The Hutchinson River is a small stream in the Bronx, about 2 miles long, that empties out near City Island.
Mary contacted me about going there. She wanted to visit the only river in America named after a woman.
“It isn’t actually the only one.” She said. “There is one named after Queen Elizabeth.”
It seems different though. Far from being a Monarch, Anne Hutchinson was an Anarchist.
She lived right here, Mary was telling me, after being persecuted and disenfranchised from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
She settled on this strip of land, and then was killed along with her family in an attack by local Siwanois, who at the time had suffered continuous mistreatment from Dutch settlers.
It was the custom of the time for a warrior to take the name of the important chief who he had killed in battle- so their cheif, Wampage took the name Anhoek.
Mary Walling Blackburn started an experimental school called the Anhoek School. In a way, she has borrowed back the name.
There we were, on a pretty, cloudy day in September, in the place where it all began.
Huge apartments buildings rose up on one side of the river. Here was Co-op City, built in the 1960s on a landfill. It is the largest cooperative housing development in the world.
Only twenty percent of the actual land is developed though, so it leaves a lot of open space, like out here on the river.
We were amazed by the numbers of birds; herons, egrets, and cormorants, sandwiched in between the train tracks and apartmnent buildings.
There were signs all around that the local residents make frequent use of the waterway.
Presently, we came across a man net fishing in the shallows.
We stopped to talk for a while with Klaus Wolters; a resident of Co-op City.
He told us about a tragic accident involving two jet skiis that happened here just a few days ago.
He knows everything about the area, and he fishes for Blue Crab.
There are no fishing regulations here for the Blue Crab, and the New York State Department of Health advises that one person can eat up to six of them per week without serious risk of contamination.
Klaus told us that in 2006, he spoke with a reporter who was walking around down here for a story about local get-a-ways. His picture wound up on the front page of the New York Times and he became something of a local legeand.
“There are probably people waching you right now from some of those windows.” He said.
He must know too. Klaus said he spends a lot of time looking out onto the Hutchinson River from the windows of his own apartment.
We thought about it, but it was hard to feel the presence of anyone at all out here at the edge of the city.
The air was a bit chilly on the open water, but it was my favorite kind of day for boating.
As the river opened up by City Island we found ourselves struggling against the wind.
We hid out under a bridge and ate some pasta that Mary made.
“I should have done a little research,” said Mary, “and brought a dish that pirates eat.”
But I don’t think any pirate would have turned down ravioli with tomatoes from Mary’s own garden.
We passed by Goose Island. Klaus had told us that it was named for a woman who lived out here in the 1920’s.
As the story goes, she came to escape her husband, who was a violent drunk.
We stopped to explore.
Klaus said that he came there once with a naturalist to install a camera so that they could watch the birds. He found the remains of an old foundation, and believed it to be the house of old Mrs. Goose.
Back into the river, we decided to explore the upper part, where the Hutchinson River narrows along the parkway.
The river seemed to flow straight through steep cuts in the bedrock.
Cement factories and metal recycling plants lined the river. Here was the manmade foundation of the city; forming and unforming.
“How far up do you think it goes?” asked Mary.
“From the map it seems to go another mile,” I said,
“but we don’t have to go there.”
The wind and rain had worn us out a bit,
and we had seen most of what there was to see along Anne Hutchinson’s river.
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