New York City Has Salvaged John F. Kennedy’s Lost Navy Patrol Boat From a Cove Off the Coast of Manhattan

An obscure piece of US history was discovered late last month as
a crane salvaged what is believed to be the wreckage of the PT-59,
a Navy patrol boat commanded by former President John F. Kennedy
during his time in the military.

New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority pulled
from the mud the wreckage of the boat, which sank in the waters of
Manhattan’s North Cove urban
wetland. The MTA pulled the boat up to build a $610 million sea
wall on the waterfront in order to prevent the train yard there
from flooding, as it did during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

MTA officials consulted with archaeological historians who
believe the recovered wreckage belongs to the PT-59. The agency is
in touch with the John F. Kennedy Presidential
Library and Museum in Boston and the Battleship Cove maritime museum in Fall
River, Massachusetts, about possibly acquiring the remnants.

Kennedy’s record as a war hero helped get him elected to the
nation’s highest office. He rescued his crew during World War
II after a Japanese destroyer sunk his first vessel, the PT-109—a
tale that was famously recounted in the New Yorker.

The Navy sold the PT-59, which Kennedy commanded afterward, for
surplus in the 1950s and it became a fishing charter boat, later
rechristened the Sun Tan and the Sea Queen
V.

At some point, a fire damaged the boat, which was purchased by
Redmond Burke, a schoolteacher, in 1970. There were no engines, so
he had it towed to 208th Street, using it as a houseboat.

“It was an adventure for me,” Burke, now 80, and on hand for the
vessel’s emergence from the river, told the New York
Times. “It was me, the rats, and the few corpses that came
floating by.”

Burke claims that he checked the boat’s hull
number, 274398, with the US Coast Guard, who confirmed it was
the PT-59. His students informed him of the Kennedy connection.

A collector of Kennedy memorabilia, Aubrey Mayhew, once planned
to buy the PT-59, but the deal fell through and Burke abandoned the
boat in the mid-1970s, leaving it on the dock to sink into the
mud.

Kennedy biographer William Doyle, who uncovered this forgotten
history in his research, voiced his hopes that or a historic
organization might try to excavate the PT-59 to the New York
Post in 2017. Instead, it was the MTA that rose to
the occasion.

The post New York City Has Salvaged John F. Kennedy’s Lost
Navy Patrol Boat From a Cove Off the Coast of Manhattan
appeared first on artnet News.