After being greeted by a 21-gun salute, the warship built from World Trade Center steel USS New York is back home. A New Yorker who knows the harbor better than anyone else, not to mention the pain of Sept. 11, guided it into the city. Harbor pilot Neil Keating, whose firefighter brother Paul was killed on Sept. 11, pulled the warship into place this morning. He told the Post, "It's fitting that 7.5 tons of Twin Towers steel were used to make the bow, because that's where the ship takes a pounding and keeps trudging forward through roughs seas. We're like ambassadors when we go on board."
Also on the ship last night acting as an ambassador, a Yankees ambassador that is, was Mayor Bloomberg. He flew to the ship, his hovercraft landing on deck, just in time to join the crew and catch the Yankees take on the Phillies. "How cool is that that the mayor of New York, the city most affected on 9-11, saw fit to take out time to spend with us?" Marine Col. Mark Desens told the Daily News.
The mayor also threw the crew a few Yanks baseball caps and gave the ship's captain, Cmdr Curt Jones, an official New York City flag that once flew over City Hall. Other guests to the warship include, according to the NY Times, "business executives, military officers and defense contractors" as well as "Jets owner Woody Johnson and the former Navy secretary Gordon R. England" who even stayed overnight.
