The Yellow Submarine at Coney Island

Posted by mike as Bizzare Creations

The story of the old, rusting submarine near Coney Island is a long and interesting tale. It begins in 1951 with the Italian Line cruise ship Andrea Doria. The Andrea Doria weighed in at 29,100 tons and had a capacity of about 1,200 passengers and 500 crew. At the time it was considered to be one of the safest ships in the world. If I ever build a ship, I will never claim it to be the “safest ship” in the world, that’s just asking for it.

The Andrea Doria ran into trouble (literally) in 1956. In extremely foggy weather on the North Atlantic off Nantucket the ship collided with a Swedish liner bound for Gotheborg (the other ship’s name was the SS Stockholm). Some of the passengers and crew members were killed, but most survived. Unlike in the Titanic tragedy, other ships were in the vicinity to assist, as well as he SS Stockholm, which did not sink.

The Andrea Doria sunk with a large number of valuables onboard.

The Andrea Doria was known to be bountifully loaded with such diverse items as a $250,000 solid silver statue of a mermaid; thousands of cases of liquor; tons of provolone cheese; 200,000 pieces of mail that the federal government would pay 26 cents a piece for; the ship’s bronze propellers, worth $30,000 each, paintings locked in air-tight vaults; industrial diamonds; the ship’s $6 million metal scrap value; passengers’ personal property left in several vaults and more.

A few years later, in 1963, a Brooklyn Navy Yard ship fitter named Jerry Bianco decided he was going to raise the Andrea Doria. Why let all that good treasure just sit at the bottom of the ocean, right? So, with no prior submarine building experience, he decided to build an “economy” sub. Named the Quester 1, the submarine measured fourty-five feet in length and was painted with yellow zinc chromate paint, the cheapest possible. His plan was to fill the ship with inflatable dunnage bags which would hopefully raise the ship to the surface.

The sub was ready to launch in 1971. Crowds and local media were gathered for the launch at Coney Island Creek. Bianco’s daughter even broke a bottle of champagne across the bow before a giant crane lowered the craft into the creek. The crane operator, lowering the sub into the water before allowing water ballast into the craft, caused the sub to turn over and sink. Embarrassing! Biano later refilled the ballast and tethered the sub, but he was never able to return to the project and had lost his financial backing. The ship remained docked there until 1975, when a storm washed the boat ashore. It’s still there, to this day.

The rusty submarine is still there, to this day. If you want to see it for yourself, it’s just west of the Home Depot on Cropsey Avenue.