,” says Bill Murphy, an artist who makes a living painting and etching the dilapidated shoreline of Staten Island. Murphy, whose work is included in such esteemed collections as the British Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences, and the New York Historical Society, does not exclusively paint the shoreline. Yet the Staten Island native has enough pieces to warrant Undead, an exhibition this past November of his waterfront works.
    As an artist, the appeal of the shoreline comes from what Murphy calls, “the double blast of light.” The sky and the water are both on fire in most of his works, while the ships sulk in silhouette. “To a lot of people, my work might seem depressing, a reminder that everything always leads to death.” The title of the exhibit, Undead, implies that he doesn’t agree. “The ships are as alive today, as full of feeling, as when men worked on them, when they were full of life in the obvious terms. The inner soul of the thing grows proportionately as the outer shell decays.”
    The painting he is most satisfied with, “Last Boneyard,” is based on one of these ship graveyards, Mariner’s Harbor. It’s a short walk through a strip of junked-up woods by Richmond Terrace and can easily be missed if you don’t know it’s there. Murphy went out to visit the site not long ago, just after “Last Boneyard” was sold to a collector in Georgia. “Mariner’s Harbor goes way back in my life as an artist,” he said, working his way through the trees and litter. “I used to come down here a lot, even in the snow.”
    It was low tide (an issue that highly impacts an artist whose subject is the shoreline) and the “harbor” was filled with an oily sludge. It was the strange phosphorescence of the shallow water sitting on this sludge that made “Last Boneyard” so challenging for Murphy. “On more than one occasion I abandoned it. I felt that the attempt at trying to capture sunlight on the ocean floor at low tide was more than I was capable of.”
    Two vessels are always present in all of Murphy’s etchings and light studies of Mariner’s Harbor, each of which is a cross between a boat and some muck that has retained the loose outline of a boat. “I know these have been here for a while because they haven’t changed much from when I first found the site in 1977.” Murphy has become one of the main historians of the shoreline, because hardly anyone gives it as much attention.
     While working on his current painting, “From the Bridge,” he often walks out on the Bayonne Bridge and documents what he finds. “I can tell you that the same huge truck tire has been right around there on the shoreline for at least the past three years,” he said, while looking at the still unfinished work. “Either that or it keeps getting washed away and replaced with a new one that looks just like it.”
     The most photographed ship graveyard on the island is Witte’s Salvage Yard in Rossville by the Arthur Kill, the slender river that separates Staten Island from New Jersey. Seventy or so carcasses are above water due to the shallow riverbed. Break-bulk barges, ferryboats, WWII vessels, and tugs all sit, lost and forgotten. Occasionally, two boats will clank together, or a pilothouse door will blow shut.
     The graveyard began as a salvage yard by John J. Witte in 1931. Since only the machinery and fittings of a vessel have significant value, it is not profitable for a salvage yard operator to dismantle an entire boat. It is also the nature of the business to delay gutting a ship until there is a potential buyer. For this reason, the vessels simply sit there, valueless until there is a need for them.
     Most nautical artifacts have been removed from the site. A steamboat pilothouse, for example, was purchased by the South Street Seaport Museum for use as a ticket booth several decades ago. A 1986 issue of Nautical Quarterly was able to identify New York Central No. 24 among the remains, a steamer from which Barbra Streisand sang “Don’t Rain on My Parade” in the musical Funny Girl. But by now, New York Central No. 24 and all the other ships are indefinable. The salt water accelerates the rate of decay, and in the two decades since the article was written, nearly half the boats have been reduced to parts.
     Ambitious explorers use kayaks to access the site, since a large white fence surrounds the area to keep out intruders. Exploring the site can be very dangerous. A friend of Murphy’s once put his leg through the floor of a barge. Murphy once gave an etching to John Witte Jr. to gain access to the Rossville site, but he found it too orchestrated. “It felt like I was painting in a museum. I need to stumble on that stuff.”
    Many of the sites will be cleaned up as Staten Island becomes more developed. The old Kreischer Brick Factory area, now known as Charleston, is currently witnessing the birth of a senior housing development that uncovered a vast amount of decaying barges that were hidden for many years.
    The Kreischerville site was recommended by a student (Murphy teaches art at Wagner College), and Murphy can quote the date of his first visit without batting an eye: April 16, 2006. “I truly felt I had found something I had been searching for. I also felt then, and for a long time after, a responsibility to the place. I felt that it was my job to record the wrecks before the housing development stretched to the waterline.” Murphy worked more quickly than usual, and so most of his waterfront work is from this period. Luckily, the old vessels are not allowed to be removed because they have been there so long that they are actually part of the shoreline and removing them would severely alter the tidal pattern and native life.
    A few weeks ago, Murphy drove out to the site. As we drove around the housing development his voice dropped to a whisper. “We’ll park here and just walk.” The woods have all been cleared by now, and we headed down a newly paved road along the shore, speaking above the noisy construction of advancing condominiums. “Last time I was here, just a month ago, this looked nothing like this.”
    The Kreischerville barges were bound to lose some of their magic as the site becomes more accessible. “When this was first discovered, it was littered with old rusty spikes and nails. Now basically everything has been stripped.” We approached the shoreline near the rubble from the old Kreischer Brick Factory featured in one of his etchings, to find that a few feet away the ground had been built up by several yards for a landscaped promenade along the shore. Murphy looked wistfully at the new ground under his feet. “Well, the spot I had made the etching from doesn’t exist anymore.” Murphy has an incredible disposition. He often forecasts into the future, and can view our current social creations with the same nostalgia that we see in these vessels. He argues that the men who worked on these ships probably had their minds in the past as well, cursing change every step of the way. With thoughts like these, it’s very easy to see a future artist, painting the dilapidated ruins of a senior housing development, shocked by the beauty and filled with awe.