Talk:Hell Gate

Geography

A tricky bit of geography. Most maps I see claim the East River is like it is defined here in Wikipedia, meaning that it is also the body of water spanned by the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge and Throgs Neck Bridge. However, I have found Hell Gate defined in the same source (!) as connecting the East River to Long Island Sound. Must definitely clear up this mystery. -- Decumanus 07:15, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I have always considered the East River to begin (and Long Island Sound to end) at roughly Throgs Neck. Common usage seems to be that the stretch from Hell Gate down to the Battery is the "Lower East River", and from Hell Gate up to Throgs Neck is the "Upper East River". The Army Corps of Engineers (see link in next section) certainly talks about Hell Gate as "the junction of the East River and Long Island Sound", but that goes against my personal experience. The USCG Light List (http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/pubs/LightLists/V1COMPLETE.PDF) refers to bouys in the vicinity of Whitestone Point and the Brother Islands as being in "East River Main Channel". I tend to think of the Light List as being pretty authoritative for names of bodies of water. Why the discrepancy? I don't know. It could be that the USACE is better at blowing things up then figuring out what they're called, or maybe names have just evolved over the last 100 years. In any case, I'd go with the Light List for current usage. --RoySmith 01:41, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Dutch Name

Wouldn't hell's gate be helsegat? --unsigned by 216.251.209.111 at 22:54, 6 January 2005

No, the modern Dutch translation for hell's gate would be 'hels gat'; in 17th-century Dutch 'hellegat' sounds about right. --unsigned by 18.100.0.71 at 15:17, 3 June 2007

Blasting date?

The article states that the rocks were blasted in 1876. However, the Army Corps of Engineers web site (http://www.nad.usace.army.mil/nan.htm) says it was 1885. Is there a citation to support the 1876 date? If not, I'd like to change it to 1885. --RoySmith 01:25, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

According to NOAA (see http://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/new_york_charts/hell_gate.html) the major blast occurred in 1885. They don’t give the exact date but say that ‘The New York Times devoted its entire cover page to this "triumph of human will over nature." ‘ You might check the NYT. --68.197.216.43 23:49, 16 February 2007 (UTC) Henry Koeppel

The "Coordinates" of this article (40.713533° -73.997941) is precisely pointed to a gateway in Chinatown of New York city. I removed it. --Jinhuili 13:36, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Lutheran/Calvinist

Block's 'paymasters' should more likely be Calvinist rather than Lutheran, as the predominant form of Protestantism in the The Netherlands is/was Calvinism. Somebody should double-check and correct this if necessary. --unsigned by 18.100.0.71 at 15:17, 3 June 2007

Largest Explosions

The article currently says: "the detonation at the Battle of Messines in 1917 was larger."
Well, I think that depends a lot on how you look at it: If the 300.000 lbs were concentrated in a small area, (which is strongly suggested by the current wording of "annihilating Flood Rock",) then I would argue that the Hell Gate detonation was definitely a larger one. Certainly, all the Messines mines together add up to much more pounds of blasting agent used, but it should be noted that this was distributed in (at the very least) 14 rather discrete locations, along a line of roughly eight miles, stretching all the way from the outskirts of Ypres to beyond the French border. The resulting craters can still be seen today and are quite a bit apart from each other. Just because (for obvious tactical reasons) all the mines along Messines ridge were detonated at the same time does not make it a single explosion.
The largest concentration was at the "Birdcage" location (112 lbs of Ammonal in four close chambers) but this wasn't even detonated... See Mines in the Battle of Messines (1917) for details.
--BjKa (talk) 08:35, 13 August 2015 (UTC)