A hundred years ago, High Tech was a paint job

Tauba Auerbach, an artist, at Brooklyn Bridge Park in front of the John J. Harvey, a former Fire Department boat that she painted in a style meant to mimic dazzle painting, a form used during World War I to try to shield Allied boats from German U-boats © Hiroko Masuike / The New York Times

In June, the artist Tauba Auerbach dressed a relic from one era as if it were almost a relic from another.

The relic in question is the John J. Harvey, a 130-foot-long ship that was once the largest and most powerful fireboat in the world. That was 87 years ago, deep in the Depression, when it joined the Fire Department’s fleet in New York City.

Ms. Auerbach gave it a splashy red-and-white paint job in a nod to a time when the United States was desperate in a different way than it was when the John J. Harvey was christened in 1931. In World War I, before radar and before satellite navigation, the best technology to help ships elude German U-boats was paint.

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