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Reprinted from the September 1993 edition of Lighthouse Digest.
After decades in the stormy seas off Cape Fear, North Carolina, a failed career as a museum, and a three-year sojourn at the bottom of a North Carolina harbor, John Krevey’s ship, the Frying Pan, probably deserves a rest.
Instead, the former Coast Guard lightship—whose strange appearance and homey name have piqued the curiosity of many New Yorkers since it first appeared there in 1991—has continued to wander from berth to berth in the harbor. Its latest home is as the resident ghost ship in a summer program at the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum.
“This is really one of the most beautiful lightships there ever was,” said Jerry P. Roberts, the technology curator at the museum, who calls the ship and its owner “the orphans of New York.”
A Four-Year Odyssey
That the 64-year-old Frying Pan is afloat at all, much less docked at one of the more prestigious sites in the city, is a testament to the efforts of the ship’s owner, John Krevey, who restored the vessel and brought it to New York after a four-year odyssey from North Carolina.
The Frying Pan Lightship takes its name from the Frying Pan Shoals off Cape Fear, which it guarded with beacons and a 1,000-pound bell as part of the United States Lighthouse Service from 1929 until 1965. “It was named after a shoal that was probably shaped like a frying pan,” Mr. Krevey said.
Lightships served as floating lighthouses, warning ships that they were approaching dangerous waters. Because they were built to stay in one spot and to weather the worst storms, lightships were designed for stability, with rounded double hulls that are wider at the base than at the deck.
Automated towers that look like offshore oil rigs replaced the lightships in the 1960s, and most of the ships were sold for scrap. The Frying Pan, though, was sold to the city of Southport, NC, in 1967 and turned into a museum. But budget cuts shut it down, and while local officials argued about its fate, it sank at the dock, ruining the engine.
The Frying Pan was eventually refloated and sold to a developer who tried to resell it as a floating restaurant.
That didn’t work, and on a cold winter day in 1983, a pipe burst, allowing seawater to rush in and sending the ship to the bottom once again. This time, the ship remained under the shallow water for three years.
Family’s Second Home
Mr. Krevey, 44, who lives in Battery Park City and whose company is on a pier in Manhattan, had already raised a 58-foot cabin cruiser that sank next to his office and then bought and sold an old tugboat before buying the Frying Pan in 1987 for $8,000.
Mr. Krevey, his wife Angela, and their two young children have made the Frying Pan—which is 133 feet long, displaces 600 tons, and has 30 rooms—a second home. The time underwater in North Carolina has given it much of its charm as a ghost ship, including barnacle-encrusted walls, peeling paint, and rusted engines. While the ship’s exterior has been painted, the inside looks almost as it did the day it was hauled up from the bottom in 1986.
“Inside, they’re keeping this bohemian ‘Addams Family’ meets ‘Gilligan’s Island’ charm,” said Mr. Roberts.
On the bridge, a range hood from a restaurant oven has been turned into the instrument console, and a barber’s chair serves as the captain’s seat. “You need a comfortable chair to sit on for the long voyages, and everything in this ship is a long voyage,” Mr. Krevey said. With its new engines, the Frying Pan manages a rather languorous five knots, about as fast as a sailboat.
Indeed, with some long stops along the way, the ship took four years to get from North Carolina to New York.
At the Kreveys’ first stop, in the small town of Whitehaven, Maryland, residents marveled at the odd assortment of New Yorkers who arrived every Thursday night to help Mr. Krevey work on the ship. The entourage, which included a member of the punk band The Plasmatics and a bald Frenchman known as “Potato,” would arrive in two black limousines that Mr. Krevey bought at auction and would work all weekend.
Docking the Hudson
Next was Annapolis, Maryland, where local boaters adopted the ship. “During sailboat races, they would use us as a buoy,” Mr. Krevey said.
For its first six months in New York, the Frying Pan was anchored behind the Statue of Liberty. But the Coast Guard was unhappy with that arrangement, so the Kreveys moved up the Hudson and anchored just off Riverside Park, where the ship soon became the topic of conversation among joggers and dog walkers.
The Frying Pan remained at the Intrepid Museum’s Pier 86 through Labor Day. Eventually, Mr. Krevey plans to use the ship as an exhibit and possibly charter it for private parties and events.
“This ship would have been scrapped,” said Mr. Roberts. “They said they would save this ship no matter what, and God bless them, they did.”
This story appeared in the
Nov/Dec 2024 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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