In the video above you’ll see aerial footage of ships left abandoned in Staten Island, NY., in a eerie graveyard of WWII-era ships nicknamed the “Arthur Kill Ship Graveyard”.
The Arthur Kill ship graveyard was never meant to become such a decrepit spectacle. In the years after World War II, the adjacent scrapyard began to purchase scores of outdated vessels, with the intention of harvesting them for anything of value. But due to an overwhelming number of once-sea-worthy vessels, ship-breakers gave up on the unsuccessful effort tearing down the abandoned boats, leaving the ones that remained to rust.
The now partial-sunken maritime museum was originally known as the Witte Marine Scrap Yard. Before the boats were dumped at the graveyard, the site was used as the slip for The Blazing Star Ferry, which transported passengers and cargo across the Arthur Kill to Woodbridge Township, New Jersey.
This ship graveyard bears the final resting place for vessels such as the USS YOG-64, a Navy gas tanker that was posted near Bikini Atoll during the Operation Sandstone nuclear weapons tests in 1948. USS PC-1264, the first Navy ship – submarine chaser – to have a predominately African-American crew during World War II.
Or New York City Fire Department fireboat Abram S. Hewitt, which served as the floating command post at the 1904 sinking of the passenger ferry PS General Slocum, a disaster that killed more than a thousand people.
