Hog Island was once situated off the coast of Far Rockaway, but according to sparse historical sources, an 1893 hurricane effectively wiped it off the map. This summer, David Garczynski became obsessed with finding it.
In 1996, a Queens College geology professor named Nicholas Coch helped to rediscover a forgotten piece of New York history. Coch, a towering man with a booming voice, had sent his students to a beach in Edgemere, Queens, to practice excavation. As they inspected the shore, they came across broken plates, beer mugs, and even a hurricane lamp buried in the sand.
. My father and I set out on bicycles to take pictures of the devastation in coastal communities, and, during one ride in the Rockaways, we met a man who was scouring the beach with a metal detector.“Doubloons,” the man replied. “They wash up in the storms.” The memory of Hurricane Sandy spurred me to continue searching for clues. I thought that, if I knew Hog Island’s exact shape and location, I could understand how a place so similar to my home town disappeared—and whether it could happen again.
Crucially, the map contained longitude and latitude lines that charted the island’s exact location—and someone had already left behind some clues. In red and black ink, they had sketched a few modern-day landmarks on the map: the Silver Point Jetty, Park Avenue, the Atlantic Beach Bridge. These were places I encountered practically every day.
This summer, I sent the 1879 map to a few experts, including Hapke, along with an overlay depicting the modern coastline. I asked them whether I was interpreting the maps correctly, and how one barrier island could have given way to another. “These T-sheets were remarkably accurate,” Hapke, who spent twenty years at the United States Geological Survey and has studied the coastal dynamics of nearby Fire Island, explained. The margin of error on a T-sheet is generally around ten metres, she added.
When I asked Hapke and Ashton what Hog Island’s demise could mean for Atlantic Beach and the many communities like it, they said that it highlights three intertwined forces: the threat of hurricanes, the instability of coastlines, and the risks of waterfront development. “What’s happened in the past tells a story of what we can expect in the future,” Hapke explained. Global warming puts similar landscapes at even greater risk, Ashton said.
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