Allan Appel Photo
The 1930s-1940s signage was revealed only months ago when exterior siding was removed.
Before Lisa Fitch sells her Fair Haven Marina she hopes to make another sale, for only one dollar: to preserve the historic oyster barge that has long been on the property.
That deal is on the verge of being signed.
Fitch revealed the news during a tour of the “old barge,” which sits at the southern end of the Fair Haven Marina, which Fitch and her family purchased in 2008. Now Fitch has put the marina itself on the market, but first wants to ensure history doesn’t get lost in the transaction.
Photo courtesy of Lisa Fitch
The barge as restaurant, around 1983.
By the end of the year, Fitch said, she hopes to sell the barge to Kenneth Karl, of Terryville, a preservationist whose aim is to lift the building onto a supporting barge and restore it there to its original look, a working oyster barge of the kind that lined the Hudson River. Fitch said her price is only one dollar because in Karl she found someone who shares her preservation dream. Karl has set up a website whose mission is to save “the last remaining New York City oyster barge.”
The next step is to locate and purchase an affordable support barge as a platform for restoring the oyster barge, said Fitch, who’s assisting Karl in the search. He can afford to pay only about $15,000 for a barge, she reported; the going rate they have been encountering is closer to $75,000.
“We’ll make an Oct. 15 deadline” to find the barge, Karl said in a phone interview.
Fitch has said that once the oyster barge lifted onto the yet-to-be-found support barge, she’ll will permit Karl to keep the restoration project in her waters until maybe the end of the year.
Karl has restored old houses; this will be his first vessel. He expressed confidence in his ability to do the job. The hoisting and “restoring isn’t a big deal, replacing the sheathing outside and a new roof. To find a good end use is the hardest part,” he said.
Karl suggested the restored barge could become a floating laboratory for a not-for-profit, perhaps one promoting sustainable fisheries. Or he could turn it over, all spiffed up, to a museum like the Mystic Seaport. Or he could look for someone to invest the big bucks into converting it to a restaurant, perhaps like the Black Duck Cafe in Westport.
After basic restoration Fitch said she’d like to see the barge go to live permanently at the Mystic Seaport museum. That call is up to Karl, assuming he becomes the new owner, which seems likely.
“The whole community [is] indebted to her,” said John Herzan of the New Haven Preservation Trust..
The genuine late-1800s oyster barge is possibly the last known example in the country. It was built in New York City as a kind of floating salesroom for the oysters that were delivered right up to the barge’s back door.
When the oystering business suffered in the Big Apple due to pollution and other troubles, the barge was bought, along with one or two others, and transported to New Haven in the 1920s, according to Fitch.
There it was beached and served first as a speakeasy. The building was most recently, in living New Haven drinkers’ memory, a watering hole in the 1970s and 1980s; it was called “The Greek’s” because it was owned and operated by John Tsilfoglou.
By the time Fitch bought the property, the building was in profound disrepair and used mainly for storage. Yet she had fallen in love with it. She has become an amateur expert on oyster barges, which used to line the Hudson River shorelines in the long ago era when “oysters were hot dogs, the fast food of the era.”
The building is tapered at the top because many were lined up in a row in the harbor and needed space as the wind and tide lifted them.
Click here for a previous story on Fitch’s plans to sell the building to a food museum in New York City, repatriating the vessel, and to expand uses on the property.
She has since determined that running a marina is too much work for her to carry on. She said she feels she’s improved the property and neighborhood with a restaurant that’s become a Sunday morning breakfast hang-out for locals and a small office building designed to echo the old barge.
Not-So-Living History
From “Oystering from New York to Boston” by John Kochiss.
Fitch remembers her parents bringing her to the “old barge” when she was a little girl. Many people she has met at the marina or restaurant tell her, “I had my first beer” at the old barge.
“Remember when mom would make us come down here to get dad for dinner?” Fitch recalled two women recently telling her when they came by and viewed the building.
But long before it became a watering hole, it was a working barge in New York (never so in New Haven), where “you’d have two lines of men (pictured above) shucking or shelling oysters. Oysters were the fast food of the late 1800s,” Fitch said. “Sharpies” [or the New York City equivalent] would unload [the oysters] from the river behind.”
Fitch admitted there is not a lot left of the building, which in any event was built as not much more than a platform with four walls, with a keel below.
She pointed out how the floor, revealed now more clearly beneath the concrete and tiles laid down by “the Greek.” is bowed or crowned to permit water and other liquid run-off.
Various people over the years have had their own nostalgic dreams to somehow preserve and rehab the barge as an operating restaurant and keep it in New Haven. Fitch said the very tiny dimensions of the place, including the seven-foot ceiling on the second floor, where the kitchen and bar used to be, would make that fairly prohibitive.
Anyway, Fitch said, New Haven has only been a stopping place, albeit a long sojourn, of the vessel from its birthplace in New York City.
“I truly believe it belongs in Mystic,” she said.
Herzan called that destination an appropriate one, of several possible. The Trust is concerned at the moment more with the building’s extremely fragile state. “I’m interested in stabilization of the resource. It won’t go anywhere unless it’s secured and protected. Whatever can save it is of paramount importance,” he added.
“There are restaurant lovers, marine history lovers and plain historical preservation lovers. I’m confident it’ll find a home. We’ve got to do our work first to show it’s viable. It was landlocked. It’ll be so much more graceful on the water.”
He’s just set up his company to undertake the project: It’s named after the man, a researcher at Mystic Seaport, who was the first to identify the structure as not a building, but a vessel, said Karl.
That company is called The John Kochiss Extraordinaire Oyster Barge Preservation Company. Those interested in helping out or getting involved can call Karl at: 860 – 214-7524.
Really Awesome!! Thank you for your vision, Ms Fitch!!!