Greenwich Titanic heads for the bottom
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All ashore
Greenwich Free Press has a very well written article on the demise of the “Showboat”, the old pseudo-paddle wheeler that was parked for years in Greenwich Harbor.
I was a little reluctant to link to Greenwich Free Press’s writer/publisher’s web site, because although I’ve linked, favorably, to her publication over the years, she’s responded by calling me a Nazi misanthrope and even tried to shut down this blog, but what the heck, when she’s not publishing puff-pieces for her advertisers and squeaking hysterically about Trump and the horrible male sex, she can write well, and she did a good job on this story.
The Showboat was once an attraction at Freedomland, the short-lived amusement park located where Co-Op City now stands (in fact, speculation has it that the owner of the marshland where it was built, William Zeckendorf, was in cahoots with NYC’s mayor and allowed Freedomland to be built solely to prove that the land itself could be developed as a far more profitable housing project — given the corruption in that city, there’s no reason to doubt that). I don’t remember much of the place except that my friend Sandy Hamill’s father (also father of Sandy’s younger sister, the Olympic skater Dorothy), took a group of us Boy Scouts there when I was ten. The amusement park ceased operations soon thereafter, but I don’t believe our visit had anything to do with that.
Regardless, the Showboat Inn eventually joined Freedomland into failure, despite its reputation as the finest whorehouse in Greenwich*, and was demolished and replaced by the DelaMar (still reputed to have an active meat market, but I wouldn’t know — perhaps you could ask the Free Press’s publisher) and the boat itself was sold for peanuts to Bill Frenz, local musical legend, founder of Billy and the Showmen, a band dating back to 1963 which, ironically, was the year Freedomland opened, and Bill had the hulk towed over to Byram, where it served as an entertainment venue for years.
This year, Frenz auctioned off the Showboat for a thousand-bucks and it was supposed to be loaded on a cargo ship and transported to Korea (?!!!). As the Free Press [sic][ reports, things did not go well:
[Greenwich Harbor Master Ian MacMillan] said the weight of the boat had been underestimated and that the bow of the boat, which had been full of cement, had broken up in the wind this week.
“This is a screw up,” MacMillan said, as the crane lifted the boat a few inches from the water. Popping noises could be heard as the bottom of the boat began to buckle.
On Friday afternoon, MacMillan said the fate of the Showboat did not look good
Possibly rivaled by Lucas’, now Gabriela’s — GPD Folk, help me out here.
