Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll find out about the city’s efforts to remove abandoned boats from its 520-mile shoreline. We’ll also get details on Chobani’s plans for a billion-dollar plant in upstate New York.
The city’s shipwreck hunter, Nate Grove, described his finds like this: “No pirate ships, no treasure chests, no doubloons, no corpses.”
He has found what he expected to find, pleasure boats, 78 in the last 12 months, mostly 20- to 30-footers whose owners probably couldn’t afford them anymore. The owners left them where they ran aground or sank in not-very-deep water, and simply walked away.
Grove is the Parks Department official behind a push to clear abandoned boats from around the city — vessels that have been left on or near the shoreline.
There are a lot of derelict boats — more than 800, the city says. There is also a lot of shoreline, 520 miles in all, which Grove likes to point out is more than the shorelines of Boston, Miami, San Francisco, San Diego and Seattle combined.
Almost a third of the city’s long shoreline is parkland, which means that Grove has jurisdiction through the Parks Department office responsible for marine debris disposal. And because 12 public marinas are on city parkland, the department started a vessel turn-in program for people to surrender their unwanted boats before they become derelict.
Partially submerged wrecks pose obvious risks to navigation and to what the Parks Department calls “waterfront enjoyers” like swimmers and surfers. But Parks Department officials say that the vessels are also environmental hazards. Most pleasure boats have fiberglass hulls, which can break down and release microplastics into the water. And oil and fuel can leak out of tanks as they rust, upsetting sensitive marine ecosystems.
Grove isn’t expecting to find the likes of the General Slocum or Captain Kidd’s ship, the Adventure Galley. “I don’t want to make this sound more romantic than it is,” Grove said. “Rare is the really interesting craft.”
But when it comes to recreational vessels, “I see the life cycle” of the boat, he said.
Someone probably bought a boat at a discount, perhaps from a neighbor who wanted to unload it, he said. “Then they find out gas costs a lot,” he explained before repeating the nautical quip that the word “boat” is an acronym for “bust out another thousand.”
As a pleasure boat ages, he said, “You can’t just find a cheap mechanic — these things are costly.” And a boat is “the first thing that gets cut when their budget gets tight.”
Worse, if the engine has conked out, “there’s no resale value,” he said. The fiberglass hull means that there’s no scrap metal to salvage and sell.
“People can scratch the identification off their boat,” hoping to keep the vessel from being traced back, and then abandon it, he said. That is a crime, but one that is not often prosecuted. The Army Corps of Engineers can haul away abandoned vessels that block major navigation channels like the East and Hudson Rivers, and the United States Coast Guard can move recreational boats that are leak fuel or obstruct rights of way.
The city began cleaning up marine burial grounds after Hurricane Sandy, first with a $2 million federal grant that focused on the removal of more than 50 boats in places like Eastchester Bay in the Bronx and College Point in Queens. Grove brought an urgency to the effort that included updating city regulations on when and how abandoned eyesores could be removed.
“We’re a maritime city — that’s what made Manhattan Manhattan back in the day,” Grove said. “Yet what I found was a woefully behind-the-times set of regulations and procedures for dealing with recreational craft. We’re stuck in the 1800s, when wrecks were referred to as something worth something, when it was presumed they had valuable cargo, rather than reflecting the current reality, when it’s recreational craft that litter our shorelines.”
In January, the city hauled away a boat that was half-buried off Breezy Point in Queens. “Everyone knew about it, coming into the channel, a sailboat almost completely covered in sand,” Grove said. “We had to get heavy equipment on the beach. It was more of an on-land removal than in the water.”
Weather
Expect a mostly sunny sky with a high near 73. In the evening, temperatures will drop to the low 50s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until May 26 (Memorial Day).
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Chobani plans a big factory in upstate New York
In the early 2000s, Chobani hired a few workers to make Greek-style yogurt in a defunct dairy plant in upstate New York where Kraft once made cheese.
Now, after becoming one of the nation’s biggest producers of dairy products, Chobani is planning a new plant nearby, a million-square-foot factory that will cost at least $1.2 billion. The company says it will rank as the largest dairy plant in the United States. Chobani already claims to be one of the fastest-growing food companies in the country, with net sales of $2.96 billion last year and adjusted pretax earnings of $509 million.
The new factory, in Rome, N.Y., is not all that Chobani has on the drawing board. The company announced last month that it would invest $500 million to expand a factory in Idaho that is expected to boost production by 50 percent.
New York officials, determined to lock in the state’s place as an agribusiness leader, offered incentives to win a competition for Chobani’s biggest-ever plant. “We were in high pursuit,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said, noting that the company would add more than 1,000 jobs in the Mohawk Valley region, roughly a third of Chobani’s existing global work force. The incentives included millions of dollars in tax credits and grants for the site at a former Air Force base.
Thanks in part to Chobani, New York is the nation’s largest producer of yogurt, sour cream, cream cheese and cottage cheese and the fifth largest producer of milk. And Chobani now produces more than yogurt. It makes oat milk, creamers and coffee beverages, having bought La Colombe Coffee Roasters for $900 million in 2023.
METROPOLITAN diary
After ‘Gypsy’
Dear Diary:
After seeing “Gypsy” on Broadway, my husband and I stopped for a pretzel.
We walked slowly as we munched on our snack. I saw a man and a woman walking together ahead of us. When I noticed the Playbill in the man’s back pocket, I realized that I had lost mine.
We must have passed them at some point because when we sat down on a bench to finish the pretzel, they walked past us. I noticed that the woman was holding her own Playbill.
I jumped up. Approaching them, I explained that I had left my Playbill at the theater and asked whether they might spare one. I said I had seen one in the man’s back pocket when I was walking behind them.
“Are you looking in my pockets?” he asked.
Looking bemused, the woman gave me her copy. We agreed that Audra McDonald had given an award-winning performance.
I don’t usually keep Playbills, but I will keep this one.
— Judi Karp
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters, Sarah Goodman and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
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