Continuing with yesterday’s theme…
New York is located on two medium-sized islands (Manhattan and Staten Island), a portion of a large island (Brooklyn and Queens are the west end of Long Island), a piece of mainland (the Bronx) and a whole bunch of small islands in the surrounding waterways. Those waterways include small streams (e.g., the Bronx River) but also the East River (a tidal strait connecting the harbor and the Long Island Sound) and the Hudson River estuary. The East River is rather violent as rivers in the middle of cities go: because it’s actually not a river, its direction changes with each the turn of the tide and the current speed regularly exceeds five miles per hour. The right-angle bend in the River near 125th Street in Manhattan, which is also the location of Ward’s Island, Randall’s Island, and the connection to the Harlem River (another tidal strait) is particularly dangerous and earned the name Hell Gate through numerous shipwrecks.
This has all been changed in different ways. The banks of the rivers have been straightened and moved with landfill, as well as being converted from sloping banks to hard bulkhead walls. Portions of the rivers have been considerably narrowed, which of course changes their flow. Piers create stagnant pockets along their edges. The dumping of raw sewage and other garbage changed their ecosystems; cleaning up the sewage has changed it again. The salt marsh south of Flushing Bay was changed to a garbage dump and then Flushing Meadows Park. Landfill turned a sand bar in the East River into Orchard Beach. Landfill turned Coney Island and Barren Island into peninsulas.
The pictures above (click to expand) show one of the more spectacular moments in this process. Flood Rock was one of the small semi-submerged islands and reefs that made Hell Gate so difficult for sailing shops to navigate. On October 10, 1885, it was dynamited to clear that portion of the channel. Each individual change to the East River was relatively small, but the overall effect has left in a state as artificial as Prospect Park: the water flowing through is from the Atlantic Ocean and the currents flow with the tides, but the channel containing the water has been modified by people for some 400 years.
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