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Spotlight: New York Minute: A New York Legend (5)

21 Nov

November 21, 2011

Mob Week officially kicks off on Wednesday but this is part of it too. The New York Minute is just one of the contributions to the Flash Cast podcast. JRD Skinner, Jessica May, and Opoponax started the podcast (and of course the Flash Pulp audios) and graciously opened it up to a diverse group of contributors, myself included. Many of the contributors will be spotlighted here this week as well as a few folks from outside the Flash-Verse. So to give Mob Week a soft opening, here is the last of my regular features you will see for a while.

Hell Gate. Execution rocks. This is New York. And this is your New York Minute.

When you think of New York, especially this time of year, I’m sure many of you think of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, skating at Rockefeller Center, and of course the famous Christmas tree. You know, all the Bright Lights Big City stuff.

Not me. I think you know that by now.

New York is full of cool history if you know where to look. And your atlas is a great place to start.

You do own an atlas, right?

Execution rocks is not a part of New York City. It is located in the center of Long Island Sound at the entrance to New York Harbor and is much closer to New Rochelle than NYC. It also boasts a very cool lighthouse that dates back to 1850 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007. I love lighthouses.

Let’s stop for a second and recap. 1850. Lighthouse. Execution Rocks. Want to bet it’s haunted? C’mon, how many episodes of Scooby Doo am I describing?

The legend goes that during Colonial times the British, wishing to avoid public executions that would inflame the revolutionary spirit, would carry out secret executions there. They would chain the condemned to the rocks at low tide and the rising water would eventually drown them. Some stories say that the skeletons were left chained to the rocks as a warning for future trouble makers.

According to lighthousefriends.com, The ghosts of the condemned had their revenge. A shipload of British soldiers, sent to pursue Washington on his retreat from Manhattan to White Plains, foundered at the reef. No redcoats survived.

The legend of the executions had such hold, that when light keepers were assigned to Execution Rocks, they were under a unique contract. No light keeper was to ever feel chained to the reef. Instead of stating a set length of duty, their contract read that their length of service was for as long as they were willing. If for any reason, they requested a transfer, it was instantly granted.

Of course, other sources say that the name Execution Rocks comes from a more mundane reason, that the name for this outcrop was chosen to reflect the historically dangerous shipping area created by the rocks’ exposure during low tides.

Guess which story I prefer.

Hell Gate is a narrow part of the East River near Queens and it is spanned by the Hell Gate Bridge. How cool is that? Wouldn’t you love to say you cross the Hell Gate Bridge to work every day? And what about the end of the day? “Yep, I’m crossing Hell Gate and going back to the wife.” Marriage is fun that way.

Anyway, Hell Gate comes from the Dutch word Hellegat, which could mean either “hell’s hole” or “bright gate/passage.” It is actually a fairly common name for hazzardous waterways in this part of the world.

By the late 19th century, hundreds of ships including HMS Hussar had sunk in the strait. In 1851 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began to clear obstacles from the strait with explosives; the process would last seventy years. On September 24, 1876, the Corps used 50,000 pounds of explosives to blast the dangerous rocks, which was followed by further blasting work. On October 10, 1885, the Corps carried out the largest explosion in this process, annihilating Flood Rock with 300,000 lbs. of explosives. The explosion sent a geyser of water 250 feet in the air; the blast was felt as far away as Princeton, New Jersey. The explosion has been described as “the largest planned explosion before testing began for the atomic bomb.”

The rocks at Hell Gate are also said to be the site of British executions, but if you believe the old legends, every place was. History is written by the victors.

This has been your New York Minute.

An audio version of this legend first appeared just last week in the amazing FlashPulp website. Check them out for awesomeness and goodies!

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A New York Legend (4)

16 Nov

November 16, 2011

Have any of you seen the movie Arthur? I don’t mean the one with Russell Brand, I mean the funny one with Dudley Moore.

It’s a good film with a good cast and though it came out 30 years ago it stands up well with it’s depiction of Arthur, a rich drunken New Yorker. But that’s really all I have to say about it.

What interests me this week is not the movie but its theme song by Christopher Cross. It hit number one on the billboard Hot 100 and is still a staple of lite FM stations. Alvin and the Chipmunks covered it in 1982 so it had to be good. Dave Seville had a real ear for music.

Anyway, the most famous lyric- don’t worry, I’m not going to sing it, and you couldn’t hear me if I did- the most famous lyric is “when you get caught between the moon and New York City, the best that you can do is fall in love.”

Romantic, isn’t it? Yes, New York really is a city of romance, of love, and imagination. If you have never been to New York you have a mental image of the city. Part of it is formed by the crime drama of television, part of it is formed by glitz of Broadway, thanks to me a small part of it is formed by invisible bridges and blind mutant albino sewer gators, and a large part of it is formed by the allure of mystery, the unknown.

“Caught between the moon and New York City.” The moon is on average around 300,000 thousand miles away from the Earth so I’m pretty sure that isn’t meant literally or it would only apply to whoever is left on the International Space Station. But it is a great line.

One New Yorker who got caught between the moon and New York City and simply disappeared was Judge Crater. Legend has it that in 1930 he simply turned a corner and vanished on his way home. It really was almost that simple.

Judge Joseph Crater is one of the most famous missing persons in American history, and the term “pulling a Crater” has come into the lexicon as slang for disappearing.

The story includes links to organized crime, Judge Crater’s mistress, thousands of dollars in cash, and a pair of suitcases.

Judge Crater was on vacation with his wife when he received a phone call. After hanging up he told his wife he had to get back to New York to “straighten those fellows out.” It isn’t clear who those fellows were or even if they existed because Crater’s next stop wasn’t New York, it was Atlantic City where he stayed few days with his girlfriend, a showgirl named Sally Lou Ritz, and I dare you to find a better pulp name.

He eventually got to New York City where he met up with his wife, went through his files in the courthouse, and cashed checks for over $5,000 dollars, which may not sound like much but was equal to over $60,000 back then. He later returned to his apartment with a pair of locked suitcases.

That night Judge Crater had dinner with Sally Lou Ritz and left to see a show for which he had bought only one ticket. The last anyone saw of him he was walking down the street on his way to the theater. And he was never seen again.

Investigators have pieced together some of his activities. His safe deposit box was empty and the two suitcases? Gone. And what about the money? And his files from the courthouse? Unknown. All I can tell you is that he didn’t run off with Sally Lou Ritz. She left town “to be with her sick father” and believe it or not, that cliché alibi happened to be true.

As you can imagine there is a ton of speculation about what happened to the Judge, but my favorite story comes from 1995.

A 91 year old woman contacted police and told her that she knew where Judge Crater was buried. According to her, Judge Crater was buried under the boardwalk in Coney Island at what is now the site of the New York Aquarium. While many crackpot theories have been put forth over the decades this one was taken a little more seriously because she claimed that one of the Judge’s killers was her deceased husband, NYPD officer Robert Good. Good, along with his partner Charles Burns, were very plausible suspects.

Now I know you all remember the very first New York Minute, about Henry Hudson, the Half Moon Hotel, and Kid Twist? Well, it was officers Good and Burns who were Kid Twist’s bodyguards the night he took a Brodie out a window and went splat on the boardwalk.

So you’ve got a fantastic and famous New York City disappearance linked to a fantastic and famous New York City mob rubout and both took place on the fantastic and famous Coney Island boardwalk and sadly, it is probably not true. When that part of the boardwalk was dug up in the 1950’s to build the aquarium no remains were found.

Although Judge Crater was declared legally dead in 1939, I like to think that he is still out there, somewhere, caught between the moon and New York City.

 

An audio version of this legend first appeared just last week in the amazing FlashPulp website. Check them out for awesomeness and goodies!

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