ENTERING NEW YORK HARBOR.
The approach from the sea to Sandy Hook is first guided for the modern navigator by the flashing white light on Fire Island, a low sand-strip on the Long Island Coast; and then there rise in front the Highlands of the Navesink, on the Jersey Coast south of Sandy Hook, with a pair of twin lighthouses perched upon their green slopes. The Hook, a long strip of yellow sand enclosing the harbor, also has another lighthouse on its northern end. Here are the expanding works of a formidable fort defending the harbor entrance, and an artillery trial and proving ground. Behind the Navesink Highlands and the Hook, the Jersey shore of the lower bay stretches far back westward into Raritan Bay, thrust up into the land between New Jersey and Staten Island. The green hills of this island, crowned with villas, make the northwestern boundary of the bay. To the right hand of the Hook, and north of the entrance, is the sand strip of Coney Island, with its stretch of hotels and buildings, the popular seashore resort of New York. Within the Hook is the lower Quarantine on the west bank of Romer Shoal, and over opposite is Gravesend Bay, behind Coney Island. The Narrows, where the Hudson has forced an outlet through a broken-down mountain range, is partly obstructed by an island reef of rocks. The hill-slopes, together with the island, are fortified, Forts Hamilton and Tompkins being on either hand, named after Alexander Hamilton and Daniel D. Tompkins, the latter having been a Governor of New York and Vice-President of the United States. On the island is the little red sandstone Fort Lafayette, where many famous political prisoners were confined during the Civil War. Within the Narrows the upper bay spreads out, the high Staten Island hills, covered with noble mansions, rising on the left hand, while on the right are the hamlets on the lower shores of Long Island, with the distant tombs of Greenwood Cemetery behind. The villages of Clifton and Stapleton and the Quarantine Station are on Staten Island, Stapleton being the yachting headquarters. Bedloe's and Ellis's Islands are passed, the latter being the landing-place of arriving emigrants, while on the former, now called Liberty Island, is the colossal Liberty Statue presented to the United States by France in commemoration of the Centenary of the Declaration of Independence in 1876. This statue, designed by Bartholdi and erected ten years later, is a female figure holding aloft a torch—"Liberty enlightening the world." It is made of copper and iron, and weighs two hundred and twenty-five tons. The statue is one hundred and fifty-one feet high, and stands on a granite pedestal one hundred and fifty-five feet high.
Over on the western side, behind these small islands, the Jersey shore recedes, and the strait making the boundary of Staten Island, which the Dutch named the Kill von Kull, stretches around behind that island to Arthur Kill and sundry railway coal-shipping ports on its banks, where the great coal roads come out from the Pennsylvania mines. Just in the entrance to East River is Governor's Island, with an old-fashioned circular stone fort, called Castle William, and the more modern defensive work, Fort Columbus. On Governor's Island is the United States Army headquarters. This old Castle William, with another very similar circular fort, then called Castle Clinton, on the Battery at the lower end of Manhattan Island, were the defensive works of New York in the eighteenth century. Castle Clinton is now an aquarium. Red Hook, the jutting point of Brooklyn, is opposite Governor's Island, and above it the East River opens, the strait flowing between New York and Brooklyn, and connecting the harbor with Long Island Sound, twenty miles distant, beyond the famous "Hell Gate," once the terror of the mariner, but since improved by costly rock excavations which have made a deep and safe channel. Through the East River and Hell Gate flows the greater part of the Hudson River tidal current. Both the East and North Rivers are lined on either side for miles by piers crowded with shipping, and the tall towers and ponderous cables of the Brooklyn Bridge rise high above the East River, while behind the foliage-covered Battery Park stretches the metropolis, with its many huge buildings.
JERSEY CITY AND STATEN ISLAND.
Communipaw, the lower end of Jersey City, is opposite the Battery, and above it the Jersey City front on the Hudson River is occupied for miles by railway terminals, making a succession of piers, ferry-houses and grain elevators. Originally Jersey City was the sandy peninsula of Paulus Hook, a tongue of flat farming land stretching down between the Hudson River and Newark Bay. The termination of this peninsula is Communipaw, long a sleepy village, originally granted to a Dutch West India Company Director—Michael Pauw. He was proud of this domain, of which he was the patroon, so he called it Pavonia or Communipauw, the "Commune of Pauw." His Dutch garrison massacred the Indians in the neighborhood, and soon afterwards, in retaliation, they exterminated all the Dutch but one family. At Jersey City there come out to the Hudson River all the great Trunk Line railways from the West, with the single exception of the New York Central Railroad. In the Revolution, the site of the present Pennsylvania Railroad Terminal Station was a British fortification, which was partly stormed and captured, with a number of prisoners, in 1779, by Major Henry Lee. Jersey City is entirely a growth of the nineteenth century, at the beginning of which it had a population of only thirteen persons, living in a single house. It now has two hundred and fifty thousand, and is replete with important manufacturing establishments, its expansion having come from the overflow of New York and the wonderful development of its railway system. While spreading over much surface, yet it presents little attraction beyond the enormous railway terminals and factories. The traveller rarely stops there, but rushes through to get into or out of New York. To the northward is Hoboken, with sixty thousand people, including many Germans, and it has large silk factories. Here, in strange contrast with the commercial aspect of everything around, the river front rises in a bluff shore, crowned by a grove of trees and running up into a low mound, whereon is the "Stevens Castle." This was the home of Edwin A. Stevens one of the projectors of the Camden and Amboy Railroad. He endowed the Stevens Institute of Technology at Hoboken, and spent his declining years and much of his railway fortune in building the "Stevens Battery," a noted warship, for New York harbor defense, which he bequeathed his native State of New Jersey, and that Commonwealth shortly afterwards sold it to be broken up for old iron. Beyond is the village of Weehawken, with the Elysian Fields, where Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in the duel of 1804, then a pleasant rural resort, but now largely absorbed by railway terminals. This duel arose from political quarrels, and at the first fire Hamilton received a wound from which he died the next day. Behind Jersey City rises the long rocky ridge of Bergen Hill, through which all but one of the railways cut their routes by tunnels or deep fissures, and its outcroppings above Weehawken come forward to the Hudson River bank in the grand escarpment of the Palisades. These remarkable columnar formations of trap rock extend for twenty miles along the western shore of the river, and in part appear to be built up of basalt. To connect the various railways terminating at Jersey City with New York, a tunnel is being constructed under the Hudson River; and two others, and also a gigantic bridge, are projected.
I have already referred to Staten Island, which is the western border of New York harbor, where its pleasant hill-slopes add so much to the scenic beauty. The narrow "Kills," stretching for nearly twenty miles down to Perth Amboy, make its western boundary, separating the island, which is the Borough of Richmond in Greater New York, from New Jersey, to which by right it is said to belong. It covers about sixty square miles, with its diversified hill-slopes rising in some places to an elevation of over four hundred feet, and has probably seventy thousand population. It is shaped something like a leaf, hung, as it were, upon the long projecting peninsula between Newark Bay and New York harbor, the Kill von Kull stretching westward to divide it from this peninsula, which at that part is the town and port of Bayonne, running off into Bergen Point at the lower end of Bergen Hill. It was from Bergen Point that General Washington in 1787 was rowed in a barge to New York, to be inaugurated the first President of the United States. From Elizabethport, on the western side of Newark Bay, the Arthur Kill stretches, a narrow strait, far southward, broadening somewhat into Staten Island Sound, and debouching at Perth Amboy into the western end of Raritan Bay. Perth Amboy was the terminus of the original line of the Camden and Amboy Railroad. It was the capital of the Colonial Province of New Jersey two centuries ago, and its eligible position at the confluence of Staten Island Sound and the Raritan River and Bay, the point of union of the various interior water ways, made it at that early period very ambitious. In fact, "Perthtown, or Ompoge on Ambo" (the Indian name for the point, which meant "round and hollow"), then rivalled New York in commercial importance. Its name came from the Earl of Perth, one of the grantees of lands in East Jersey. Early travellers flocked thither, praising its merits; and even William Penn was persuaded to go over and look at it, oracularly declaring, "I have never seen such before in my life," whatever that might have meant. But New York, with its great harbor, ultimately overshadowed Amboy, and it has since dropped out, even as a way-station on the route between the two leading cities. It has about fifteen thousand inhabitants, and its trade chiefly consists in shipping coal and fire-clay, brought out by the railroads.
The loyal Jerseyman will never forgive New York for having captured Staten Island. After the English came to New York in 1664, under the grant of King Charles II. to the Duke of York of all the country from Canada down to Virginia, the Duke granted to Berkeley and Carteret the portion lying between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers. This grant grieved the New Yorkers, for they said it gave away the best lands around their harbor, so they tried to get it all back, and managed to capture Staten Island. Some sharp fellow invented the fiction, on which they resolutely insisted, that the Arthur Kill was really the Hudson River; and, taking possession, they never gave it up. A legal contest was fought for over one hundred and fifty years, and it was not until 1833 that a treaty between the two States declared the Kills to be their boundary. Staten Island is about sixteen miles long, and from its eastern slopes has a noble outlook over the Lower New York Bay towards the ocean. Fine beaches line these coasts, which rise sharply into hills inland, and most of the eligible sites are crowned with villas. It was at Stapleton, on Staten Island, that Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the head of the great family, was born in 1794, and he laid the foundation of his great fortune, at the age of sixteen years, by sailing a ferryboat to New York, six miles away. Upon a plateau in the centre of the island is the village of New Dorp, the original settlement of the Vanderbilts, a farm of about four hundred acres. Here the Commodore came in his youth, and here his son, William H. Vanderbilt, was born and lived for many years, an agricultural laborer for his father. Here also is a little Moravian church they attended, and upon a terraced hill behind it, the highest part of the island, is the spacious gray granite mausoleum, within which rest the two great millionaires, father and son, with some of their children. In the old churchyard are the graves of many other Vanderbilts and their collaterals. At Port Richmond, over on the Kill, the most considerable town on the island, and formerly the county-seat, is the house, now a hotel, in which Aaron Burr died in 1836.
SOME NEW JERSEY TOWNS.
Westward from Bergen Hill and the Palisades are the meadows which stretch down to Newark Bay, and meandering through them to form it are the Hackensack and Passaic Rivers. The name of Hackensack means, in the original Indian dialect, the "lowlands," and it was given by them also to the channel around Bergen Point, by which the waters of Newark Bay reach New York harbor. This river drains the western slopes of the Palisades. Passaic means "the valley," and the name seems to have referred to the country through which that stream flows. The Passaic River, which is ninety miles long, comes from the mountains of Northern New Jersey and flows a tortuous course to Paterson, fifteen miles northwest of Jersey City, where there is an admirable water power which has created a manufacturing town of over one hundred thousand people, having extensive silk and cotton mills and locomotive factories. The river describes a curve, forming the boundary of the city for more than nine miles, on all sides excepting the south, and its rapids and falls descend seventy-two feet, the falls being a most picturesque cataract with fifty feet perpendicular descent. The town was named after Governor William Paterson of New Jersey, who signed its incorporation act July 4, 1792, the manufacturing corporation projecting it having been formed under the auspices of Alexander Hamilton.
The Passaic flows onward past Newark nine miles west of Jersey City, another extensive and prosperous manufacturing city of two hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, turning out goods of all kinds with an annual value of over $100,000,000. This city spreads far across the flat surface above Newark Bay and adjoining the Passaic, and to the northward its suburbs run up into the attractive hills of Orange. Market Street is a fine highway through the business section, while a large area is covered by comfortable and handsome residences, among which passes Broad Street, its finest avenue, one hundred and thirty-two feet wide, shaded by majestic trees, bordered with many ornamental buildings, and skirting three attractive parks embowered with elms. Newark is a great iron and steel centre, makes fine jewelry, good carriages and excellent leather, and also brews much lager beer. Yet few would suppose it had a strictly Puritan origin. In 1666, hearing the praises of East Jersey, a body of discontented men of Connecticut, headed by their pastor, Abraham Pierson, journeyed to the Passaic meadows and bought these lands from the Hackensack Indians "for one hundred and thirty pounds, twelve blankets and twelve guns." In early life the pastor had preached at Newark in England, for which he had quite an affection, and he gave the Jersey settlement its name. When Philadelphia was founded, the fame of Newark spread down there as a producer of excellent cider and seductive Jersey apple jack. Its most famous son of modern times was General Phil Kearney.