![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/jeffreyshookrustedhooks.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nOkay, Tubby Hook is a name that hasn\u2019t been widely used for a century. But in the colonial era, Dutch settlers gave the name \u201choek\u201d\u2014later anglicized to \u201chook\u201d\u2014to the many irregular-shaped spits of land jutting into the East and Hudson Rivers.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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<\/a>.<\/p>\n One surviving hook, however, is Jeffrey\u2019s Hook (sometimes spelled Jeffery\u2019s Hook), a prominence just south of the George Washington Bridge inside the parameters of Fort Washington Park. <\/p>\n Jeffrey\u2019s Hook\u2014who Jeffrey was seems to have been lost to history\u2014is a lesser-known, smoothed over place along the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway<\/a> to relax, take in view of the river, and feel the ghosts of history.<\/p>\n This hook has a long backstory. As the above map shows, Jeffrey\u2019s Hook in the late 18th century was a longer, more jagged spot surrounded by military fortifications. <\/p>\n Because of its geography, it served as a strategic site where important events in the Revolutionary War played out.<\/p>\n \u201cLocated 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,\u201d states a 1991 Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report.<\/a> (Third photo, Jeffrey\u2019s Hook in 1900)<\/p>\n \u201cIn 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\u2019s Hook and a rifle redoubt was constructed on the rocky slope<\/a> above the point.\u201d<\/p>\n After the war, Jeffrey\u2019s 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\u2019s Haven Avenue today. <\/p>\n By the end of the 19th century, Jeffrey\u2019s Hook was included in the new Fort Washington Park, and in 1921 got its iconic red lighthouse. <\/p>\n This sweet little lighthouse (above) functioned as a crucial navigational aid for the increased ship traffic in this treacherous part of the river\u2014until the brilliant lights of the George Washington Bridge made it irrelevant<\/a>.<\/p>\n All of this background leads me to something mysterious. What are these rusted old hooks drilled into the shoreline rocks of Jeffrey\u2019s Point?<\/p>\n A 2011 post from Untapped Cities<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n \u201cUnder 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,\u201d explains the post, written by Benjamin Waldman. <\/p>\n \u201cIn order to sink the ships they first had to be moored and weighted.\u201d <\/p>\n The rusted hooks in the rocks at Jeffrey\u2019s Hook were used to moor these ships, according to historian David Freeland, author of Automats,Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville<\/a>, per the Untapped Cities post.<\/p>\n The blockade of sunken ships didn\u2019t deter the British warship brigade, unfortunately. But the rusted hooks left behind\u2014and another rounded hook on a nearby rock (sixth image)\u2014seem to be small yet tantalizing connections from the Upper Manhattan of today to its rich Revolutionary War backstory.<\/p>\n [Second image: Library of Congress<\/a>; third image: MCNY, x2010.11.1987<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York is a city of hooks\u2014Red Hook in Brooklyn, Corlears Hook on the Lower East Side, Tubby…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17935,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-218879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218879\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n