Pier A
Below left is Department of Docks Building, Pier A (1936) and immediately below to that is Battery, Foot of West Street (1936). Pier A is Manhattan’s oldest remaining pier, and the building features a clock tower at its western end, which was the first formal WW I memorial erected in the United States (1919). In Battery, Foot of West Street, we see a different angle of the Department of Docks Building, with the Whitehall Building on the right half of the frame.
The American Merchant Mariner’s Memorial, by Marisol Escobar, consists of four bronze figures situated on a fiber-reinforced concrete, sinking lifeboat. As the harbor’s tide rises during the day, the figure in the water is submerged by the sea, with only his reaching hand visible at high tide. The monument is based on a photograph taken by Reinhard Hardegen, the commander of U-123, who torpedoed the SS Muskogee on 22 March 1942. The survivors were never seen again.