Photo: Shaun O'Boyle

The Witte boneyard, often referred to as New York’s graveyard of ships, usually sits unnoticed on the shore of Staten Island on the Arthur Kill in a far corner of New York harbor.   In the last week, however, it has appeared in the media twice – as a set on a network crime show and as a podcast on a local radio station.  On this week’s CSI:NY (Do Not Pass Go – Season 7, Edisode 6) , a television show about crime scene investigators in New York City, a murderer hid a body on an abandoned ship in  the Witte Boneyard on Staten Island.   Through the wonder of editing, the scene inside the ship was shot on the windjammer Peking, tied up at South Street Seaport.  Sadly, the interior of the Peking looks no better than the exterior shots of the ship graveyard, which is obviously why the ship was chosen as a set.  (This takes place at about the 38 minute mark of the episode.)

Then a  local radio  station, WNYC,  featured the salvage yard in a pre-Halloween podcast. Click on the red arrow below to listen.

The Witte Boneyard: A Different Kind of Graveyard

Along the lower part of Staten Island’s Arthur Kill waterway, historic ships rot and rust in the mud.

These ship skeletons, with their slumping smoke stacks and jutting, rib-like girders, sit at the top of the city’s most impressive “boneyard,” or ship graveyard. Active since the 1930s, the old Witte Marine Equipment Company — now Donjon Marine Company — is unique not only for its continuous marine salvaging but also for the number and variety of vessels that have been pushed into the muck. The rounded bridges of wooden tugboats, soaring bows of warships, and even the broad decks of old ferries can be seen along the water, sinking in slow motion.

These ship skeletons, with their slumping smoke stacks and jutting, rib-like girders, sit at the top of the city’s most impressive “boneyard,” or ship graveyard. Active since the 1930s, the old Witte Marine Equipment Company — now Donjon Marine Company — is unique not only for its continuous marine salvaging but also for the number and variety of vessels that have been pushed into the muck. The rounded bridges of wooden tugboats, soaring bows of warships, and even the broad decks of old ferries can be seen along the water, sinking in slow motion.

Former owner John J. Witte was famous for chasing the curious away from the 24-acre property. Witte — who passed away in 1980 — refused to let ships brought in be dismantled, and at one point the boneyard held some 400 vessels, some over a century old. According to Witte’s son Arnold, who now runs the yard as part of a larger dredging company, at least 100 craft rest there now, retaining the yard’s bragging rights as one of the largest gatherings of historic ships like it in the world.

“Many if not all of the vessels you commonly see transiting the water ways of New York and New Jersey come to final resting place there — or have over the years,” Says Witte, 72, who began his career in marine salvage and wreck removal at the yard as a 12-year-old. “It’s closed off for public safety reasons. Some of the current wrecks are so deteriorated that it would be rather insensible to suggest it could become a tourist attraction.”

That hasn’t stopped some visitors. Artist Bill Murphy, a native Staten Islander and artist who knows his borough’s coastline well, first braved the threat of John “Old Man” Witte’s wrath in the 1970s.

“The very first time I ever went down there was probably the scariest time I ever had,” says Murphy. “I actually got onto Witte’s property and I was on an old coal barge. My foot went right through a 12-inch wide plank and I went right down — my right leg went all the way down past the knee.”

Scores of etchings, paintings, and sketches later, Murphy continues to scour the coastline for decay — he says the natural progression of the ships’ slow disappearance below the waterline, and the process of discovering the skeletons of New York’s harbor history, is intoxicating. He’s not alone either. Photographer Shaun O’Boyle has made several trips to the yard, putting some of the photos into a book: Modern Ruins, Portrait of Place in the Mid-Atlantic Region. Another set of shots, particularly spooky in black-and-white, can be found online at a Web site called Opacity.

One artist, John A. Noble, made it his life’s work to document the slow obsolescence of sailing and steam vessels along the Arthur Kill — the body of water separating Staten Island and New Jersey. Noble died in 1983, but his studio, built on a barge in a New Jersey Port Johnston boneyard now laid mostly to rest under water, survives at the Noble Maritime Collection at Staten Island’s Snug Harbor Cultural Center.

“Noble knew old man Witte, and he used to draw at Witte’s yard, but he got chased out too often,” says Erin Urban, executive director of the Noble Maritime Collection. “It’s kind of haunting, to say the least, because there’s enough left of the ships you get a sense of what life was like there. You even find debris — things that are reminiscent of their personal lives and still laying around.”

Thanks to Ulrich Rudofsky for passing the article along.