18th-Century Ship Found at WTC Site

On Tuesday, workers digging a new level for a vehicle security center at the World Trade Center site ran into a set of evenly-spaced wooden beams. Had someone been building a boat in a basement?
“They were so perfectly contoured that they were clearly part of a ship,” said A. Michael Pappalardo, an archaeologist with the firm AKRF, which is working for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to document historical material uncovered during construction.

By Wednesday, the outlines made it plain: a 30-foot length of a wood-hulled vessel had been discovered about 20 to 30 feet below street level on the World Trade Center site, the first such large-scale archaeological find along the Manhattan waterfront since 1982, when an 18th-century cargo ship came to light at 175 Water Street.

The ground where the boat was found had been undisturbed for 200 years. Back then, the site was much nearer the Hudson River. Link -via reddit

(Image credit: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

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The odds are the ship was intentionally sunk there as part of the landfilling that took place at the time. My company participated in the retrieval and preservation of the ship found in 1982, which was determined to have been left there to take up space. It is really a waste of time to pull the ship out of there as though it is some sort of artifact; the 1982 ship still sits in tanks of preservative in upstate New York. No one wants the ship or its parts, and the same will happen with this one once it is pulled out of the ground at huge expense.
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