When the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in the Patapsco River after being hit by a container ship, those of us who grew up in waterfront families thought of our fathers. It would have been kitchen table conversation along the narrow streets of Crabtown for months, probably longer.
Like the bridge, my tugboat man father and the dads of the guys I grew up with are gone.
Robert and Gregory Lukowski, first cousins born in the mid-1950s, spent just about every weekend of their childhoods at the Seaman’s Cafe, their grandmother’s saloon and boarding house at 1718 Thames Street in Fells Point. The city’s tugboat fleets docked across the street on each side of the Recreation Pier.
“We were maybe nine or ten years old and we’d run across the street and jump on the tugs,” said Robert Lukowski. “We pretended we were driving the boats.”
Both grew up to do just that. The son of a tug captain, Gregory joined a clean-up crew out of high school and rose from a deckhand to Chesapeake Bay pilot. Robert, the brother of a tug captain, lived around the corner from his grandmother. He became a pilot in the Port of Los Angeles after apprenticing on neighborhood tugs. Both are now retired, their thoughts are never far from the water.
“My birthday is in June when school is out,” said Gregory, whose father Jerome was best friends with my old man, Manuel, a chief engineer. “My favorite gift was spending the whole day with my father, moving ships around the harbor.”
By the time the Lukowski boys came ashore for good, the Key Bridge – and the cranes and ships seen from the 1.6 mile span – was one of the few visible symbols that Baltimore remains a mighty port of call.
Perhaps not as robust as early-to-mid-20th century when Bethlehem Steel in Sparrows Point turned out a Liberty ship a day for the World War II effort, but still a bedrock of the Maryland economy. The Port of Baltimore leads the nation in the import and exports of cars and trucks and handles an estimated 50 million tons a year of wood, aluminum, gypsum, iron and steel, and other products.
It’s been decades – particularly in the wake of 9/11 – since Baltimore’s maritime industry was concentrated in neighborhoods, dramatized in Hitchcock’s 1964 movie Marnie. When Tippie Hedren walks out of her mother’s Federal Hill row house on Sanders Street, the scene is dominated by the bow of a cargo ship at the end of the block.
Generations of Baltimore stevedores simply walked from their front doors to ships in port and went to work. The view from Sanders Street has long looked out on a harbor of pleasure boats and amusements.
There are no boarding houses anymore for itinerant seamen like the fabled Norwegian coal shoveler “Mister Olie” in Fells Point, where the Lukowski tavern is now a self-described “local beach bar with laid back vibes.” And no tugboats across the street, all moved behind security fences some 40 years ago.
In the 1920s, the Thames Street pier where the tugs tied up was a spot where my Polish grandmother and her wanna-be flapper girlfriends went to dances. From the time it opened in 1914 to house cargo, boys played ball on the roof, which was covered with a derivative of cork. A ball slugged over the chain-link fence around the perimeter was a homerun.
“I played softball up there all the time,” said Robert. “When someone hit it out, the tugboat guys would fish the ball out of the water and throw it back to us.”
The recreation pier is now a hotel with room rates averaging about $500 a night, about what my father made in a month in the engine room while putting my brother and myself through Catholic school.
One of the few things that still defines the 17th century village as a waterfront enclave is the water itself.
As a young priest, Cardinal James Gibbons (1834-1921) crossed from Fells Point to Locust Point in a rowboat to say Mass for Polish congregations on both sides of the channel. Water taxis now take people to bars and restaurants around the harbor rim.
A few years after Gibbons earned his red hat, the Lukowski family arrived from Poland and found work as stevedores, tug captains, union leaders and line handlers.
Robert’s late uncle Gilbert Lukowski was once president of International Longshoremen’s Association Local No. 1355. He gave me my first break in the newspaper business with a scoop for the City Paper during a 1977 ILA strike.
When I asked why he was willing to talk to me when the union had called a news blackout, he stared at me like I was an idiot and barked, “Who’s your father?”
That’s how it was in Baltimore – on the waterfront, at the racetrack and the assembly line – for more than a hundred years.
Robert, now 70, was the last family member to work the water. On the day of the Key Bridge crash he said, “The whole thing collapsed like a toy. I’m almost in tears.”
I think I spotted a tear in my father’s eye when I shipped out for the first time after high school in 1976. It was out of love, perhaps pride though he never wanted me to end up on the waterfront.
With dreams of becoming a writer and ignorant that kids like me usually went to college to practice the craft, I bugged Dad my senior year to get me a job on a ship. If he’d been a ringmaster I’d have lobbied him for a job with the circus. This, I believed, was how you made your bones in the world of letters.
I knew nothing of handling lines when I boarded the infamous S.S. Mayaguez to work as an Ordinary Seaman. Dad put a word in with an old sailing buddy at the seaferer’s union and I was hired. The officers called me “Junior.”
A World War II hospital ship converted to containers for runs between Baltimore, Puerto Rico and New Orleans, the Mayaguez had been seized the year before I signed on – just after the fall of Saigon – by the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia. It was recaptured by the U.S. Marines.
Imitating the other deckhands before we shoved off, I saw a tugboat headed toward the ship, which was odd because we were already made fast to tugs that would tow us toward the channel and the not-quite-yet-completed Key Bridge.
As it pulled abreast of us, I heard the shrill and familiar “toot” and looked up to see my father beaming in the wheelhouse of the Baker-Whiteley tug America, waving farewell with Gregory’s father “Romey” at the wheel.
It idled for a moment as I waved back – I can see it now, clear as the summer day when it happened – and backed off to give room for us to be underway.
Rafael Alvarez is the author of the Orlo & Leini tales set in old East Baltimore. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com
Beautiful memories. Thank you for a slice of Baltimore and its families.