TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE ONLY IN THE NEXT WORLD

William Teason - book cover for "We Have Always Lived in the Castle"

In the early nineteenth century, an underwater discovery brightened Brooklyn’s maritime prospects. As tensions with the British mounted in 1807, and New York contemplated wooden underwater obstructions to defend itself, Colonel Jonathan Williams was sent to survey the harbor. He found evidence of significant environmental change between Governors Island and Brooklyn, a reach known as Buttermilk Channel. “There are people now living who remember when the channel between Governor’s island and Long Island was fordable,” he wrote, “and I have the best authority for saying that about fifty years ago, the gardener of the then Governor used to pass and repass in a canoe, without a paddle, by merely a push with his foot at setting out.” By 1776, a chart revealed that the channel had deepened in its shallowest points to a full three fathoms, or eighteen feet. Another assessment completed in 1798 showed the same spot measuring a depth of five fathoms, and by the time that Williams got around to measuring it in 1807, he discovered “seven fathoms of water at low tide.” How did a channel passable on foot become more than forty feet deep in just fifty years? Williams believed the change had come from “the cast given to the East river ebb tide, by the docking out on that side of the city.” He was correct that the filling in of underwater land in southern Manhattan and the consequent narrowing of the East River upstream contributed to the change. But it was not the ebb tide that drove the deepening process. By constricting the river, New Yorkers had effectively put their collective thumb over the opening of a giant hose. They inadvertently called forth a jet of water that eroded the seabed and turned what had once been not much more than a tidal mudflat into a bona fide navigation channel. [...] To the south, Red Hook experienced its own makeover. Once known for its shad, Red Hook (originally Roode Hoek and famous for its red-colored soil) evolved in a more speculative direction, capitalizing on the unintended geographical effects of New York’s growth. “There is very little doubt, but that Governor’s Island was formerly connected with Red Hook point in this town,” declared one local historian in 1824. The land bridge across which cattle were once driven was now the deepening Buttermilk Channel, and Brooklyn, incorporated in 1834, adapted as large vessels churned through.