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 a strait through which a tidal current flows. Tidal currents are usually unidirectional but sometimes are bidirectional. Tidal straits, though they are narrow seaways, are technically not rivers. They are frequently of tectonic ...

Upper New York Bay New York Harbor is a bay that covers all of the Upper Bay. It is at the mouth of the Hudson River near the East River tidal estuary on the East Coast of the United States. New York Harbor is generally synonymous with Upper New York Bay ...

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

, approximately long and wide, separating

Governors Island Governors Island is a island in New York Harbor, within the Boroughs of New York City, 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 ...

from

Brooklyn Brooklyn is a Boroughs of New York City, borough of New York City located at the westernmost end of Long Island in the New York (state), State of New York. Formerly an independent city, the borough is coextensive with Kings County, one of twelv ...

. 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 ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...

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 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 of 1817—the volcanic winter following the " Year Without a Summer"—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, the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, and the Red Hook stop of the NYC Ferry SB route 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. 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