Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 90.djvu/180

 Suppose New York's Harbor Were Drained

It would look like the picture below and show the deep channels dredged for great trans-atlantic steamships

��npi

��^HE ac- I c o m - panying illustration shows how New York Harbor and vicinity would look if all water were drained off. The deep channel of the Hudson River is shown and the exact shore line of New Jersey and lower New York is vivid- ly outlined. But the most interesting single feature is the loca- t i o n and shape of Am- brose Chan- nel, which is the largest ar- tificial harbor entrance in the world. It is through this channel that the great ocean liners must pass to and from New York.

Ambrose Channel is seven and one-half miles long, two

���The three black lines at the extreme top represent Williams- burg, Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. The black spot below them is Governor's Island and the Statue of Liberty- is on one of the little islands to the left. Coney Island is the stretch of land lying directly below Gravesend Bay

��thousand feet wide, and forty feet deep at mean low water. Sixty-six million cubic yards of material were removed in making the channel, and the cost to the Government was four and one-half million dollars.

The cost of upkeep is even more astound- ing. Each year the Government spends

��ninety-five thousand dol- lars alone in guarding the channel to prevent it from being clogged by iU legal dump- ing. Because the dumping scows must pass far out to sea to dump their loads of rock and debris there is a great tempta- tion on the part of dis- honest cap- tains to dump wherever con- venient. For instance, the amount of dirt and rock dumped at sea during the past twenty- five years would build seventy pyra- mids the size of the great pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. The increase in late years has been four- teen million cubic yards. Is it any won- der, then, that the Government is so vigilant in its patrol that it forbids tugboat captains to dump the ashes from their own engines in Ambrose Channel?

To the individual such an injunction seems arbitrary; but an aggregate of all the ashes from all the tugboats that enter the harbor would present a formidable problem.

��184

�� �