Riley built his 2.4m-tall submersible not from oak but from cheap plywood, coated with fiberglass and topped off with portholes and a hatch bought from a marine salvage company. Pumps in the bottom allowed him to add water for ballast or remove it.
On Thursday evening, he and the two friends, Jesse Bushnell and Mike Cushing, scrambled around in the murky Red Hook water - avoiding the occasional condom or dead rat - to make sure that the sub, called the Acorn, was seaworthy and would submerge. (It never did so completely.). They had loaded several thousand pounds of lead into the bottom and were adding rocks to further lower the moss-coated vessel, which resembled something out of Jules Verne by way of Huck Finn, manned by cast members from Jackass.
"We start arguing with each other and saying, 'Hey, you're doing that wrong,'" said Bushnell, who owns a bicycle shop in Providence, Rhode Island. "And then we realize there is no right way to do this." He added grumpily, "I've basically been wading around in this water for three days in my underwear."
Riley's last big artwork was an illegal makeshift tavern built last summer on a spit of land near Rockaway Inlet in Queens that in the early 1900s was a kind of Wild West territory, with saloons and prizefights. That project was also brought to a premature end by the police, who arrived at night with guard dogs and scattered most of Riley's friends. With the submarine, which he launched on a short-lived test run to the Queen Mary 2 last month, Riley said he accepted early on that the real performance would probably end with an arrest. Or with him sinking.
"I'm not really a very technical kind of guy," he said, sitting shirtless on the pier Thursday with various green things still clinging to his arms from the water. "I just guessed a lot on this." Asked how he planned to get back to shore after the tide carried him out to the cruise ship, he grinned. "I haven't really thought about that yet," he said.
On Friday afternoon, as he, Bushnell and Cushing were being taken into custody, still dripping wet, Riley's art dealers, Alberto Magnan and Dara Metz, said they planned to display the submarine in a show soon at their Chelsea gallery. And to post Riley's bail, if needed. "My wife's cousin is a lawyer," Magnan said.
As he spoke, one of the beefy police officers standing on the bow of a harbor patrol boat laughed and, pointing at the wooden submarine below him, said: "What are we going to do with this thing? It looks like the Turtle!"
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