Here's what the NY Times had to say about this marine salvage yard, more popularly known as the "ship graveyard" or "boat graveyard", back in 1990:

For decades the Witte Marine Equipment Company, the lone remaining commercial marine-salvage yard in the city, has given mothballed, scuttled, abandoned and wrecked ships of all sizes a final port. Through the years it has become, an "accidental marine museum," as a nautical magazine described it, with one of the world's largest collections of historic ships.

To historians like Norman Brouwer, curator of the South Street Seaport Museum, it "is a tableau of the history of shipping in New York."

There were once some 400 vessels to be found here, resting in the muck along a bend of the Arthur Kill. While there are far fewer today — old man Witte's successors have dismantled many of the boats since his passing in 1980 — the ship graveyard, now owned by the Donjon Marine Company, still makes for quite an impressive sight. This aerial view will help you get a sense of things, and, if you're interested, you can find many more photos of the place here.

This web had been woven in an almost perfectly circular hole in the deck of one of the ships. (The deck just looks white in the photo because of the high contrast between it and the dark water underneath.)

Nap time at the ship graveyard

Once the world's largest landfill; soon(ish — maybe 25 years from now) to be a 2,200-acre park, the second-largest in the city. And there might be goats, too!

The landscape in the last photo was quite picturesque, but there are still plenty of reminders here at Fresh Kills that this was an active landfill little more than a decade ago. Just past the fenced-in area on the left is a dock where garbage scows were unloaded.