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It sometimes seems that way. At the former immigration processing place, Castle Clinton, down in Battery Park, where I was at the end of last year monitoring a new subway tunnel through the park to the Staten Island Ferry (2005) was a model of the "Turtle" just before 9/11/01 put there by the History Channel who promised a much better replica to follow, which the Australian Navy loves to describe as the world's first armed submarine used in naval operations. Also about the day or two before 9/11/01 a French parasailer got tangled up in the Statue Of Liberty's torch, trying to get the best "shot" of it in his camera (the first electrically lit lighthouse in the world they say on the "Snapple" bottle-cap 1898 I think) and the NYC police had to untangle him from the torch! My grandmother Margaret Gregory, before she married my real estate reporter grandfather Joseph Myers and had eleven kids, my Dad the youngest born on the table at 660 Water Street on the day after Christmas, "Boxing Day" in jolly old England, was a nanny to the caretaker on "Bedloe's Island" and they used to call her "Bedloe's Nanny" which strangely no one knows in New York where Bedloe actually came from I read. They had to move in the 1930's and NYC's first public "projects" were built there the Alfred E. Smith Houses (still there, he was the first Catholic high level politician grew-up on Peck Slip in the Seaport nearby).

I got canned from the 3:30pm to 12:00am midnight monitoring the subway trench job back in December for having a blog! A subcontractor for the MTA, Dewberry, but they didn't tell me what for just the why. The section there of subway is so curved only the first 4 cars have access to the platform for the Staten Island Ferry (grandpa joke: Henry Hudson sails into NY harbor with the Dutch crew, he being English. Looks over "Is that an island?" Dutch crewman writes down "Staten Island") which probably had some people very flustered on 9/11/01 as they were leaving. New Ferry Terminal is quite nice escalators and Labrador retrievers I noticed, and snack stands, etc.

I finally made it back to the Grand Manan group and read the LPG stuff very interesting. I guess that Iran/Soviet report has people spooked. The German submarine in August 1918 showed up and after putting the crew off of a three masted I think put an explosive charge in the depths of the hold and blew it up and sank, quite, what would you say "civilly" it was reported years ago in the "Quoddy Tides". WWII wasn't very civil at all, and Grand Mananer, from Castalia, Leman Urquhart, Master Mariner, and Savannah, Georgia harbor pilot, was lost with 42 others when the "SS City of Atlanta" was torpedoed by U-123 off of Avon, NC Cape Hatteras in early January of 1942. He was my grandfather Lawrence Urquhart's brother.

That's Castle Clinton not "Fort". "Fort Apache" looks nothing like it once did. All those places President Carter visited are all fixed up. The bank nearby it was said to have been, where the rush to take all the money out of banks started, causing a bank collapse that contributed to the start of the Great Depression. That was nearby "Fort Apache" according to a City Planner who took us on the "Old Croton Aqueduct" walk on Saturdays different sections up to the dam.

Fort Williams is on Governors Island they were twins sort of. I’ve heard “castle” are all stone, and “forts” much more wood. I worked there four days once digging deep holes with a backhoe before it was turned over to the City for an offer of $1 by then President William Jefferson Clinton, who lives in Chappaqua, NY where Horace Greeley, a once Presidential candidate himself who offered to buy out the Confederacy, is attributed with the expression "Go west young man and grow up with the country." There's a statue of him sitting on a sofa (bronze) in City Hall Park (and a statue of Nathan Hale moved to the front since and a Joseph Pulitzer marker near Greeley) I spent a month or two excavating human burials (delineating them more where they were, from the "First Almshouse" it's thought) under the Horace Greeley statue which they cleaned up too that summer of 1999.