300px, The Buttermilk Channel, shown in red, in Upper New York Bay Buttermilk Chan jeh

Buttermilk Channel is a small

tidal strait A tidal strait is technically not a river but a strait connecting two oceans or seas. Tidal straits are narrow seaways through which tidal currents flow. Tidal currents are usually unidirectional but sometimes are bidirectional. They are frequent ...

Upper New York Bay New York Harbor is at the mouth of the Hudson River where it empties into New York Bay near the East River tidal estuary, and then into the Atlantic Ocean on the east coast of the United States. It is one of the largest natural harbors in t ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

, approximately long and wide, separating

Governors Island Governors Island is a island in New York Harbor, within the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is located approximately south of Manhattan Island, and is separated from Brooklyn to the east by the Buttermilk Channel. The National Park S ...

from Brooklyn. The channel is marked by a number of navigation aids (green cans no. 5 and 7 at the northeast entrance, and green gong no. 1, marking low water off the tip of Governors Island). Tidal currents on the channel are rather strong.

History

Origins of the name are uncertain but it is alleged to be a reference to the dairy farmers who used to cross this channel by boat to sell their milk in

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the List of counties in New York, origin ...

markets. Some people believe that the channel got its name because crossing it was so rough that the farmers' milk was churned into butter by the time they reached Manhattan. According to another legend, before the channel was dredged to accommodate cargo ships, cows were walked across it at low tide to graze on Governors Island. In his newspaper articles about Brooklyn history,

Walt Whitman Walter Whitman (; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among ...

wrote of a time "as late as the Revolutionary War (when) cattle were driven across from Brooklyn, over what is now Buttermilk Channel, to Governor's Island." In the bitter

volcanic winter A volcanic winter is a reduction in global temperatures caused by volcanic ash and droplets of sulfuric acid and water obscuring the Sun and raising Earth's albedo (increasing the reflection of solar radiation) after a large, particularly explosive ...

of 1817— the

following the "

Year Without a Summer The year 1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by . Summer temperatures in Europe were the coldest on record between the years of 1766–2000. Thi ...

"— when the thermometer dropped to , the waters of the Upper Bay froze so hard that horse-drawn sleighs were driven across Buttermilk Channel to Governors Island. On the Brooklyn side, modern development started in the 1840s, when the Atlantic Basin and docks, and the "Erie Basin" were started. The former is now the Red Hook Container Port and the Brooklyn Cruiseship Terminal, while the latter is now the site of the Brooklyn IKEA. In 1902 the channel was dredged extensively by the

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers , colors = , anniversaries = 16 June (Organization Day) , battles = , battles_label = Wars , website = , commander1 = ...

. Subsequent modifications were made in 1913, 1935 and 1962. With current charted depths of , Buttermilk Channel is still a busy shipping lane offering the most convenient access to the Brooklyn waterfront. Until the late 20th century the primary user of the channel was the U.S. Coast Guard, which had a local headquarters on

. In April 2015 the Army Corps of Engineers issued a Request for Proposals for additional maintenance dredging of Buttermilk Channel. The channel was fully dredged in fiscal year 2016.

References

*''Red Hook Gowanus Historical Guide'' (Brooklyn Historical Society, 2000) {{coord, 40, 41, 06, N, 74, 00, 54, W, display=title Straits of New York County, New York Straits of Kings County, New York Port of New York and New Jersey

History

See also

References