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6 The Rotary Club of Spring Valley NY Named Our Commodore Eddie Frank “Rotarian of the Ye ar” and Celebrated with Dinner and a Roast! *Spring Valley Rotarian Past President and Paul Harris Fellow Treasurer Co-Founder and Vice-Chairman of S.T.E.P. (Schools to End Poverty) Chairman of the Arbor Day Program Chairman of The Rotary Dictionary Program for Third Graders District 7210 Service Foundation Humanitarian Award Recipient of 2007 and Service Above Self Awardee of 2015 *Vietnam Combat Veteran Rockland Cty. Veteran of the Year 2012 Three-time President of Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 333 Chairman of VVA Chapter 333 College Scholarship Program Educator at Vietnam Memories Stories Left at the Wall teaching over 85,000 students and parents about that War *Plus Hudson Cove Yacht Club Commodore Summit Park Family Math Night Supporter *Husband *Father *Grandfather *Brother *Friend April 16 th , 2016 was all 7 About Eddie... Escorted in to the sweet wail of a bagpipe, dressed in a kilt (a nod to his half-Irish roots) and his navy dress blues blouse (a salute to his military service) with Popeye’s corncob pipe for extra dash. The highlights of the evening… Good-natured ribbing from friends and family and a walk down memory lane with musical emphasis from the Spring Valley Rotary “Rotarettes.” Yacht Clubbers never miss a chance to party! *Plus To learn more about the many humanitarian projects of S.T.E.P. (Schools to End Poverty) co-founded by Eddie visit www.schoolstoendpoverty.org. Shown here are just two of the Vietnam schools S.T.E.P. has helped fund. 8 The Strange History Of NYC’S Mighty Hell Gate By Ryan Healy Contributed by Rich Thabit You might recognize the Hell Gate Bridge from Serpico. Or the lesser known 1991 film, Queens Logic. Or because it was a target for Nazi demolition experts during World War II as part of Operation Pastorius. Or you might've seen its sister, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, , in Australia. Or maybe you’re familiar with its hardiness: the Hell Gate Bridge would be the last New York City bridge to collapse if humans disappeared, taking at least a millennium to do so. But to understand the bridge, you must understand the tumultuous waters it spans. Hell Gate is a narrow tidal strait located in the East River in between Queens and Ward’s Island at the center of a confluence of the New York Upper Bay, Long Island Sound, and the Hudson River (via the Harlem River). It runs the span of Manhattan’s 90th Street to 100th Street, while its narrower, sister strait is known as the Little Hell Gate which flows in between Randall’s and Ward’s Islands. The strait derives its name from the Dutch word, Hellegat, which has two meanings: "Bright Gate" or "Hell Gate." The name was coined by Dutch fur trader and explorer, Adriaen Block in 1614 after he sailed his newly constructed forty-five foot, sixteen-ton ship the Onrust (Dutch for “restless”) through the dangerous passage of water and into the Long Island Sound where he discovered Block Island. Block was also the first European to explore the Connecticut River. Since Block passed through the Hell Gate, this mile long strait acted as a “key gateway to the Atlantic, marked with a giant whirlpool, punctuated with rocks, reefs and islands.” What makes Hell Gate such a pain to navigate is that its own waters are in a continuous contention with those of the Long Island Sound. Claude Rust, writing about the 1904 fire board the excursion steamship General Slocum in the East River, when more than 1,000 passengers died, compared Hell Gate’s waters to “wild beasts:” When the tide rises on the eastern seaboard it sets New York Harbor and, farther to the northeast, into Long Island Sound. At New York Bay it splits at the tip of Manhattan, one current pushing up the Hudson and through Harlem River, the other entering the East River. Here with the horizontal movement impeded by the opposite flow of the Harlem River and the narrowness of the channel up to the Sound, the huge basin of the Hell Gate begins to fill. The waters, like wild beasts, circle their confines, impatient for the chance to escape. The downcoming flow of the Harlem River is then stopped by the strength of the escaping currents and sent back up through Little Hell Gate and the Bronx Kills, and the channel to the west, like a sluiceway, is filled with swift seething water racing up to the Bronx shore. This flow builds for hours, building up to a high tide along the East River shore. Then when other waters settle into slack, the downcoming tide, which has been delayed four hours by the distance and the drag of the Long Island Basin, begins its relentless drive—and the struggle for mastery is on. Cont’d.- Four hours after entering the Sound this tide has changed the flow of the river which is 9 down the narrow ‘sluiceway’ from the Bronx and down Little Hell Gate channel into Hell Gate Basin, counterclockwise around Millrock and as far down the river as the upcoming tide will allow. To this confusion of ebbs, add the rocks, reefs, and freakish whims of the winds. At ebb tide the process was reversed, but no less confusing. The Hell Gate's most famous victim succumbed to its waters 80 years earlier. The H.M.S. Hussar was a 28-gun, 6th-rate, Mermaid Class, Frigate of the British Royal Navy. Built at Rotherhithe on the Thames River in 1763, the ship was 114 feet long by 34 feet wide with a crew of over one hundred. It fought in minor sea battles off the coasts of Ireland and Portugal before being dispatched to New York in November 1780 to fight the colonists as part of a 100-ship “Cork Fleet.” The British army owed a large amount of backpay to its soldiers, so the Hussar arrived in Manhattan with wages and 70 American prisoners of war. The exact amount is under dispute, but a coin dealer interviewed by the Times in 1985 estimated that the ship contained 960,000 British pounds in gold, worth roughly $576 million at the time. Today, Joseph Governali, a real estate agent, treasure salvager, and actor with the stage name “Joey Treasures,” is one of the world’s most prominent seekers of the Hussar’s Fortune. In 2013, Governali claimed to have recorded footage of part of the Hussar wreck off the Tiffany Street Pier in the Bronx. Governali believes the Hussar wreckage might have been pushed north by a storm many years ago, and also claimed to have salvaged a British beer pitcher said to be the only remaining one of its kind in existence. According to his TV pilot, Joey Treasures found a gold coin, too. By the 1850s, one in fifty ships passing through the Hell Gate were either damaged or sunk—an annual average of 1,000 ships ran aground in the strait. Ships would navigate extra ocean mileage to avoid this passage to the Atlantic. Captains seeking to test their mettle would have to wait for the slim window of time where they could navigate their ships safely through the Hell Gate. But burning extra coal while waiting for the dissemination of those treacherous high tide waters was a waste of time and money. French engineer Benjamin Maillefert was the first person to attempt to clear the passage. Maillefert was hired in 1850 by Mr. E. Meriam, "a public-spirited citizen of New York," to remove some of the larger rocks in the Hell Gate. Congress refused to pay for the arduous work, so Meriam sought donations from New York merchants. For $15,000, Maillefert proposed to lower a canister of gunpowder to the rock by rope via a lengthy pole, and then set off the explosive from a safe distance. The first blast knocked four feet off the top of “Pot Rock,” and the project continued for several months. A barrage of 284 charges set off on Pot Rock gave a clearance of 18 feet—240 more charges on “Frying Pan” and “Ways Reef” lowered them 9½ and 13 feet. The project was progressing until one perilous day. Here is Claude Rust's account: The relentless blasting of Hell Gate went on till March 1852, when the law of averages caught up with Maillefert. After placing a 125-pound charge of powder atop a rock, he took what he thought were the lead wires to the submerged mine and paid out the line till he and the supply boat were a safe distance from the explosion site. Upon touching the wires to the battery terminals in his boat, he blew the other boat clear out of the water and was thrown 50 feet in the air himself. Of the five men in the operation, three were killed and Maillefert and his assistant were disabled. Despite all this, Maillefert was able to dismantle a large portion of strait's whirlpool and claimed that if he continued with his efforts, Hell Gate would ultimately be the safest passage to the NY Harbor. Cont’d.- 10 Everything was progressing—Congress, pleased with the results, even chipped in $20,000 to continue the operation—until the Civil War disrupted the plan. The Hell Gate received a twenty-year reprieve. In 1876, US Army General John Newton was charged with clearing the three acres worth of the impassable reef (about three football fields' worth of square feet) beneath the waters of the Hell Gate.