April 13, 2006

The bovine history of Brooklyn's Buttermilk Channel

When the Queen Mary 2 arrives at the Brooklyn Cruise Ship Terminal this Saturday, it will spend 12 hours docked in the Buttermilk Channel, which separates Red Hook from Governors Island.

Here's a great bit of background from the "Red Hook Gowanus Neighborhood History Guide" published by the Brooklyn Historical Society:

The waters between Red Hook and today's Governors Island were so rough that they churned the milk that farmers brought by boat from Bay Ridge dairy farms, leading to the name Buttermilk Channel. Yet the channel was once much wider and shallower than it is today, particularly at low tide. In his newspaper articles about Brooklyn history, Walt Whitman wrote of a time "as late as the Revolutionary War (when) cattle were driven across from Brooklyn, over what is now Buttermilk Channel, to Governors Island." Dredging deepened the channel, however, and it became narrower as wharves and piers were built on both sides of the river.

April 13, 2006 02:46 PM in History, Out of Manhattan

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