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IMAGES OF AMERICA: THE EAST RIVER
Introduction
It avails not, time nor place-distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh'd…
-Walt Whitman from Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
The East River is New York City's premier waterway. These waters set iconic scenes from the opening passage of Moby Dick, to countless shots in films and television shows today. But more importantly its 16 miles thread together stories and sights from daily life as diverse as the metropolis it sustains.
The river might more accurately be called the Gotham Strait. Atlantic tides jostling through its narrow channels bedeviling sailors, starting with the Dutch explorer Adriaen Block in 1613. He gave its midway point the name Helegat, meaning “bright passage.” But as a place of whirlpools and dangerous rocks, the Anglicization that stuck was Hell Gate.
It's fitting that the river's center point should bear such a macabre name. After all, the river has a strangely alluring dark side that complements urban grit and mystery. Years after the Revolutionary War retreating tides on the Brooklyn shore revealed the bleached bones of patriots who died aboard British prison ships in Wallabout Bay. In 1904 more than a thousand souls were lost when the Slocum steamboat caught fire in the river. Mob hits, both real and fabled, turned the river's name into a shorthand threat. Its islands, surrounded by powerful currents, served through the centuries to imprison the city’s criminals, to house its insane in brutal asylums, and to quarantine its diseased, including the infamous Typhoid Mary.
But the river is foremost a source of life. Its rich fish stocks and salt grasses once fed Native Americans, European settlers, and their cattle, and its tidal energy swept through marshes to turn mills on Dutch colonial farms. Piers bristled with tall ships as the port became a center of world trade and shipbuilding. Today Hindu and Yoruba worshippers gather at shorelines where Native Americans once prayed and colonists were baptized. An ecological renaissance is drawing recreational boaters back to the water.
Just as the peoples who line the river have changed, so has the river itself. It has been cinched by landfill and seawalls and dredged for shipping. The most powerful manmade explosion before the Atomic Age was here, to clear the reefs of Hell Gate. Now thirteen tunnels cross below the riverbed as the spans of eight world-class bridges loom over it. Airport runways stretch out into the river where pioneering seaplanes like the Yankee Clippers skimmed the surface. But the true joys of the East River, this unique blending of natural forces and cosmopolitan verve, are timeless
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