Eugene Francis Moran

Background

Eugene F. Moran was born on March 24, 1872, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Michael Moran, founder of what became the Moran Towing and Transportation Company, and of Margaret Haggerty.

Education

Few boys, however bright and industrious and however prosperous their parents, stayed in school past the eighth grade in the 1880's, and Moran was no exception.

Career

He had never liked school, and the excitement of the towboatman's life (his father had first engaged in towing barges on the Hudson River between New York City and Albany) was further heightened by his father's growing prominence in the rough-and-ready business of tugboating and by his older brother Dick's outstanding success as boatman and pilot in New York's booming harbor. Apart from the elements of practical navigation, moreover, the chief requirement for a tugboatman then, as now, was an intimate knowledge of the harbor, the tides, and the currents, which can be learned nowhere but on the job.

Moran was determined to be a boatman and served during the summer of 1886 as second deckhand on the M. Moran. His service consisted in large measure of helping the cook, but by summer's end he was adept at heaving lines, tying knots, and similar elementary chores - and still determined to be a boatman. But his father had other ideas. "You're not heavy enough in the stern to work on tugboats, " he said, although it is clear that of his five sons he had picked Eugene to succeed him as head of the business.

In 1887 he got Eugene a job at $60 a week with the Lancashire Fire Insurance Company, where he could learn the intricacies of marine insurance.

In 1889 Moran joined the family firm. Well before the end of the nineteenth century, the steam revolution was complete, and the ships that tugboatmen were called upon to maneuver were increasing in size, complexity, and cost. Tugs, too, became larger, and by the end of the century the Moran Company was operating a large fleet of them in New York and other major harbors of the United States. The skyscraper building boom and the construction of such major improvements as subways, which transformed New York after 1898, brought added business for the towing firms. Hauling of barges and lighters (the latter vital to the interchange of freight between the numerous railroads whose tracks ended at waterside on the Hudson, the East, and the Harlem rivers and New York Bay) and of scows loaded with garbage or excavation rubble became important tows.

"There's more city bottom land out there now than on Manhattan Island, " Moran liked to say, referring to the spot in Lower New York Bay where rubble was dumped. By the turn of the century it was apparent that the thirty-foot channels through which ships made their way across the sandbar that lay athwart the entrance to New York Harbor were no longer deep enough. Moran was active in encouraging the federal government to dredge the channels. As a member (and for fifty years chairman) of the Committee on Rivers, Harbors and Piers of the Maritime Association of the Port of New York, he kept up the pressure on the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers until the Hudson had been dredged to a depth of forty feet, shore to shore, as far north as Fiftieth Street, to give the city the most convenient passenger liner piers in the world.

Most of Moran's career was spent in the demanding, dangerous, but ultimately prosaic work of keeping things in motion in the world's busiest port. As he grew older, Moran watched with regret as fewer and fewer people, especially the young, seemed to be aware of the great body of water that had brought New York to first rank among the cities of the world. The tubes and tunnels that were dug beneath the Hudson after 1900 quickly made the ferries that plied between New Jersey and Manhattan obsolete. The passing of the great liners, which were quickly eclipsed by jet airplanes after 1960, soon made such landmarks as the Narrows between Upper and Lower New York Bays and even the Statue of Liberty unknown to all but a few.

After his father died in 1906, Moran assumed the presidency of the family firm. In the same year he moved the office from South Street to 17 Battery Place, where the dispatchers could shout orders direct to crews from a balcony of the Whitehall Building. In 1930 he became chairman of the board. In 1898 the company's gross revenues had been $125, 000; by 1944 they exceeded $8 million. After more than a decade of development and testing of diesel power plants, the Moran company took delivery of its first diesel-electric tug in 1936.

Four years later Moran yielded the presidency of the company to a nephew, Edmond J. Moran. He died on April 13, 1961, in Palm Beach, Florida.

Achievements

• Eugene Francis Moran was a tugboatman, who afterwards became the head of the family firm, Moran Towing Corporation, which is now considered as the leading provider of marine towing and transportation services.

Membership

Eugene F. Moran served the Port of New York Authority as its chairman from 1942 to 1959. He also served as a member of the New York Transit Authority.

Connections

On November 10, 1897, Eugene F. Moran married Julia Claire Browne; they had six children.

Father:

Michael Moran

Mother:

Margaret Haggerty

Wife:

Julia Claire Moran (Browne)

Brother:

Dick Moran