Royal Navy Visits Brooklyn

By on July 8, 2007 5:25 pm in Maritime, News

The Royal Navy ships HMS Illustrious (photo), an aircraft carrier, and Manchester, a destroyer, have been docked on opposite sides of Pier 7, near the foot of Atlantic Avenue, this weekend.  The ships were previously docked in Manhattan, but moved to Brooklyn on Friday.  Tomorrow they will complete their six day goodwill visit to New York, departing for Norfolk, Virginia, where they will stay five days before participating in a naval exercise with U.S. Navy and other NATO vessels.

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  • http://tugster.wordpress.com will

    thanks for identifying these ships. amy posted a comment and pix to my blog a few days ago.

  • http://bk11201.com EJ

    Atlantic Ave felt like the maritime port of the old days this weekend.

  • Bklyn Native

    A hearty welcome to our cousins from Great Britian.

    Hope there are no lingering hard feelings from the unpleasantness circa 1776 and 1812.

    Back in grade school I learned that during 1812, y’all were trying to impress our seamen. That phrase used to give me a good chuckle.

    Hopefully now your seamen will impress NYC. ;-)

  • Beavis

    heh, heh, heh, he said seamen.

  • brooklyn tattoo

    Just before the 4th, we were bombarded by drunken english sailors looking to get tattooed, as we dont tattoo drunk people, we started to make appointments for later in the weekend, when the 4th was over, and the revelry(sp?) stopped, I was away this weekend, i look forward to going back to work to see how that went… alot of them were tipping pints at the Field and Monteros, of course…

  • http://selfabsorbedboomer.blogspot.com Claude Scales

    I was in Montero’s for a while Sunday afternoon. There were seven or eight British sailors there, all enjoying themselves, but well-behaved. The owner even enlisted some of them to help him carry in barrels of ice.

    I’d be interested to learn how many of them come back to Brooklyn Tattoo, and what designs they favored.

  • nabeguy

    Dummy that I am, I saw some sailors on Saturday, and then the ship on Sunday, and never linked the two in my mind. At least now, I can explain the sailors to my daughter…she thought it was a Popeye convention.

  • brooklyn tattoo

    I’ll keep you updated, they werent badly behaved in our shop, just buzzed, and none in uniform . The 2 designs I was asked about was a Brooklyn Bridge piece and a sparrow on a hand.The sparrow is typical of sailors, as is a tattoo of a monument of a place visited…I am not supposed to go into work today, but am curious of how the weekend went, i will catch up later…I am sure they loved monteros, a real sailor bar…Pepe (the owner) is a great guy

  • brooklyn tattoo

    So, my partner reported that he had the busiest sunday ever last sunday, and most of it was the brits. They were leaving on monday, and they made appoinments galore. None were drunk when they came in, and as far as the subject matter, it ws unfortunately mostly tribal. Tribal consist of decorative sharp designs with little meaning other than aesthetic. and half of the work was fixing work that had been started on their home turf. more often than not, in towns not so populated, or urban, people will take it upon themselves to train themselves to tattoo, and cut up their friends in order to learn, this happens all over the world, not just England (we call these hometrained tattooers “kitchen magicians” or “scratchers”). So there you go. It was a 12 hour day, mostly tribal, alot of touching up.

  • http://selfabsorbedboomer.blogspot.com Claude Scales

    Brooklyn Tattoo: Thanks! Very interesting. I’m glad your shop was able to get some business out of this.