As a boy growing up in New York City my favorite part of The New York Times was the section entitled “Shipping Mails”. Here I could track which ocean liners were arriving and departing the deep harbor of the city, and exactly which Piers they could be found at on the Hudson River, which my Mother used to swim in as a girl growing up on Grandview Avenue in Nyack, New York. From my Grandmother’s house at 41 Benedict Road (the highest point on Staten Island) I studied the comings and goings of the ships, and could pretty much identify any of them going back and forth across the bay that stretched from the Verrazono Bridge to Sandy Hook.