Urban Archeologists Reflect on Lower Manhattan’s Buried History
On October 18, the South Street Seaport Museum hosted “Archaeology of the Maritime City: Stories from the Depths,” about unusual discoveries made during Lower Manhattan excavations. Presentations from members of the Professional Archaeologists of New York included talks by Dr. Joan H. Geismar (who has led excavations at Wall Street, Water Street, and Coenties Slip), Dr. Elizabeth D. Meade (who discussed the discovery and reconstruction of a ship from the 1700s found buried at the World Trade Center site after September 11, 2001), Kevin Wiley and Leah Mollin-Kling (who work for the Archaeology Department of the City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission), and Chris Pickerell (the marine program director at Cornell University, who talked about the central role played by oysters in New York’s history).
The vessel unearthed at the World Trade Center site in 2010 as workers were preparing the foundation of the vehicle security center is a case study in the detective work that accompanies excavations in Lower Manhattan. The fragments indicated that it was a 50-foot gunboat, a type of ship built hastily in the months after the first shots of the American Revolution were fired at Lexington and Concord. Dendrochronology (the forensic science of dating wood fragments, as well as their likely place of origin) traces the vessel to Philadelphia, where 13 such ships were built in 1775, to defend the City of Brotherly Love against capture by the British. With cannons mounted on their bows, these boats could hold up to 30 men. The name of the boat found buried beneath the World Trade Center remains unknown, but two clues indicate that it may have been captured by the Royal Navy: traces of damage caused by turu (a timber-eating worm that feasts on wooden ship hulls, found in the Caribbean, where the British maintained colonies throughout the Revolutionary War), along with several buttons from British uniforms. In all, more than 1,000 artifacts were pulled from the mud in 2010, along with 30 feet of the 50-foot vessel.
How and why the boat came to be submerged here will likely remain lost to history, apart from the insight that obsolete vessels were often intentionally scuttled on the waterfront of Manhattan, as an inexpensive form of landfill when the city repeatedly sought to expand its shoreline. (Before Europeans began to settle in New Amsterdam, later renamed New York, the Hudson River lapped at what is now Greenwich Street.)
As striking as this discovery may seem, it is not particularly unusual. Dr. Geismar led a 1982 investigation at a site near Front and John Streets that uncovered the Princess Carolina, a buried 92-foot merchant ship built in the early 1700s and deliberately sunk in 1729. When discovered, only half of the vessel could be removed from the site, because engineers determined that the other end of the hull was holding up Front Street.