Ed Fanuzzi grew up going on scrap drives during WWII, built his first diving helmet at age 11, and since then has collected innumerable items from wrecked ships in the waters around New York City. Most of all, Ed is always searching for gold. This exhibit invites you to take a dive into Ed’s stories and scraps to see if you come up with any gold of your own.
Introduction
It’s a sunny day on a Monday. I’m all full of grease and crap. Up to my ears in alligators as usual. I happened to do a stupid thing on a cold weekend. This should be done in the summer. But I took my boiler out. And I found one in my backyard. Been there for I don’t know how many years. More than fifteen. And it’s an actual pulse jet engine submerged in water. And it a unique boiler because it captures almost all the heat – 96% of the heat and hardly anything goes out the exhaust. So it’s very efficient. When they designed this boiler they were way ahead of the time. They tried to duplicate it in a couple of manufacturers. Its troublesome – you need to go to school to work it. I went to school. I am licensed in New Jersey. Probably anywhere. Its just a certificate said I attended school. I don’t know what good it is. But I understand it. But the reason it went out of favor was nobody could fix it. It’s so complicated technically. It’s got so many safeties on it that it hardly wants to work. Being it’s a jet engine, once it fires, it don’t stop until you stop the fuel. It doesn’t require any electric and there’s no moving parts. It fires with a blower and a spark plug. Once it ignites it keeps burning and it captures so much heat so fast that it’s actually too big for my house. But I’m gonna’ leave it there for one year. I’m gonna’ take it out and buy a modern one. I’m doing this just to piss everybody off. All my family and friends, they just are screaming at me from top to bottom.
Twelve seconds to get that forty gallons up to a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty. That’s marvelous. ‘Course the noise level is another thing. All the neighbors hate me anyway so they’re gonna’ hear this jet engine. But I’m making mufflers. I’ve already quieted it down. That’s yet untold, that story. But it’s gonna’ make noise for a while until I figure out how the hell to quiet it down.
—Ed Fanuzzi
Oysters
These are some of the oyster shells that used to be – Staten Island was like an oyster capital of the world. Used to come here and collect oysters for all over. And then the pollution killed them all. But these are some of the oysters, there’s one up there. That oyster was next to a piece of iron and it started to become a conglomerate. It seems that iron and things like stones and sand, they all turn into a glob. And I find so much of that. Need some scientist to explain it.
Copper
Ed’s father worked in the cellar of their family home with scrap copper. He turned it into small items like the hook and the slotted spoon in this box. Look closely at the small indentations from where the copper was pounded on both pieces. On the spoon, Ed thinks he made the slots with a nail.
Mask
The big job I had for this mask, it was the biggest, was Vanderbilt’s job, when he sunk a barge. The ice in the creek was very thick and he was pulling this barge up to shore to put the hoppers and cement mixers and stuff on it to transport it over to this other place. Well it was below zero and everything was really frozen pretty bad and he couldn’t get the barge close to shore. So he tied a couple of cables on it with bulldozers. Pulled it, thinking that the weight of the front of the barge would press the ice down like an icebreaker. And it didn’t. The ice went right through the barge and it sunk.
And I got the call, ‘cause I knew Neely Vanderbilt and I went there and I made pieces of plywood with canvass on it. I figured I knew there would be holes 12” deep right through the barge, ‘cause that’s how thick the ice was. So I made plywood about a foot and a half – I think they were three foot pieces. And what I would do is I would go underwater and the hole in the bottom of the barge – I would put the plywood with canvass on it and nail it on to the barge with roofing nails. And when I went in the water, the ice water, this mask didn’t cover my temple and it got me and I passed out from the cold. And Donald Dekker actually saved my life. He felt me go down. I had a rope around me. He pulled me up. And after I warmed up and came to, I put more foam rubber around my head, insulated it more and went down and I finished the job and raised the barge.
Skull
This is a skull Ed found on a dive one time. He doesn’t know what kind of a creature it comes from. Do you? We thought that maybe somebody at Columbia might have an answer.
Weisseglass
Weisseglass made all kinds of crates. This was in the days when there was iron and wood, so this crate is probably 60 years old or so, laying in the rain and it finally fell apart. We broke it apart just to salvage the bottom and one board off of it. But Weisseglass had a dairy down the street from here, owned by Oscar Weisseglass, who was also a friend of my father’s, ‘cause my father did a lot of tile work in his milk dairy – milk factory.
I worked for General Electric in Jersey and I did the Hotpoint – I was the factory representative for Hotpoint. And I did all their appliances. So when you had a serious complaint about your Hotpoint dishwasher or washing machine, I go down to investigate it.
So I got a call one day to go to Oscar Weisseglass house to fix, I think it was their dishwasher had a defect. When I was leaving the house there was this little dog, was yapping and yapping, and he bit me. He got me by the leg and I got my toolbox and my big flashlight, and he’s hanging on my ankle and I’m bleeding like a stuck pig, and I whack him in the head with the flashlight, and he got pretty quiet.
So I pick the dog up, and I rang the doorbell, and I says, “I don’t know whose dog this is, but there’s a dog here. He doesn’t look so good.” And they’re all hollering and screaming and I left.
I went to the hospital, and I told them that it was Oscar Weisseglass’s dog, and they says, “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with you. That dog already bit five or six people.” So they just put iodine on it and that was the end of it. Poor Oscar Weisseglass’s dog.
Speed Control
That’s the speed control. This got bent up in the wreck. This was on the – right next to the wheel. And there was a little thing in here and you just moved it, varoom up and down. And it was spring loaded, so it would stop in these notches.
Running Light and Battery
The boat wound up on the Rockaways on the rocks coming in. The boat was totally in tact, and they could’ve pushed it off shore or maybe with another boat just towed it out and save it. But the people on that beach pulled it up to wreck it, and they stole – they went inside of it before it sunk or anything, and I had beds in there for six. I mean, it was a beautiful boat. I used to take families away and we’d go up the Hudson River and stay for the weekend under the George Washington Bridge. There’s a nice little beach there with bocce courts and picnic. So we used to swim off the boat. But anyway, it was fully equipt with fishing poles – probably ten rods. I had diving gear for two people. My compressor, which was worth about two thousand dollars and the engines and generators. All portable stuff. And this guy actually got out of jail and he lived on the Rockaways. During Hurricane Donna, this is what I get, this guy not only robbed my boat. I was kicking doors down, I was a little berserk and one woman, she got scared as hell and she told me, “Could I please keep what I got off your boat?” And I says, “Well what did you get?” She says, “Well I needed blankets for the kids.” And I said, “You can keep whatever you got.” I think she took a mattress, blankets. The guy I was after was the one that stole the compressors and stuff. And I pretty well had it nailed down, but I got out of there before he went to jail. But what he did, his next-door neighbor was pregnant. He went in that house, she wasn’t there, and he took the chandeliers and everything off that house. I don’t know what he did – sell them, scrap them. But they caught him in that deal. Never got anything back.
I met a guy in a gas station and I asked him if he could help me get my engine off the beach. The engine was washing up and down. The engine weighed like eight hundred pounds, but it was washing up and down the beach with the bottom of the boat after the boat broke up into a million pieces. And I lassoed it with a cable and held it. And he loved it, this guy I met in the gas station. He had a WWII three quarter ton weapons carrier and he came down with winches and cables, and we winched it up on the beach, put it in my van and brought the engine back here. I cleaned it and got it running on the ground, and it stayed with me for almost fifty years, and I sold it recently to a guy who is restoring antique boats. It’s in Maryland someplace.
That was the story of the Betty Jane. And I took a lot of stuff off the wreck. Portholes, and them lights I took off. And the propeller and the shaft and the shifting rod.
Betty Jane was the name that came with it. The boat was a fluke. I heard about it in a bar. A guy told me they gonna’ bulldoze this boat. They had a fight – the gamblers owned this boat up in Wappinger Falls. And this guy - they had a fight because they were using it for gambling, whatever they did, and they just put this new engine in it. And he wanted to use it for fishing, whatever it was, you had ‘till one-o-clock to get the boat or they were gonna’ bulldoze it. So I went up there and I think I paid maybe a thousand dollars for it. But I was in a rush to get it off there because they had the bulldozer running and everything. So me and my buddy Sam, I had a little car, so I took the battery out of the car and I brought my battery down to the boat and it started right up. And we left the dock. Left my car at Wappinger Falls. Left the dock and thank God I brought tools, hoses, plus a gasoline pump ‘cause I didn’t trust the boat. I was afraid it might sink.
And it almost did sink. Coming down past the Statue of Liberty, Sam comes hollering that the water’s up to the bottom of the engine. I said, “Oh, Christ!” I started the pump, pumped it out, and it was just keeping up with the leak until we got around by Chelsea, and the boat was really sinking. And I ran it full steam ahead right up on the bank. Ran it right up on the mud, hit the shore, and the mud sealed all the cracks. And the next morning, the boat was floating and I pumped it out and then Gene Edkins had a railway right next door. I put it on his railway, and then me and my father put a new - couple of planks in the boat were rotten on both sides. Maybe ten ribs we put in. Bent the oak ribs and everything was copper riveted. It was a beautiful boat. White cedar.
