A History of Hurricanes in New York

[New York City's] own hurricane history is more tumultuous than many New Yorkers might think.

In 1821, when a major hurricane made a direct hit on Manhattan, stunned residents recorded sea levels rising as fast as thirteen feet in a single hour down where there’s now Battery Park City. Everything was flooded south of Canal Street. The storm struck at low tide, though, and, according to Queens College professor Nicholas Coch, a coastal geologist who calls himself a “forensic hurricanologist,” that’s “the only thing that saved the city.”

Then there’s Hog Island. The pig-shaped mile-long barrier island was off the southern coast of the Rockaways. After the Civil War, developers built saloons and bathhouses on it, and Hog Island became a Gilded Age version of the Hamptons. The city’s political bosses and business elite used the place as a kind of beachy annex of Tammany Hall. That all ended on the night of August 23, 1893, when a terrifying Category 2 hurricane made landfall on the swamp that is now JFK airport.

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Hollywood Jesus

"Most movies present the world according to Hollywood (and the word
became flesh—lots of flesh)—that the sex act is good in and of itself,
that people should follow their feelings (which invariably will lead
them to right conduct and happiness), that prayer is like throwing a
penny in a wishing well, that God is within us, that God is love, that
God makes no demands of us and that the followers of traditional
religion are a bunch of uptight, puritanical, hypocritical killjoys."
—Don Feder