A few years ago, a friend told me about a ship graveyard in northern Staten Island. I was intrigued. Alas, the environment doesn’t seem to have been much of a concern for states bordering the Hudson River, and I had heard of subway cars dumped into The Atlantic before.
Located not too far from the landfill near Fresh Kills, John Witte founded the scrapyard in the 1930s. But, over time, “the Witte Marine Scrap Yard accumulated far more vessels than it could dismember, and the boats quickly piled up.”
To see the graveyard, you need to follow a path that starts near a few small cemeteries with graves from the late 18th, early 19th century. From there you find the following vistas:
