Heartbeats in the Muck by Waldman John;

Author:Waldman, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Flood Rock explosion at Hell Gate, 1885. (Harper’s Weekly)

Opening the Long Island Sound route to New York Harbor so “provokingly barred” at Hell Gate was a favored option because it would avoid a hundred-mile exposure to a dangerous ocean coast, shorten the route to Europe by fifty miles, and eliminate the wait for high water at Sandy Hook. Soft-bottom dredging at that time was done by specially rigged vessels that scooped sediments; however, the bedrock of Hell Gate offered a challenging exception. One briefly considered alternative to deepening Hell Gate was to dig a ship canal around it through Astoria, a neighborhood in the borough of Queens. But Hell Gate’s most dangerous reefs surrendered to enormous blasts in 1876 and 1885; the latter used six times more dynamite than had ever been previously fired in the world, sent geysers 250 feet into the air, and may have been the biggest explosion prior to the atomic bomb. That blast of 1885 shattered the bedrock to the thirty-foot level, creating cracks wide enough for divers to enter and allowing excavation to the desired channel depth of twenty-six feet. Hallett’s Reef, which protruded three hundred feet into the river, was weakened before blasting by tunneling and excavating from below. Other reefs in the Hell Gate gauntlet were shaved with multiple small explosions.

In the end the overriding importance of the busiest port in the country provided sufficient impetus to open the other end of the harbor anyway. By 1884 a thirty-foot-deep channel was carved through the Sandy Hook–Breezy Point transect, but by 1897 even this was inadequate for the ten-thousand-ton steamers that were becoming commonplace; thirty-five feet became the new goal. In 1899 Congress authorized funds for a forty-foot channel two thousand feet in width. A new seven-mile path was chosen, along the East Channel across Sandy Hook bar, and it was named the Ambrose Channel after John Wolfe Ambrose, the Irish engineer who lobbied Congress for eighteen years for funds to create the channel but died before it was dredged. The Ambrose Channel remains the main passage to New York Harbor to this day, but now at forty-five feet.

The New York and New Jersey bistate Port Authority was founded in 1921 with the mission of promoting commerce of the port. Long known for its arrogance toward the environment, it has of late converted to the view that the success of the port is closely tied to the quality of the estuary. The Port Authority now operates seven marine terminals, including three of the biggest in the world, at Port Newark and Port Elizabeth as well as Howland Hook, Staten Island. But maintaining the preeminent position of the Port of New York against the competition of Norfolk, Baltimore, and Halifax for the business of huge container ships has become a serious challenge because of environmental concerns about dredging. In 2010 there were 4,811 ship calls to the Port of New York, with more than 3 million containers handled and a total cargo of more than thirty-two million tons worth about $175 billion—about one-quarter of all U.

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