"The Mary Whalen is a great platform for discussing an extremely wide range of topics. You hear people talking about different welding techniques and then move right into complex discussions of the past, present and future of the City's waterfront.

I was struck by how many parents brought their kids. Its an industrial ship, but because the ship has been branded a museum space, it is understood to be a safe place for inter-generational interaction. Kids were literally crawling on the metal deck and drawing with chalk.

People are innately curious about our industrial heritage, a world that is essentially inaccessible to them unless they work or worked there. The Mary Whalen is like a portal into that world.

With a story like this you end up with a great intersection of people that normally would not interact—retired tug captains and longshoremen talking to parents and kids with designer clothes coming from upper Manhattan. Somehow the deck of the Mary Whalen feels like a totally comfortable place for this to occur."

Thanks to openhousenewyork's extraordinary outreach, some key people found us: a former woman crewmember, the son of an engineer, and Karen Dyrland, the daughter of Alf Dyrland, the first captain of the tanker under her second (and current) name The Mary A. Whalen.  These people brought us history and will help bring the Whalen story to life. We also met two people from Columbia University's preservation program who told us a colleague wrote a Master's thesis in 2002 about repurposing old tankers. This thesis was news to us; and we'll be getting a copy from them.