Aerial view of the East River and Brooklyn, New York City,
The East River is New York City's premier waterway. These racing waters set iconic scenes from the opening passage of Moby Dick, to the Great Houdini's first astonishing underwater escape, to countless shots in films and television shows today. But more importantly the East River's 16 miles thread together stories and sights from daily life as diverse as the metropolis it sustains. The East River might more accurately, and grandly, be called the Gotham Strait. Atlantic tides jostle through its narrow channels, making it the most turbulent arc of a saltwater ring stretching from the Upper Bay to the Long Island Sound and then through the open sea south of Long Island. Those tides quickly gained fame for bedeviling sailors, starting with the Dutch explorer Adriaen Block in 1614. He gave the East River's midway point the name Helegat, meaning "bright passage." But as a place of whirlpools and dangerous rocks, the Anglicization that stuck was Hell Gate. It's fitting that the East River's center point should bear such a macabre name. After all, it has a strangely alluring dark side absent from New York's other great waterway, the Hudson River. Perhaps that's because while the Hudson's most famous vistas are in the rural north, the East River is wholly the city's own. It is synonymous with urban grit and mystery. Years after the Revolutionary War retreating tides on the Brooklyn shore revealed the bleached bones of patriots who died aboard British prison ships in Wallabout Bay. In 1904 more than a thousand souls were lost when the Slocum steamboat caught fire in the East River. Mob hits, both real and fabled, turned the river's name into a shorthand threat. Its islands, surrounded by wild currents, also served through the centuries to imprison New York's criminals, to isolate its mentally ill in brutal asylums, and to quarantine the diseased until death, including the infamous Typhoid Mary. New Yorkers at the start of this millennium will always remember seeing smoke
Size: 5353px × 3569px
Photo credit: © Robert Quinlan / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
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