Ariel Patterson, was a 19th-century American shipbuilder. He apprenticed under shipbuilder Perrine, Patterson, and Stack in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Patterson had his own shipyard, building and designing for 40 years some of the finest steamships. The most notable were the steamer Ericsson, which had the first Hot air engine invented by John Ericsson and the three-masted side-wheel SS Yankee Blade, one of the first steamships to trade between to New York and San Francisco. In 1863, Patterson bought property at the foot of North Third Street, where he started a shipbuilding, dockage and a sawing and planing mill. He died in Brooklyn, New York in 1877.

The SS Yankee Blade was a three-masted side-wheel steamship belonging to the Independent Line. The Yankee Blade was one of the first steamships built to transport gold, passengers, and cargo between Panama and San Francisco, California, during the California Gold Rush. The ship wrecked in fog off of Point Arguello in Southern California on October 1, 1854. The shipwreck cost an estimated 30 to 40 lives.