This land is your land
this land is my land
from California
to the New York Island...
Woody Guthrie, "This Land Is Your Land", 1940
We all know
Manhattan as an island. But it wasn't always so! Manhattan used to be
mostly a
peninsula, because its northern bound was not in fact continuous water but
a seasonal
creek named the
Spuyten Duyvil. Today, that creek survives in memory only
in the name of the
Spuyten Duyvil Bridge, a swing-open railroad bridge which connects
Manhattan to the
Bronx. It is currently used only by
Amtrak traffic, but in its day
it handled freight, passenger and all manner of trains into the island.
But we digress.
The notion of a ship canal across the northern end of Manhattan was attractive to both
government and investors in the 19th century because New York City was both a very active
port as well as the gateway to large amounts of ship traffic traversing up the Hudson.
In order to reach berths in lower Manhattan, or to reach the Hudson River, ships approaching
from the north were forced to detour all the way around Long Island, adding perhaps
twenty-five miles to their journey. Although this wasn't much for transoceanic
shipping to handle, the plethora of coaster traffic of the day was heavily affected.
A light shipping run from Manhattan to, say, Bridgeport, CT or Boston would have a great
deal of time, expressed as a percentage, added to its path - and be forced to leave the
more sheltered waters of the rivers and Long Island Sound to venture out past Montauk
into the wilder climes of the greater Atlantic.
If a path could be made between the wide, deep Hudson and Long Island Sound (via the Harlem River), not only
could new routes be undertaken, but it would mean a whole new stretch of waterline on
which piers and businesses could be built, a potentially lucrative real estate upgrade.
In 1817, a narrow canal had been dug to permit small craft traffic to traverse south of
Marble Hill in all seasons, dubbed the 'Dyckman Canal'. It allowed rowboats and small
private sailing vessels to move across the upper part of Manhattan to the wider, western
end of the Spuyten Duyvil creek, and thence to the Hudson. Steam vessels, however,
were far too large to make the passage. A couple of corporations were formed in the first
half of the 19th century to complete the canal, but both failed. In 1863, the Hudson And
Harlem River Canal Company came into being with the goal of succeeding in joining the
Hudson and Harlem rivers with a navigable canal. Actual construction began five years
later.
The initial canal course was not the one we see today. The neighborhood of Marble Hill
was first isolated by the small canal cut south of it, and the seasonal creekbed remained
as its northern border. The new canal also had to contend with strategic priorities!
At the very south tip of the Bronx, just where a straight-line canal would traverse from
the northern tip of the navigable Harlem River to the Spuyten Duyvil bridge, lay the
Johnson Ironworks. This foundry was a major supplier of guns and cast ammunition
(shot and shells) to the U.S. military, and that path would require condemning the
major portion of its works and isolating the southern part. Therefore, the initial canal
(also known as the 'United States Ship Canal') looped south of the foundry.
The path of the canal contained a great deal of rocky terrain, and the dolomite sediment
there required blasting. Steam drills were used extensively, and
explosives detonated in their holes to break up the rock, which then needed to be cleared
away to landfills in the area. The work was dangerous and labor-intensive.
Nor'easters caused extensive damage to the project, including tearing away the dams
erected at the east and west ends to permit the excavation as a dry task. A great deal of
construction machinery was ruined by the flooding, and the canal was finished by dredging
both the rock and the machinery away, while the drilling and blasting was done from that
point on by divers.
The canal opened officially in 1895, and John Jacob Astor IV - a backer of the canal,
and one of the world's richest men, who had speculated heavily on the real estate that the
canal would improve into waterfront, was set on being the first man through it. To his
dismay, however, three months prior to the opening ceremony a lowly steam tugboat -
the Lillian M. Hardy - managed to traverse the entire route with its shallow draft,
stealing his thunder. The official ceremony, months later, would be opened by the
U.S.S. Cincinnati firing a broadside to signal the opening of the Spuyten Duvil bridge
to ship traffic. A huge celebration took place, with hundreds of thousands showing up for
the spectacle.
In 1916, part of the old creek was completely filled in, making the former island of
Marble Hill contiguous with the Bronx. However, that neighborhood remains, to this day,
administratively part of Manhattan. It votes for Manhattan representatives, it has
a Manhattan ZIP Code, and if you are arrested in Marble Hill, you'll find yourself
arraigned in a Manhattan court.
Eventually, in 1923, the ironworks were condemned anyway - and the path of the canal was
modified. The southern part of the ironworks remained as a small island. If you look at
the satellite images today, you can see a peninsula on the south bank, with baseball
fields on it, where the island was joined to Manhattan once ships could pass to the north
of it.