Water Under The Bridge:
New Yorkers Remember The Jamaica Bay Hurricane, Part 1 by Chris Oakley
(adapted from material previously posted at TIAH.co.uk)
It was one of the most devastating storms to hit the U.S. East Coast
during the 20th century. It laid waste to one major American city, flooded
large sections of another, and left residents of all the rest with a host
of stark reminders about the heights nature’s fury could reach. It was the
Jamaica Bay hurricane, and it not only wreaked havoc on the New York City
landscape but also buried the political career of its then-mayor. Many of
the city’s most famous landmarks were damaged or destroyed and its economy
took months to recover from the catastrophe. The Jamaica Bay hurricane, so
called because it made landfall at the Jamaica Bay section of the borough
of Queens, changed New York and America forever-- indeed, even as it ended
one political career it would propel another into the stratosphere.
In this series, we’ll hear the personal recollections of several
people who were living in New York when the hurricane struck along with
commentaries by historians about the hurricane’s immediate and long-term
effects on New Yorkers. We’ll also retrace the hurricane’s steps during
its rampage up the eastern seaboard en route to Boston and its eventual
demise off the shores of Canada’s maritime provinces. As you’re about to
learn, even after more than half a century, the hurricane’s presence can
still be felt on the streets of the Big Apple.
******
The Jamaica Bay hurricane, also known as Hurricane Cleo, is thought
to have originated somewhere west of the Bahamas around August 15th, 1960;
it had already reached Category Two status by the time the United States
Weather Bureau became aware of its existence and was becoming a Category
Three storm as it barreled towards the U.S. east coast. It was initially
believed the hurricane would strike Florida when it made landfall, but to
the shock and alarm of Weather Bureau personnel the storm track abruptly
shifted northeast toward New York Harbor. Despite the agency’s efforts to
alert New Yorkers to the impending danger, the Big Apple was still caught
largely by surprise when Cleo-- now a Category 4 storm --hit.
Hurricane Cleo made landfall at Jamaica Bay around 12:30 PM on the
afternoon of August 17th, 1960. Queens and Brooklyn were the hardest-hit
spots during the course of the hurricane’s rampage, but the storm would
also unleash considerable devastation on Manhattan and the Bronx; indeed
the only one of New York’s five boroughs not to suffer massive damage in
the hurricane was Staten Island, and even there residents had to endure
blackouts as the hurricane cut power to the metropolitan New York area.
New York’s subway and bus systems screeched to a halt in the face of the
hurricane’s wrath; even the Big Apple’s legendarily daring taxi drivers
were unwilling to risk Cleo’s fury.
Many of the city’s most famous landmarks were destroyed or at the
very least seriously damaged by the Jamaica Bay hurricane. Among the
places hardest hit by the storm was Yankee Stadium, which was so badly
wrecked by Cleo that one New York Post sportswriter would later say it
looked like it had been hit by an atom bomb. The Statue of Liberty also
sustained heavy damage and would be closed to visitors for more than
ten months while it underwent structural repairs; the New York Public
Library lost much of its stock to water damage when its central branch
and many of its subsidiary branches were flooded by the hurricane. Not
even Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, was spared Cleo’s
wrath-- at least half of its windows were blown out by high winds and
its basement became swamped by the same floodwaters which had invaded
a host of other New York basements that afternoon.
Once Cleo had finished venting its wrath on New York City, it
roared up the East Coast and proceeded to lash out at Boston, putting
that city through a hell which for its citizens eerily recalled the
1938 hurricane which had devastated much of New England. Then-Boston
mayor John Collins had already declared a state of emergency, meaning
the city’s streets were empty; Boston would thus be spared the terrible
loss of life New York City had sustained at Cleo’s hands, but property
damage would be almost as severe as that in New York and Boston’s own
subway and bus systems would experience many of the same problems which
had crippled New York’s mass transit lines. Boston was more fortunate
than New York City in one respect: unlike Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park
survived the hurricane relatively intact(although its celebrated “Green
Monster” left field wall did have to undergo minor structural repairs).
At the end of its destructive journey, the Jamaica Bay hurricane
briefly touched parts of eastern Canada before turning out to sea and
breaking up somewhere over the North Atlantic. Modern U.S. Coast Guard
records indicate at least 150 S.O.S. calls were sent by ships caught in
the hurricane’s path; even now wreckage of vessels sunk by the hurricane
still occasionally turns up off the coasts of New England, New York, and
the Canadian maritime provinces. And it wasn’t just New York City’s mass
transit systems that had been incapacitated by Cleo-- Idlewild Airport,
today known as JFK, had been torn up from stem to stern by the hurricane
and would effectively be out of commission for six weeks. Tiffany’s, the
jewelry store immortalized by Truman Capote in his short story BreakfastAt Tiffany’s, was forced to temporarily relocate to Long Island while the
United Nations set up a new interim headquarters in Staten Island pending
the completion of repairs to its regular offices in Turtle Bay.
******
“That’s where it happened.” Henry Stanton, a former NYPD officer
who was assigned to a Queens precinct at the time of the hurricane and
returns to Jamaica Bay every summer to honor his fellow cops who died in
the storm, points to a granite column marking the spot where Hurricane
Cleo made landfall on that grim day. A sergeant in August of 1960, he’d
been with the department ten years; he would eventually be promoted to
the rank of lieutenant and retire from the force in 1980. “The son of a
gun came chargin’ up the beach like MacArthur landing at the Philippines
in ’44. It’s a miracle that I’m still here to talk about it, is all I
can say.”
It is indeed a miracle. Lt. Stanton had the misfortune to be near
ground zero when Cleo began its lethal rampage across the Big Apple.
Many New Yorkers further from the brunt of the hurricane weren’t quite
so lucky, as the archives of the city coroner’s office-- and Stanton
himself --can attest. “At just this one house in Flushing we must’ve
pulled out twenty bodies.” he says, recalling the devastation he and
his partner encountered once the storm was over. “Whole neighborhood
looked like King Kong had passed through it.” Stanton and his partner
were forced to take shelter in the basement of a local tavern because
flooding had rendered the streets impassable to their patrol car. When
they finally emerged from that basement some ten hours later, it was to
a scene of desolation which surpassed even the ruin left behind by the
1863 draft riots and rivaled the destruction resulting from the atomic
bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki sixteen years earlier.
“I still get the willies when I think of it.” Stanton confesses
after a long pause. He wasn’t the first NYPD cop to have psychological
troubles in the aftermath of Cleo, nor would he be the last: in the six
months immediately following the hurricane, dozens of policemen at all
levels of the department were diagnosed by psychiatrists as having what
in modern terms might be described as post-traumatic stress disorder.
At least two patrolmen are known to have committed suicide as a result
of depression related to the hurricane, and a lieutenant who before the
disaster had been on the fast track to make captain was so emotionally
wounded by the death and destruction the storm had left behind that it
drove him to take early retirement.
But for Stanton neither suicide nor quitting was an option. “I
loved being a cop, and besides that something in me said it wouldn’t
be right to just up and leave while there were still all those people
who needed help.” In fact, it took considerable coaxing on the part of
his watch commander and his then-fiancée before Stanton could finally
be persuaded to take a leave of absence to recuperate from the stresses
of the hurricane and its aftermath. That fiancée, herself a former NYPD
employee, wed Stanton a month after the hurricane and the couple would
continue to live in Queens another thirty-plus years before relocating
to their present home in western Connecticut.
******
Jonathan Trasker is a Columbia University history scholar whose
specialty is chronicling the development of urban transport systems.
He’s made something of a second career out of writing books about the
New York subways; his most recent book, published three years ago, was
adapted into a PBS documentary, earning Trasker the nickname “the Ken
Burns of the turnstile”. Not surprisingly, a good deal of his work in
and out of the classroom deals with the Jamaica Bay hurricane’s effects
on New York’s mass transit networks. In fact, the first thing you see
when you walk into his office is a wall map charting the spread of the
floodwaters generated by the hurricane through the city’s streets and
train tunnels.
“The trains literally could not move an inch.” he says, pointing
to a blowup of the now-famous New York Daily News photograph showing
a trolley car in Flatbush four feet deep in water. “The minute that
Cleo hit the shoreline it was like a giant hand had pulled the plug on
every train, bus, and trolley from Central Park West to Spanish Harlem.
Anyone who didn’t get off the trains or buses before the floods reached
their neighborhood was in deep trouble....In Manhattan alone there were
at least two dozen deaths by drowning among subway and bus passengers.
Well into October of 1960 wrecked buses and subway cars were still being
cleared off the streets.”
Professor Trasker holds up a plastic diorama he made two years ago
to give his students an idea of how the flooding triggered by Hurricane
Cleo disrupted subway service in New York. “One of the best examples of
how the subways were affected by the storm is the Times Square station.
The water that got into the tunnels and onto the platforms hemmed in the
passengers on that train like it was solid concrete. It wasn’t until at
least three days after the storm passed through that the NYPD was finally
able to get at those passengers, and by then at least a third of them had
died from either storm-related traumas or asphyxiation.”
Even after getting off the Times Square train the survivors still
weren’t out of the woods; many of those rescued would die of waterborne
diseases in the first two weeks after the hurricane, and there were more
than a dozen confirmed heart attacks among the survivors. Some of those
passengers who had been on the Time Square subway when the hurricane hit
vowed never to ride it again, and to this day there are still commuters
who approach it with a certain degree of superstitious dread. It wasn’t
until December of 1960, nearly a month after the presidential election,
that the New York City subway and bus lines were fully functional again...
