Things Shifted Around

From “1915-1930”, “Aquarium and fire boat, New York”:

The Aquarium is Castle Clinton, buried within a wood and stucco shell (and full of huge glass tanks on several levels). That’s Battery Park to the left, and the seawall with a rather casual chain barrier rather than the serious fence that is there now. The hills in the background on the right are Brooklyn, with buildings lost to the combination of distance and low resolution.

The fireboat is either tied up at or just launched from the pier with that cute little towered building. In my head, the fireboat pier is Pier A but that’s further west and I vaguely remembered that Pier A only became the fireboat pier in the 1960s. Of course I reached for a map, in this case 1905:

There’s the park, the fort/aquarium, and the cute building on the pier, labelled as “Floating Engine 57” which sounds a lot more romantic than “fireboat 57.” The diagonal brown pier next to the word RIVER is Pier A, then used by the dock department, the police department, and the harbor patrol. The bigger yellow pier to the right of Pier A is Pier 1, the southernmost of the Hudson River commercial piers.

The most surprising thing here is the presence of a yacht basin adjacent to Pier A. I’m not sure how long that was there, but it’s spiritual descendent is now the north cove of Battery Park City.