A Colonial Sailing Ship Was Uncovered in the Foundation of the World Trade Center

It might come as a surprise (or not) to learn that a lot of Manhattan Island has been built on a giant trash heap. New York City has been upcycling its refuse and waste to build more New York City for more than a century.

Ellis Island was built on dirt used to create the New York City subway system. FDR Drive was built on landfill into the East River. The World Trade Center itself was built on a landfill that used to be part of the Hudson River. Those are just a few examples. There are a lot more.

You almost have to admire how New Yorkers solved the major problem of needing more space with another major problem: how to get rid of the garbage created by more people taking up that space.

So when excavation crews working at the former World Trade Center site in 2011 were surprised to unearth the hull of a colonial-era sailing ship, maybe they shouldn’t have been.

But New York City’s history as an expanding trash heap isn’t so widely known. In fact, when New Jersey sued New York for claims to Ellis Island, even New York City couldn’t find the evidence it needed to prove Ellis Island was built on New York dirt.

Everyone probably just assumes New Jersey is more likely to be a landfill anyway.

But it turns out that using old ship hulls as the foundations for landfills in Manhattan is an old practice. It dates to 1836 when developers began purchasing “water lots” along the Hudson River. Sinking a ship on the water lot was one of the most popular ways to begin landfill construction.

Since the World Trade Center sat on what was once part of the Hudson, it’s actually more surprising that work crews only found one old hull.

Coffee Or Die’s Lauren Coontz writes that excavators found the ship while working on a vehicular security center on the 56th block of lower Manhattan. Archeologists from the AKRF consulting firm dated the hull back to between 1770 and 1780, using the same technique used to date tree rings.

Those archeologists also concluded that the vessel was likely a commercial ship that made repeated trips to the Caribbean, as it was infested with shipworms and underwent frequent repairs. Many of the water lot landfills also used problematic hulls to begin their landfill constructions.

After all, it doesn’t make any sense to sink a good ship with some years of use left in it. That’s just a waste of good timbers.

The vessel unearthed at the World Trade Center site in 2011 isn’t the first excavation to dig up a surprise ship’s hull in the city. In 1982, developers building near the South Street Seaport found an 18th-century merchant vessel in its excavation site. Those workers hit a wooden wall that later was discovered to be the 85-foot bow of the oceangoing vessel. ​​

That ship happened to have a ceramic top aboard that dated back to 1746, so there was no need to start counting rings. Archeologists unearthed what they could and sent it to a museum for preservation before construction resumed.

Of course, the World Trade Center was much too big and heavy for a simple wooden-hulled merchantman to carry. Luckily, the technology around keeping river water out of landfills had progressed (predictably) a lot between 1770 and 1968, when construction began.

To keep the Twin Towers dry, workers built a massive reinforced concrete basin around the WTC foundation that became known as “The Bathtub,” which stretched all the way down to the bedrock. Excavations from the finished World Trade Center site went to create New York’s last large-scale landfill project in 1973, which is today Battery Park City.

No one really knows what ships were used to form the foundations of these landfills. After all, if they had real historical significance, New Yorkers might not be so quick to sink them and fill them with trash to build bodegas and skyscrapers.

-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on Facebook.

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