The Mary A Whalen is a decommissioned oil tanker docked at Pier 11 in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Built in 1938, she was originally called the S.T. Kiddoo, after Solomon Thomas Kiddoo, the Vice President of the company that manufacturing its engines. The ship was built for Ira S. Bushey & Sons, a Red Hook business that operated a combination shipyard and fuel terminal. She is 172' (52m) long and 31.5' (9.6m) wide, with a gross tonnage of 613 and a capacity of 8.019 barrels of fuel.
The ship delivered fuel up and down the east coast between 1938 and 1968. In 1962, she was purchased by the Eklof Marine Corporation of Staten Island and re-christend the Mary A. Whalen. I'm not entirely sure who that is. She went out of service in 1994, due to a damaged engine crankshaft.
The ship is the last of its kind. It's an early example of lap-welding, a technique in which one steel plate overlaps the other, and is also one of the few surviving examples of a bell boat. On a bell boat, the captain or mate steering has no control over the throttle or direction of the boat, and uses a manual system of bells to signal instructions to an engineer in the lower levels to determine speed and direction. She is also significant for being the subject of the 1975 Supreme Court case U.S. v Reliable Transfer Co., and important maritime law case.
Currently, she is owned by PortSide NewYork, a non-profit advocacy group for waterfront development, and serves as their headquarters and museum. In 2012, she was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
