Is it just me, or did anyone else call it Hells Gate? I did, for years. It’s Hell Gate.

It’s where the East River meets Long Island Sound — the only way to get a ship directly from New York Harbor to the Sound and the coast beyond without going all the way around Long Island.

The name is Dutch. Adriaen Block, the first European known to have circumnavigated Long Island, called it *Hellegat* during his 1614–1616 sojourn, after the mouth of the River Scheldt in Zeeland. A nineteenth-century theory traces the name further back, to the Greek Hellespont — what the Dardanelles were called, another stretch of water with a reputation. The likelier Dutch reading is plainer: bright gate, or clear passage.

It anglicized into Hell Gate and it stuck, because it fit. Shifting tides from the Sound, the East River, the Harlem River and the Upper Bay all meeting, with rocks above and just below the surface.

Ships died there. On 23 November 1780 the 28-gun British frigate *Hussar* went down near Hell Gate. Rumor says she carried four million dollars in gold to pay troops fighting the Revolution. People still look for it — though researchers in England have found no record of the shipment. Then again, that’s the kind of thing somebody might want kept quiet.

For seventy years the Army Corps of Engineers blasted the rocks out.

They outdid themselves on 10 October 1885, when they blew up Flood Rock with 300,000 pounds of explosives. The geyser went up 250 feet. The blast was reportedly felt as far away as Princeton, New Jersey.

You’ll see it called the largest planned non-nuclear explosion before the atomic bomb. Probably not true — the mine blasts at Messines in 1917 were likely larger, and they killed over 10,000 German soldiers. But it’s in the conversation, and nobody died at Flood Rock.

The rubble got used to fill the gap between two small islands, forming Mill Rock — off East 96th Street, southwest of Randall’s Island. It’s what I’d call a blank spot in an urban environment.

This is one of the entries in New York City’s Little Black Book 1: Secrets, History, and Trivia of the World’s Greatest City.

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