CultureNOW - McKay Shipyard: Peter Vanderwarker

McKay Shipyard

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
We''re on the east Boston waterfront, looking across the harbor toward Charlestown. In the old photograph, the Glory of the Sea is under construction at the legendary yard of Donald McKay. McKay was famed for his speedy clipper ships. The most celebrated, the Flying Cloud, once covered 2,000 miles in six days. The historian Samuel Eliot .
Morison wrote about the clippers in an oft-quoted passage: "Never, in these United States, has the brain of man conceived, or the hand of man fashioned, so perfect a thing as the clipper ship. . . .The Flying Cloud was our Rheims, the Sovereign of
the Seas our Parthenon, the Lightning our Amiens."

But the age of the clippers was brief. "They were monuments carved from snow," wrote Morison. McKay (who lived around the comer at 80 White Street) built his first clipper in 1850 and his last in 1856. They cost too much to maintain and succumbed first to declining freight rates, then to the arrival of steam. The Glory, McKay's last design, .
launched in 1869, wasn't a true clipper. It was fuller and heavier, which may explain why it lasted until 1922. There's a model of the Flying Cloud at the Boston Tea Party and Ship Museum, at 47 Atlantic Avenue; a statue of McKay stands in Marine Park,
on Castle Island in South Boston. McKay may also - nobody is sure - be the man in the cap seated in the foreground of the old photo.

Today, it's hard to imagine what this waterfront must have been at its peak. Someone took the trouble, on the Fourth of July, 1855, to count 188 "ships, barks, and brigs" anchored in Boston Harbor. They sailed allover the world. As befits New England, ice was a major export. Much of it went to Queen Victoria's tropical colonies, where the
expatriate British, desperately fanning themselves, strove to recapture the chill of their native land. Often, the ice protected a second cargo of Baldwin apples. Boots and shoes were another big export.

The newer photo shows the same scene, viewed from Border Street, between White and Eutaw streets. The tranquility of decay has settled over these old wharves. The tug Saturn is moored at right; at left is the huge General Ship and Engine Works, once a major repair facility. It is now used only by construction crews that work on the Sumner and Callahan tunnels by night. Across the too-peaceful water, we can see the Charlestown Navy Yard and the Mystic River Bridge.

All this may soon change. In August, a new ferry, cheap and frequent, is expected to connect East Boston with Long Wharf downtown. And plans are getting under way to bring new uses - light maritime industry, retailing, recreation, maybe some housing -
to this derelict, historic, beautiful shoreline.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - McKay Shipyard", Boston Globe, 1994

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Location

Border St & White St
Boston, MA 02128
United States

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