Berger's New York: A Frozen Hudson

Remember in The Day After Tomorrow where people walked on the Hudson and through the mouth of the harbor in search of someplace warmer? Yeah, and how you also thought that couldn't happen in real life because of the salinity of the Hudson? According to Meyer Berger's column, the Hudson used to freeze over all the time:

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January 19, 1955

A group of middle-aged gentlemen in town got talking about the weather the other day and how modern winters are sissy periods compared with those they passed through in youth.

One stubborn fellow insisted that in 1918, when World War I was on, he and a whole group of small-fry from Ninetieth Street walked across the frozen Hudson to a point on the New Jersey shore--Fort Lee he thought it was.

The talk swelled to uproar at the bar, one faction holding that there has been no bank-to-bank freeze below Yonkers in modern times, though such a phenomenon was common in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Newspaper files show that a munitions worker named Fred Gabay crossed on the ice from Hastings in Westchester to a point on the New Jersey side in a free-up on Jan. 2, 1918. The same file indicated a Hudson River freeze-up just five years earlier but didn't say how far down it came.

The files also showed a photograph, published Jan. 13, 1918, showing Dr. Lee de Forest, the inventor, and Miss Nancy Mayo crossing the Hudson opposite 230th Street, New York City.

Edward Rindwood Hewitt of Gramercy Square, son of Abram Hewitt, who was Mayor of New York in 1887, remembers that the Hudson froze almost every year around that period, mostly about February.

It sticks in his mind, he says, because he and the other silk-stocking kids used to sail-skate from somewhere around Yonkers down to Manhattan's upper reaches. They did it year after year.

Mr. Hewitt, pushing 90 down, recalls clearly that one winter day in 1875 it was the East River that froze, and probably both rivers. That freeze is fixed in his memory because the cash boy for his grandfather, Peter Cooper, due at the office in Water Street that morning, didn't show up until mid-afternoon.

It turned out that ice had stopped the East Twenty-third Street-Greenpoint ferry, so the cash boy had come down the hard way. He had walked from Cooper's Bushwick glue factory to Greenpoint, then to the Manhattan shore and all the way downtown without wetting his feet.

The last ice-up anyone could remember was during the record cold of February, 1934, a bitter depression year when the thermometer only once struggled above freezing. By that time, though, river traffic was so heavy that there was no shore-to-shore ice bridge, only heavy floe accumulation.

***

That would've been so amazing to see. I need to get over to the Hudson when it snows, because I've never seen it like that before.

Berger's New York: Bunnies on 11th Street

The First Presbyterian Church on 5th Avenue and 12th Street.

While exploring Portland during a newspaper conference last year, Hannah, Peter, Brandon and I made sure to visit Powell's Bookstore, this amazing independent/used bookstore that blows Strand out of the water. As we explored the different floors and colored sections, I found myself drawn to the history section, more specifically, New York City history. There, I found Meyer Berger's New York. After flipping through it quickly, it intrigued me (and hey, the price was right, $5 for a hardcover? Hells yeah) so I bought it. Stashing it in my bag, I soon forgot about it until recently.

Meyer Berger was a New York Times reporter, with a short stint at the New Yorker under his belt. His column, About New York, explored the many stories New York has to offer, the kind of stuff I'm interested in. His column most likely gave way to blogs today like Gothamist.

So I want to share some stories from the book, which I will do as I continue to read the book.

One of the first stories I read as I went through the book was the following (if you know me, then you know why I chose this article):

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February 26, 1954

Residents in lower Fifth Avenue who tip a companionable cup now and then have been bothered by the notion that they have been bothered by the notion that they have seen white rabbits hopping along the pavement, or down side streets.

Well it wasn't just a notion, but it's nothing to be concerned about. White rabbits do appear in Fifth Avenue and sometimes in Eleventh Street, just west of the avenue. They belong to the nursery school of the staid First Presbyterian Church in the neighborhood.

A gentleman called this newspaper the other night to report that he had caught up with a white rabbit in the avenue near the church, learned that its hutch was on the church grounds and put it back inside the church fence.

Michael Kennedy, a sturdy fellow who works around the grounds, says there's just one rabbit in the hutch right now, an all-white one that is the pet of the kindergarten class. Someone—no one's ever found out who—left him on the lawn one night two years ago and the children adopted him. He has the run of the lawn sometimes and rarely strays.

Three weeks ago another unidentified benefactor left a second white rabbit on the lawn. Mr. Kennedy, after a talk with the kindergarten teacher, put him into the hutch with the first one.

They didn't get along, it seems, so Mr. Kennedy put the newcomer out on the lawn, and he's the one who keeps hopping through the fence to sample dangerous living. A Chinese laundryman brought him back after he'd gone almost as far as the Avenue of Americas in Eleventh Street.

The other day he was gone again, but Mr. Kennedy didn't know where and didn't seem to care much. "That second one was too quarrelsome for a rabbit, if you ask me," was his comment.

***

I also like this story because it's where Eugene Lang College is (11th Street) and that's the same church where we had our divisional graduation.

And there's something special about reading older articles. I remember researching articles from the 1968 Columbia University strikes for Inprint, and a reporter used the phrase "Bogarty" to describe someone and it made me giggle.