Dinner with a friend on a terrace – a windswept terrace at less than 50 degrees F – seemed like a good way to take a first step towards transitioning back to eating in restaurants. This place is at an old pier that is no longer used by ships; our terrace was between the pier’s head house facing Eleventh Avenue and the slip south of the pier. The picture above is the south face of the pier proper.
Building a pier with a steel frame and steel cladding riveted together in 1954 meant the structure was not very different than the ships that tied up there. And it has some of the same problems: steel rusts, and steel exposed to salt water rusts faster than steel exposed only to rain and other fresh water. The Hudson River at New York City is an estuary with a significant amount of salt. Just like ships have to be continuously scraped and painted, the pier needs similar maintenance.
