At Sea.(The Talk of the Town)(City Island, New York)

Shortly before nine o'clock on the evening of July 13, 2007, a fire broke out on the front porch of the City Island Nautical Museum. The fire was most likely set by local teen-agers, for whom the porch was a favorite hangout. "We think they were setting off firecrackers inside a rotten column," Barbara Burn Dolensek, a trustee of the museum, said recently. Backup firefighters had trouble negotiating the traffic on City Island Bridge, which has connected the island to the rest of the Bronx since 1873, and by the time they got the fire out the museum's facade was deeply charred, and smoke and water had damaged several exhibits. The museum was closed for repairs for almost a year and a half. It reopened in mid-December, thanks, in part, to a thirteen-hundred-dollar gift from the fourth graders at P.S. 175, a few blocks away, who were determined not to endure a second academic year without a full complement of field trips.

City Island, which is at the western end of Long Island Sound, just south of Pelham Bay Park, looks like the illegitimate child of Nantucket and Hunts Point Avenue. It contains what is probably the city's densest concentration of yacht clubs (six of them) and seafood restaurants (Johnny's Reef, Tony's Pier, Sammy's Fish Box, Sammy's Shrimp Box), yet the restaurants' parking lots tend to be enclosed by tall, barbed-wired-topped chain-link fences, and knowledgeable seafood-loving locals often order lamb chops or steak. The Nautical Museum is on Fordham Street, in a nineteenth-century building that used to be a public school. It's a few doors up from the tiny ferry that runs between City Island and Hart Island, a half mile to the east. Hart Island served as a prisoner-of-war camp toward the end of the Civil War and currently contains a vast city-owned cemetery, a potter's field, which is used for the interment of stillborn infants, unclaimed and indigent people of all ages, and amputated limbs. The deceased--among them the novelist Dawn Powell, who died penniless, in 1965--are buried in long trenches, in stacked pine boxes. The burials are conducted by prisoners from Rikers Island, who, on their way to and from the ferry landing, travel past the museum in ...