Heroes of New York Harbor by Marian Betancourt

Author:Marian Betancourt [Betancourt, Marian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Globe Pequot Press
Published: 2016-03-13T05:00:00+00:00

7

John Wolfe Ambrose: Bringing in the Biggest Ships

With no personal concern in the improvements outside of what is felt by every member of the commercial organization of New York, he worked patiently for nine years to bring about these improvements, and at last sees the beginning of the work which shall make this the finest harbor in the world . . . a man whose crowning achievement was that he had procured for the port of New York an entrance channel 2,000 feet wide and 40 feet deep from the Narrows to the ocean!

—Governor Theodore Roosevelt, April 26, 1899

Like a true Renaissance man, John Ambrose had many interests and talents. His son-in-law George F. Shrady Jr. said his “giant intellect, coupled with his remarkable executive ability and constructive genius, conceived plans for public improvements so vast and comprehensive that he occupied a unique position among men in that he was far ahead of his time. He was one of our most public spirited citizens, to whom New York owes an eternal debt of gratitude.” Shrady further described Ambrose as “a man of commanding presence” who possessed “a keen sense of humor, and was by nature genial and kindly.”

Over six feet tall and well tailored, Ambrose wore very prominent sideburns, or burnsides, a fashion begun during the Civil War by General Ambrose Burnside (no relation). A variation on jowl muttonchops, they connect thick sideburns by way of a mustache and leave the chin clean.

Ambrose accomplished a great deal for the city in his lifetime. He built the Second Avenue elevated subway, laid ninety miles of gas mains in ninety days, designed the city’s street-cleaning program, developed the South Brooklyn waterfront for shipping, operated a ferry company between there and lower Manhattan, and built an amusement park that saw the likes of Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley. But his tireless efforts for nine years to get a recalcitrant Congress to appropriate funds to build the deep shipping channel that kept New York harbor a world port by the beginning of the twentieth century is his most lasting gift.

An Irish Immigrant

John Wolfe Ambrose was born January 10, 1838, at Newcastle, Limerick County, an area of southern Ireland known for dairy farming and produce such as barley and oats, and where Protestants and Catholics lived together peacefully. It is in a bowl shaped valley on the River Ara, which flows into the River Deel. Ambrose was twelve or fourteen when he came to New York with his parents and possibly other family members, but little is known about his early life or his parents. Records from Castle Garden, the former Castle Clinton then serving as an immigration center, show only one Ambrose family during this time, a twelve-year-old John Ambrose arriving in August 1851 along with his mother Bridget and sisters Johanna, sixteen, and Bridget, eleven. The father, also named John, forty, had arrived three months earlier. While it is not certain this is the same Ambrose family, the age matches what we know about John Wolfe Ambrose.

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