This is in response to those who asked:”Who are you?” It is a least a dimension.Boats have always been a part of my life. Naturally interwoven with the story of Newport.
Category: newport ri
NEWPORT, MY TOWN
I have been working in I movie. I will post tomorrow the finished version of Looking For America; which I had started almost a month ago. Meanwhile here is the Newport and the waterfront I knew.
FILOLI, ROSES AND VISITOR’S CENTERS
As some of you may be aware there is a controversy in Newport over the visitor’s center planned for on the grounds of the Breakers, one of the houses of the Preservation Society of Newport County. The proposed visitor’s center will be placed inside the fenced property on a site that had been an important garden. Like many Newporters, I believe there is a better solution.
My wife and I visit many museums and gardens all over the world. I always look not just at the collections, but how the public is received and treated. The quality of the food and service. How friendly and helpful the guides are.
I believe the Preservation Society of Newport County is violating their own mission statement which is to preserve these houses in their entirety.
Today we visited, for the second time “Filoli” south of San Francisco. The visitor’s center is just off the parking, obscured from all angles from the main house and gardens. Food is served; it is good and fresh. As you see there is no food allowed on the grounds.
The visitor sees the house and gardens as it was meant to be seen.
AMERICA’S CUP: WHY NOT NEWPORT?
FROM SCUTTLEBUTT:
SAN DIEGO, CHICAGO, BERMUDA ARE STILL IN THE RUNNING.
America’s Cup: Why not Newport?
Published on June 9, 2014
Russell Coutts, the CEO of America’s Cup champion Oracle Team USA, announced in January that officials were talking with other venues about hosting the 35th America’s Cup in 2017 because San Francisco officials hadn’t offered sufficient terms to automatically return.
Among the immediate candidates was Newport, RI, which had been closely considered for the 2013 event, and had been home to the event from 1930 to 1983. The venue had several attractive attributes: passionate fans, summer seabreeze, and dedicated facilities.
However, when Coutts announced last week to BBC News that the list had been narrowed to four cities, and Newport wasn’t one of them, we got curious what happened. Brad Read, Executive Director of Sail Newport, which coordinated the bid on behalf of the state and Sail Newport, Rhode Island’s Public Sailing Center, sheds light on situation.
“While disappointed, we remain optimistic to once again be a host site for an America’s Cup World Series event in 2016. We appreciate Russell Coutts and the rest of the America’s Cup team taking the time to evaluate our bid. However, the America’s Cup is a complex event, both on and off the water. Operating under a very tight time frame imposed by the AC Event Authority, we were not comfortable engaging commercial partners with the information that was available in the timeframe required.”
While the 35th America’s Cup match will be held elsewhere, Read is hopeful that Newport will remain in the running to host a preliminary America’s Cup World Series event as the teams prepare for the 35th America’s Cup. The extremely successful America’s Cup World Series event in June 2012 proved that Rhode Island, Newport, and Narragansett Bay can host a yachting event of the highest magnitude.
“With the support of the State of Rhode Island, Fort Adams State Park has been developed into a premiere shore side venue for grand-prix maritime competition,” said Read, noting that Rhode Island Sound and Narragansett Bay are famous around the world for their spectacular sailing conditions.
“Next spring we will host the only North American stopover of the 2014-15 Volvo Ocean Race. This event will bring hundreds of sailors, team support staff, race officials and journalists to Newport, along with tens of thousands of sailing and non-sailing fans daily to our wonderful Fort Adams State Park. With the continued cooperation of the Governor’s office and the State Legislature – without which none of this would be possible – we believe we can continue to attract top sailing events, and their considerable economic impact, to the Ocean State.
“The America’s Cup is a part of Newport’s history and vice versa. We will remain in contact with ACEA in hopes that Newport will be considered for an America’s Cup World Series event and to keep open the possibility of hosting an America’s Cup match in the future.”
WORKING WATERFRONT, NEWPORT RHODE ISLAND
What do I do with the archive of photos I have accumulated over half a century? I jumped in with both feet and produced a book titled “WORKING WATERFRONT”. These are images of Newport’s waterfront, which has long since disappeared from the landscape; along with those who worked there.
Each photo has a story connected to it for me. Anecdotes unconnected other than by the waterfront that I remember in these photographs.
WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES
Today was the day that the trees opened their buds. soon the leaves will lose that delicate yellow/green color and will be fully green as in summer. This is the day I wait for each year. Most of my adult life I would be traveling and return after it had passed.
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
I had my own experience with a message in a bottle. I find it is a rather profound event in life representative of so many thoughts and feelings.
101-year-old bottle message: Baltic find reveals my roots, says granddaughter
Berlin resident Angela Erdmann speaks of unknown grandfather who threw bottle but died six years before she was born
-
Louise Osborne in Berlin
- theguardian.com,
Richard Platz’s message, which he threw into the sea in 1913, when he was 20 years old. Photograph: Uwe Paesler/EPA
Angela Erdmann never knew her grandfather. He died in 1946, six years before she was born. But on Tuesday she described the extraordinary moment when she received a message in a bottle 101 years after he had lobbed it into the Baltic Sea.
Thought to be the world’s oldest message in a bottle, it was presented to Erdmann by the museum that is now exhibiting it in Germany.
“It was very surprising,” Erdmann, 62, said, recalling how she found out about the bottle. “A man stood in front of my door and told me he had post from my grandfather. He then told me that a message in a bottle was found and that the name that was on the card was that of my grandfather.”
Her visitor was a genealogical researcher who had managed to track her down in Berlin after the letter was given to the International Maritime Museum in the northern port city of Hamburg.
The brown beer bottle, which had been in the water for 101 years, was found in the catch of Konrad Fischer, a fisherman, who had been out in the Baltic Sea off the northern city of Kiel last month.
Holger von Neuhoff, curator for ocean and science at the museum said this bottled message was the oldest he had come across. “There are documents that have been found without the bottle that are older and are in the museum,” he said. “But with the bottle and the document, this is certainly the oldest at the moment. It is in extremely good condition.”
Researchers believe Erdmann’s grandfather, Richard Platz, threw the bottle in the sea while on a hike with a nature appreciation group in 1913. He was 20 years old at the time.
Much of the postcard was indecipherable, although the address in Berlin on the front of the card was legible, as was the author’s polite request that the note be sent by the finder to his home address.
“He also included two stamps from that time that were also in the bottle, so the finder would not incur a cost,” Erdmann said. “But he had not thought it would take 101 years.”
She said she was moved by the arrival of the message, although she had not known her grandfather because he died, at the age of 54, six years before she was born.
“I knew very little about my grandfather, but I found out that he was a writer who was very open minded, believed in freedom and that everyone should respect each other,” she said. “He did a lot for the young and later travelled with his wife and two daughters. It was wonderful because I could see where my roots came from.”
Like her grandfather, Erdmann said, she also liked culture and travelling around the world. She described herself as open minded, too. “What he taught his two daughters, my mother taught me and I have then given to my sons,” she said.
Despite her joy at receiving the bottled message, she said, however, that she hoped others would not repeat what her grandfather had done and throw bottles with messages into the sea. “Today the sea is so full of so many bottles and rubbish, that more shouldn’t be thrown in there,” she said.
The message and the bottle will be on display at Hamburg’s maritime museum until the beginning of May after which experts will attempt to decipher the rest of the text. It is not clear what will then happen to the bottle, but Erdmann hopes it will stay at the museum.
“We want to make a few photos available to put with the bottle and give it a face, so visitors can see the young man who threw the bottle into the water,” she said.
WHARF RAT
I googled the words “wharf rat” and to my dismay I found many references to those who were ardent followers of the “Greatful Dead”; not one reference to my assumption of that who wandered the docks attracted to the life on boats. Even in the International Maritime Dictionary there is not a reference to “wharf rat”. Naturally I then started to question my own idea. Was it self created; a figment of my own mind?
Continuing my internet search I found some references by Sven Carlsson about a man Jerry Warren; a self professed “wharf rat” stating it was a title one had to earn; a badge of pride.
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote ” When I saw the seafaring people leaning against posts and sitting on planks, under the lee of warehouses,–or lolling on long-boats drawn up high and dry, as sailors and old wharf-rats are accustomed to do, in seaports of little business.
Of course the quote from “Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame “There is nothing–absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” spoken by Ratty.
I had many of my own experiences on Newport’s Waterfront over the years; some of which I had the good sense to capture on film.
ST. PATRICK’S DAY PARADE
AMERICA’S CUP UPDATE
Hawaii, Newport, San Diego compete to host 2017 America’s Cup
BY RONNIE COHEN
San Francisco Thu Feb 13, 2014 7:12pm
(Reuters) – Hawaii and the coastal cities of Newport, Rhode Island, and San Diego are vying to entice billionaire Larry Ellison to let them host the America’s Cup in 2017, when the contest for the historic sailing trophy will next be held.
Ellison would by all accounts like to keep his Oracle Team USA sailing crew and the 35th America’s Cup matchup in San Francisco. Last year’s competition overcame a host of early difficulties and ended with an epic comeback win for Oracle and widespread praise for the spectacular racing venue on San Francisco Bay.
But despite strong support from San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, initial negotiations between the city and Oracle team CEO Russell Coutts for the 2017 event have been rocky.
Local politicians who have long opposed any public subsidies for what they deride as a rich man’s yacht race have gained ammunition with a report this week showing that the 2013 regatta cost city taxpayers more than $11 million and created fewer jobs than expected.
That may create an opening for the port of San Diego and Newport, Rhode Island – both of which have hosted multiple Cup regattas in the past – as well as the state of Hawaii, where Ellison owns most of the Island of Lanai.
Coutts confirmed in an email to Reuters on Thursday that, though he is continuing to talk with San Francisco, he is evaluating alternative venues. In the meantime, he plans to release next month the rules for the 2017 event, calling for smaller, less-expensive catamarans than the 72-foot yachts that competed for the Cup last year.
The big boats provided an exciting spectacle. But sailors questioned their safety after a British sailor died in a training accident, while their prohibitive cost limited the field to just four teams and undermined the economics of the event.
It’s unclear whether other locations are being seriously considered or simply being used as negotiating leverage in the San Francisco discussions, but some prominent Cup participants say a return to San Francisco is anything but assured.
“There was a strong desire to go to San Francisco, and I don’t think there’s a lot of confidence that that’s going to happen anymore,” Iain Murray, who was race director for the 2013 contest and is now heading up an Australian Cup challenge, told Reuters this week.
Bob Nelson, chairman of San Diego’s port commission told Reuters that his city would be thrilled to see the return of an event that was held there in 1988, 1992 and 1995.
“As great as San Francisco is as a venue, if there’s no deal to be had there, San Diego is ready,” said Nelson.
“We’re wide-eyed on the fact that San Francisco has invested a great deal of money and that much of that infrastructure remains available,” said Nelson.
Brad Read, executive director of Sail Newport, told Reuters on Wednesday he is filling out a “request for information” to promote Newport as the host city for the next regatta. Read would not divulge the questions in the RFI, saying they are confidential.
Read’s public-access sailing center on Narragansett Bay would make a perfect amphitheater for the 2017 series, he said. Newport hosted the Cup races from 1930 until 1983, whenAustralia broke the United States’ long stranglehold on the 163-year-old trophy known as the Auld Mug.
“Newport is synonymous with the history of the America’s Cup,” Read said. “We have the fan base, and we have the track.”
Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie expressed a willingness to do whatever he could to accommodate the races and Ellison.
“The governor thinks it’s a tremendous opportunity, and he’s certainly doing his best to be sure that Hawaii’s favorably considered,” press secretary Justin Fujioka told Reuters.
Negotiations between San Francisco and Ellison’s team were also contentious last time around. Cup officials flew off to Newport at the 11th hour before finally reaching a deal with San Francisco.
Murray said San Francisco remains everyone’s favorite.
“I think every sailor loves sailing in San Francisco. If you did a worldwide poll of sailors, racing on the bay in San Francisco would be right up there,” he said. He praised the San Francisco Bay’s ideal geography, its predictable, strong winds and its scenic backdrop framed by the Golden Gate Bridge.
“All the stars lined up when San Francisco got created for sailors,” he said.
The mayor’s office did not return calls or emails. Lee told Coutts in a December letter that lessons learned from the 34th America’s Cup would guide his approach to the next event.
“I am committed to negotiating an agreement for the 35th America’s Cup in San Francisco … that maximizes the economic, cultural and other benefits for the City and eliminates unnecessary risks and uncertainty,” he wrote.