New York is a city of hooks—Red Hook in Brooklyn, Corlears Hook on the Lower East Side, Tubby Hook in Inwood, for example.

Okay, Tubby Hook is a name that hasn’t been widely used for a century. But in the colonial era, Dutch settlers gave the name “hoek”—later anglicized to “hook”—to the many irregular-shaped spits of land jutting into the East and Hudson Rivers.

Most of these hooks disappeared from maps by the early 1900s. In some cases the water surrounding the hook was reshaped with landfill, and therefore the hook no longer existed.

Others were de-mapped because forward-thinking New Yorkers chose to rebrand a neighborhood long known as a hook into something less old-world Dutch, which is how Tubby Hook became Inwood.

One surviving hook, however, is Jeffrey’s Hook (sometimes spelled Jeffery’s Hook), a prominence just south of the George Washington Bridge inside the parameters of Fort Washington Park.

Jeffrey’s Hook—who Jeffrey was seems to have been lost to history—is a lesser-known, smoothed over place along the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway to relax, take in view of the river, and feel the ghosts of history.

This hook has a long backstory. As the above map shows, Jeffrey’s Hook in the late 18th century was a longer, more jagged spot surrounded by military fortifications.

Because of its geography, it served as a strategic site where important events in the Revolutionary War played out.

“Located just to the south of the highest elevation in Manhattan, named Mount Washington in 1775, the small point of land was an element in the defensive plans of the colonial army during the Revolutionary War,” states a 1991 Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report. (Third photo, Jeffrey’s Hook in 1900)

“In conjunction with the construction of Fort Washington in 1776, a small demi-lune battery with a single gun was erected at the extreme end of Jeffrey’s Hook and a rifle redoubt was constructed on the rocky slope above the point.”

After the war, Jeffrey’s Hook and the land surrounding it became part of a country estate owned by John A. Haven, according to the LPC report. Haven was the man whose name graces Upper Manhattan’s Haven Avenue today.

By the end of the 19th century, Jeffrey’s Hook was included in the new Fort Washington Park, and in 1921 got its iconic red lighthouse.

This sweet little lighthouse (above) functioned as a crucial navigational aid for the increased ship traffic in this treacherous part of the river—until the brilliant lights of the George Washington Bridge made it irrelevant.

All of this background leads me to something mysterious. What are these rusted old hooks drilled into the shoreline rocks of Jeffrey’s Point?

A 2011 post from Untapped Cities might hold the answer: These hooks date all the way back to the Revolutionary War and were part of a failed attempt in 1776 to block British ships from moving up the Hudson.

“Under the direction of General Israel Putnum, American ships were sunk in a line across the Hudson River between Fort Washington in Manhattan and Fort Lee in New Jersey to stop the British advancement up the Hudson,” explains the post, written by Benjamin Waldman.

“In order to sink the ships they first had to be moored and weighted.”

The rusted hooks in the rocks at Jeffrey’s Hook were used to moor these ships, according to historian David Freeland, author of Automats,Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville, per the Untapped Cities post.

The blockade of sunken ships didn’t deter the British warship brigade, unfortunately. But the rusted hooks left behind—and another rounded hook on a nearby rock (sixth image)—seem to be small yet tantalizing connections from the Upper Manhattan of today to its rich Revolutionary War backstory.

[Second image: Library of Congress; third image: MCNY, x2010.11.1987]