The peninsula of Throgg's Neck is the northern headland at the entrance of East River into Long Island Sound. Beyond this, the waters deeply indent the New York shore, and there is thrust out the green peninsula of Pelham Neck. This is some distance beyond the Bronx. Eastchester Bay is on the southern side of the neck; Pelham Bay beyond it; and immediately in front City Island, reached by a long drawbridge. To the north is Hunter's Island, connected by another bridge. Hunter's Island and more than two square miles of the hills and meadows adjacent on the mainland make the new park of Pelham Bay. Various old mansions scattered over this domain were the homes of the Hunters, Lorillards and other prominent families. The island belonged to many generations of Hunters, and near the bridge a large gateway has "Hunter's Island" carved on one of the marble gate-posts. Years ago another wealthy man bought the island, and these words offending him, he brought a marble-mason out from New York, who chiselled them off, and carved instead the words "Higgins's Island." But after Higgins had his day and was gathered unto his fathers, the next owner, revering rather the antiquity of the place, had "Higgins" eliminated and "Hunter's Island" restored, though the gate-post became quite thin under this treatment. On the western edge of Pelham Bay Park is Hutchinson's River, flowing down into Eastchester Bay, and recalling the days of the Salem witchcraft. Poor Anne Hutchinson fled here to escape burning as a witch, and on City Island built a hut on a little cape still called Anne Hook. She lived there peacefully for a year, harming nobody and declining every invitation to stir from her humble abode. One day a young girl went to visit Anne, but found the hut in ashes, and before the door lay the poor woman, where she had been tomahawked and scalped by the Indians. No one has built a house on Anne Hook since, and many have been the tales told of ghostly Indian revels on bleak and rainy nights around the site of the burning hut. On the mainland were Indian villages, and here have been found relics, and in 1899 there was exhumed the skeleton of an Indian warrior.
EAST RIVER AND HELL GATE.
The Harlem River, flowing into the East River, divides Manhattan from Ward's Island, and this, with Randall's Island to the north and Blackwell's Island to the south, forms the group of "East River Islands" upon which are the penal and charitable institutions of the great city. The chief of these are on Blackwell's Island, a long, narrow strip stretching nearly two miles in the centre of East River, and barely more than two hundred yards wide. It covers one hundred and twenty acres, and has the penitentiary, almshouses, workhouses and hospitals, the spacious buildings being of granite quarried there by the convicts. Over on the New York City shore is the extensive Bellevue Hospital. In cases of vagrancy and minor crimes, the offender is said to be "sent up to the Island." Ward's Island has a surface of two hundred acres, and here are the Lunatic Asylum and Emigrant Hospital. Randall's Island has the institutions for children and idiots, while upon Hart's Island, out in Long Island Sound, are industrial schools and the pauper cemetery. The buildings are all upon a most elaborate scale, and it costs over $2,000,000 for their annual maintenance. A steamboat ride along East River, with these extensive establishments and their well-kept grounds passing in review, is a most interesting suburban excursion.
The Long Island shore to the southward of Ward's Island is thrust out in a way that curves and contracts the East River passage, which, turning eastward just below where the Harlem River comes in, goes through the famous Hell Gate to reach the Sound. Formerly, the swift tidal currents boiled and eddied through this dangerous pass, Hallett's Point, jutting out from Long Island, narrowing the channel, and Pot Rock, Flood Rock, the Gridiron and other reefs making navigation perilous. Many were the wrecks here, and frequent ineffective efforts were made to improve the passage. The Government finally undertook the work in 1866 under a comprehensive plan projected by General Newton. His first task was the removal of the Hallett's Point reef, a mass of rock projecting three hundred feet into the stream and throwing the whole tidal current coming in from the Sound against the great opposing rock called the Gridiron. He first sunk a shaft upon the Point and excavated the inland side so that it made a perpendicular wall which was curved around, and designed for the future edge of the river. From the shaft, tunnels were bored into the reef under the river in radiating directions, being connected by concentric galleries. The design was to remove as much rock as possible without letting the water in from overhead, and then to blow the rocky roof and supporting columns into fragments and remove them at leisure. This work began in 1869, the shaft being sunk thirty-two feet below mean low water and the tunnels drilled out, inclining downward under the river. In 1876 the task was finished, and thousands of separate dynamite blasts had been placed in the roof and supporting columns, ready for the explosion on Sunday, September 24th. This being the greatest artificial explosion ever attempted, there was much trepidation shown in New York for fear of the shock, while everywhere the keenest interest was taken in the result. The blast was entirely successful, being discharged by General Newton's little child, who touched the electric key. The calculation had been so accurately made that the great reef was pulverized, and the fragments fell into the spaces excavated beneath without causing more than a slight tremor in the adjacent region. By a similar system and more extensive work, Flood Rock was afterwards removed from mid-channel, the second great blast reducing it to fragments, being discharged in October, 1885. The terrors of Hell Gate are gone, though the tide still flows swiftly through the strait.
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE.
The growth of population on Long Island has caused various new bridges and tunnels to be projected for crossing East River. One new bridge is to cross at Blackwell's Island, with a pier on the island. Another now nearly completed, and estimated to cost $10,000,000, crosses from Grand Street to Broadway in Brooklyn. The Long Island Railroad is arranging to bore a tunnel under East River, to be operated by electricity, to bring its trains into New York. The East River being the locality for most of the foreign shipping, the bridges are at high elevations, the great Brooklyn Bridge, which crosses from City Hall Park, being one hundred and thirty-five feet above the water. Its massive piers are among the tallest structures about New York, rising two hundred and sixty-eight feet. This, the largest suspension bridge in the world, was begun in 1870 and opened for traffic in 1885. The piers stand upon caissons sunk into the rocky bed of the river, which is forty-five feet below the surface on the Brooklyn side and ninety feet below on the New York side. Their towers carry four sixteen-inch wire cables that sustain the bridge, which is built eighty-five feet wide, giving ample accommodation for two railways, two wagon roads also carrying electric cars, and a wide raised footway in the centre. The bridge cost nearly $15,000,000, the distance between the piers is about sixteen hundred feet, and its entire length between the anchorages of the cables is three thousand four hundred and seventy-five feet. The cable anchorages are enormous masses, each containing about thirty-five thousand cubic yards of solid masonry. The whole length of the bridge and its elaborate approaches is considerably over a mile. Its projector was John A. Roebling, who died during the early work, and its builder, his son Washington Roebling, who caught the dreaded "caisson disease" while superintending labor under water, and for years afterward an invalid, watched the progress of the later work from his chamber window on Brooklyn Heights nearby. The bridge has carried an enormous traffic, taxing its capacity to the utmost, and its passengers average over a million a week. The view from its raised footway is one of the most superb sights of New York, disclosing both cities, and the extensive wharves and commerce of East River, the Navy Yard just above, and for miles over the surrounding region and down through the harbor to the distant blue hills of Staten Island.
THE CITY OF CHURCHES.
The Borough of Brooklyn, which has grown from the overflow of New York, whose people are said to go over there "chiefly to sleep or be buried," is popularly known as the "City of Churches." A large portion of the working population of the metropolis, as well as the merchants and business men, make it their home and dormitory, while there are beautiful cemeteries in the suburbs peopled largely by dead New Yorkers. Greenwood, overlooking New York harbor from Gowanus Heights in South Brooklyn, is regarded as one of the finest American cemeteries. In no other city can be found such an aggregation of churches, developed in a past generation, and under the ministry of a regiment of distinguished clergymen, then led by Beecher and Storrs, so that the popular title was well bestowed. Brooklyn is entirely the growth of the nineteenth century, a growth due to the inability of New York to spread, excepting far northward. It stretches several miles along East River and three or four miles inland, and grows rapidly. When the century began, however, it was hard work to find three thousand people there, and, strangely enough, they had to cross over to New York to go to church. Just about the time old Peter Minuit was buying Manhattan from the Indians, a band of Walloons first settled in Brooklyn. Their descendants drove cows across East River to Governor's Island to graze, the Buttermilk Channel between them being then shallow enough for fording, though it is now scoured out deep enough to float the largest vessels, the docks located where the cows then crossed now accommodating an enormous commerce. At first a little ferry from Fulton Street to Peck Slip, New York, accommodated the straggling village, and it has grown into more than a dozen steam ferries of the largest capacity, which (besides the bridge) will carry daily a half-million people across at one cent apiece, this fleet of packet-boats being the greatest transporters of humanity in the world.
The Indians called the region around Wallabout Bay, and Gowanus Mercychawick, meaning "the sandy place." When the Walloons came along, they began settling on the shores of the bay, which they called Waal-bogt, afterwards gradually changed to its present name of Wallabout. In 1646 the town was organized by Governor Kieft as Breuckelen, he appointing Jan Eversen Bout and Huyck Aertsen as "schepens" or superintendents to preserve the peace and regulate the community. During the Revolution the British prison-ships were moored in the Wallabout, and it is estimated that eleven thousand five hundred Americans, chiefly seamen, died upon them, the shores of the bay being full of dead men's bones, which the tides for many years washed out from the sand. In 1808 these bones were finally collected and put in a vault near the Navy Yard, which had been established on the bay. This is the chief naval station of the United States, covering about eighty-eight acres, including all the available space. There is attached a large naval hospital, while between the two is the immense Wallabout Market, covering forty-five acres, the largest in Brooklyn, its buildings being brick structures in the old Dutch style.
Fulton Street is the chief highway of Brooklyn, beginning almost under the shadow of the great Bridge. It is a broad and attractive street, stretching six miles to the eastern edge of the city, and about one mile from the river it passes the various city buildings, including the Post-office, Court-house and Borough Hall, all handsome structures. In front of the Borough Hall is a fine statue of Brooklyn's most famous clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher. From Fulton Street radiate several of the highways leading into the fashionable residential quarter,—Brooklyn or Columbia Heights,—overlooking East River, where the tree-bordered streets are lined with costly and attractive dwellings. Here in Orange Street, in a very quiet spot, is Brooklyn's most noted edifice, a plain, wide, unornamented brick building, with the inscription, "Plymouth Church, 1849." Here preached for nearly forty years, until he died in 1887, Beecher, the great Puritan, whose family was so noted. His father, Lyman Beecher, like the son, fought slavery and intemperance in Boston, Litchfield and Cincinnati, and was an impressive pulpit orator. The old man was eccentric, however, and after being wrought up by the excitement of preaching, is said to have gone home and let himself down by playing on the fiddle and dancing a double-shuffle in the parlor. He had thirteen children, nearly all famous, and has been described as "the father of more brains than any other man in America." Four sons were clergymen and two daughters noted authoresses. Henry Ward, who ruled Brooklyn, and Harriet, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, were among the great leaders of the anti-slavery movement.