Hell's Gate Explosion

On October 10, 1885 the ground in Princeton, New Jersey shook. There was no great earthquake. It was, instead, the largest planned detonation prior to the atomic bomb. In order to clear obstacles from Hell Gate - a narrow tidal strait in the East River -- and free up ship traffic the US Army Corp of Engineers started blowing up several obstructions in the waters. This image, captured by Adrian Vanderveer Martense, an amateur photographer and descendent of the early Dutch setters, shows the moment Flood Rock was annihilated with 300,000 pounds of explosives. The geyser of water pictured went 250 feet in the air. Rock fill from the gap was used to close the gap between Great Mill Rock and Little Mill Rock creating the now known Mill Rock. 

Just a bit farther up the East River from Mill Rock is North Brother Island where egrets and heron live and was once home to Mary Mallon, also known as Typhoid Mary from 1907-1938. After World War II the military built homes for returning veterans. One of those veterans, according to the New York Times found all the birds on the island so unsettling he wrote a short story that was turned into the screenplay for, you guessed it, Hitchcock's The Birds. (Though other's claim the screenplay was based on Daphne Du Maurier's horror story from her 1952 collection The Apple Tree later published as The Birds and Other Stories.)

Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We look forward to inviting you to CBH in the future to research in our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. In the meantime, please visit our resources page to search our collections. Questions? Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.