BY PATRICE O’SHAUGHNESSY
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Sunday, November 2nd 2008, 12:14 AM

More than 1,300 people are working to finish the USS New York.

Grinder Joe Franco

AVONDALE, La. — The first thing that hits you about the New York is the enclosed masts that form twin towers stretching skyward over 1,300 workers toiling to finish the massive warship dedicated to the victims of 9/11.

Deep within the ship, there’s a piece of metal in the 25,000-ton vessel with almost sacred significance.

The 7.5-ton,19-foot-long bow stem, which forms the forwardmost part of the ship, is forged from steel recovered from the hallowed land at Ground Zero.

SEE: EDITORIAL: CONNED AGAIN BY THE PORT AUTHORITY

The men and women building this ship have found a special purpose, a sense of history, in a chunk of I-beam from the World Trade Center’s south tower combined with twisted steel found at the Fresh Kills landfill.

“I told my kids, ‘I welded that,’” said Maximo Alcantara, 36, a first class welder at the Northrop Grumman Ship Systems shipyard who worked on the bow stem. “That’s a piece of history.”

“The bow is the leading point … whatever headway it makes, it takes the towers with it,” ship director Tommy Barrett said.

SEE: PORT AUTHORITY SAYS 9/11 MEMORIAL WILL OPEN IN 2012

Here on the banks of the Mississippi, nine miles upriver from New Orleans, the Northrop Grumman shipyard is a scene of controlled chaos.

Piercing alarms sound and buzzers go off each time one of the three, 70-ton yellow cranes called gantries slowly roll along the side of the ship to hoist and deliver tons of equipment to builders on the decks.

Trucks come and go, workers pedal bicycles to get around the sprawling shipyard and men with pipe fittings and pieces of steel over their shoulders dodge the moving behemoths.

“Please be safe so we can go fishing Dad,” reads a child’s crayoned drawing on the cafeteria door.

The sun blazes over the daunting milieu. The smells of fuel oil and hot metal hang in the 80-degree heat. Pigeons loll on the moorings holding the ship.

The special hurricane moorings were removed after the storms Ike and Gustav swept the Gulf Coast and forced the shipyard to close shop for a few days.

The New York is longer than two football fields; it would stand taller than the Woolworth Building.

The enormous structure sitting in the murky brown river is designed for stealth. It’s painted a lusterless gray, the numerals “21″ in lighter gray. Its boxy shape reduces its signature on radar to that of a fishing boat.

A fragment of yellow ribbon clings to the bow, left over from the christening ceremony last March, shortly after the ship was placed in the water after assembly on dry dock.

The ship is made of 1,000 compartments, for things like living quarters, mess hall, post office, library and hospitals. Six hundred are done.

“We all had deep feelings about using the steel,” said J.D. Murray, general foreman for compartments. “The Trade Center itself and New York will live on in this ship.”

Electrical forewoman Betty Landry hooks up power panels. “We’re the ones that light it off, put the power to the generators,” she explained. “We crawl into very small spaces. It’s hot. I started as a welder. I know this ship since it was a slab.

“This ship brings the best out of a lot of people,” she said. “We try to do our best. What I do today will affect people’s lives later on. We want a good safe ship.”

“A lot of folks have really taken to heart what happened,” said Barrett, in a rich Southern accent shared by his co-workers. “People are driving to get the ship done. A lot of our people were devastated by Katrina, lost their houses, but they stayed to work on it.”

Barrett reported that all the tanks for the fuel oil and ballast have been finished, and the electronics, weaponry, computers and generator systems are all on track.

The first captain at the helm of the new ship will be Navy Commander Curt Jones, 41, from upstate Binghamton. He fondly recalls dining at Windows on the World in the Trade Center.

“It’s an overwhelming honor,” he said. “We’re bonded to the victims and the heroes of that day. The first time I visited the LPD 21, I was underneath the hull, I put my hand on the bottom, and the hair on my neck stood on end.”

The amphibious assault ship can deliver up to 800 Marines and their equipment. It’s a fearsome weapon in the war on terror that began on 9/11, but, befitting the innocent victims, it also will be used for humanitarian missions.

Construction should be completed next spring, followed by sea trials by the builder and the Navy before it is ready. It will be brought to New York Harbor to be commissioned next Sept. 11.

While Ground Zero has remained a pit all these years, the builders at the Louisiana shipyard have been creating a floating monument to those who died at that site.

The steel was the only visible remnant of the towers, among everything turned to dust. It once supported a skyscraper where some of our best and brightest worked; now it provides the mettle for a ship bearing the young and the brave to every corner of the globe.

poshaughnessy@nydailynews.com