Читать книгу Palisades - Robert O. Binnewies - Страница 11

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A Dynamite Park

The land was pleasant with grass and flowers and goodly trees as ever seen, and very sweet smells came from them. We were on land to walk on the west side of the river and found good ground for corn and other garden herbs, with a great store of goodly oaks, walnut trees, yew trees and trees of sweet wood in great abundance, and a great store of slate for houses and other good stones. Hard by was a cliff that looked of the color of white green and thought it were either copper or silver mine, and I think it to be one of them by the trees that grew upon it. For they were all burned, and the other places were as green as grass.

—Robert Juet, aboard Henry Hudson’s Half Moon, 1609

ALICE HAGGERTY WAS the winner. According to a report in the March 5, 1898, edition of the New York Times, “This slip of an Irish girl had been chosen for the distinction of destroying one of the most widely known and splendid pieces of scenery in North America.”

The piece of scenery was known as the Indian Head, a massive 200-foot vertical spire of diabase rock, a distinctive geological feature estimated to weigh 350,000 tons attached high on the Palisades cliffs overlooking the Hudson River. The Carpenter brothers, quarrymen by chosen profession, were dynamiting away more than a thousand cubic yards of the cliff each day. They “owned” the Indian Head, and it was their next target. Forty shafts, each two inches in diameter and twenty-five feet deep, had been drilled downward from the summit of the cliff into this celebrated rock formation. “Eighty feet below,” reported the Times, “a tunnel was dug from the face of the precipice. It was five feet in diameter and ran back into the rock one-hundred-feet. From the inner end of this, two five-foot shafts descended almost to the river’s level.” The shafts and tunnels were packed with seven thousand pounds of dynamite.

During the Triassic period, thirty million years ago, semimolten igneous rock had been forced up through a fissure in the earth’s crust. Overlying the fissure was a thick insulating layer of sandstone. The intruding rock slowly cooled, shrank, and solidified into giant vertical crystals of diabase lava consisting of silica, feldspar, magnetite, and pyroxene. Over eons, as the earth’s crust shifted and the sandstone eroded, the flint-hard diabase was exposed, forming a thirty-mile cliff face ranging in height up to 550 feet along the western shoreline of the river named in honor of Henry Hudson. In 1524, when Giovanni de Verrazano sailed the French ship La Dauphine into what would become known as New York Harbor, he was so amazed by the cliff that he proclaimed the newly discovered land “La Terre de L’Anomee Berge,” the Country of the Grand Scarp.

More than three centuries later, Alice Haggerty stood on the summit of Verrazano’s “Grand Scarp.” On a flat rock within arm’s reach rested a small wooden box about twelve inches square. Two electric terminals and a T-shaped plunger protruded from the box. Wires from the terminals snaked off through grass and forest duff to the cliff’s edge, then descended to connections with thousands of pounds of dynamite packed into the Indian Head. One quick pulse of hand-generated electricity from the box promised to deliver explosive power that would rattle buildings across the river in New York City.

By foot, on horseback, and in horse-drawn carriages, a large expectant crowd had gathered along the cliff summit. Other spectators, including the Carpenter brothers, floated in boats at a safe distance far out on the river. All waited for Alice to step forward and grasp the plunger, despite a whispered indictment among some of the spectators that she had won the contest with “pull.” After all, went the whisper, Alice was a friend of Mrs. Hugh Reilly, wife of the Boss Blaster. Second only to the Carpenter brothers, the Boss Blaster was in command, and his word and influence were supreme.

The grand moment did not go as planned. According to news reports, Alice Haggerty “dabbed coquettishly” at the plunger, “then swept her skirts around with an involuntary movement of one hand and fled.” A trickle of electricity reached one or two of the distant explosive caps that were embedded in sticks of dynamite. From a lower tunnel, a dull thud and small puff of smoke dislodged a few pieces of rock that clattered to the base of the cliff. Then silence. The Indian Head held firm, looming over the river as it had for fifty thousand years, ever since the last Ice Age glacier receded from the river valley.

Blasters describe a partial explosion as dangerously “hanging fire.” Alice’s meager blast likely had done some damage to the maze of connections that still awaited the electrical signal. These connections would require repair. At worst, a blasting cap somewhere in the network of tunnels and shafts might still go off unexpectedly. The Carpenter brothers, the Boss Blaster and his quarrymen, and the hundreds of spectators waited. Still more silence. Finally, Hugh Reilly and four quarrymen approached the edge of the cliff. The Carpenter brothers rowed close into shore for observation. With a rope around his waist, the Boss Blaster scaled down the cliff face and, for more than an hour, toiled to inspect connections and reset wires.

The mission was to bring the Indian Head down into a dust-swept, jumbled pile of broken rock. Italian stone workers, swinging sledgehammers and using more dynamite and machinery, would further pulverize the rock in preparation for its shipment on barges across the river to the city. Rock blasted from the Palisades was being used as base course and macadam for streets, building foundations, railroad beds, and other functional but unglamorous purposes. Diabase rock was too hard and brittle to be used for anything other than the most utilitarian projects. No diabase would decorate city skyscrapers or otherwise capture the creative attention of architects. Marble, granite, and sandstone were preferred. Palisades rock was “fill material,” generally buried out of sight and forgotten.

Palisades quarrying, circa 1898 (PIPC Archives)

When Reilly finally was hoisted back to the cliff summit, he walked resolutely to the plunger box. By then, the Carpenter brothers had rowed again to the safe haven of the far eastern shore of the Hudson. “The brawny arm of the Boss Blaster flew high as he drew the plunger out to its full length,” reported the Times. “Then he forced it back with a quick, vicious thrust. The ground for hundreds of yards back from the brink of the cliff shook and trembled. There was an enormous all-pervading crash and roar. The solid face of the cliff bellied out at the middle and then the whole great surface collapsed and crumbled with a rush. Echoes of the explosion and fall reverberated along the cliffs and shores for six minutes. Where the Indian Head had been there was a huge, raw-looking concavity in the side of the Palisades, with a great pile of broken rock heaped at the bottom.”

The crowd cheered. The Carpenter brothers rushed back across the river to congratulate the Boss Blaster. Alice Haggerty’s moment of fame floated away in the dust.