{"id":315036,"date":"2026-08-06T08:08:45","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T08:08:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/315036\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T08:08:45","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T08:08:45","slug":"gertrude-ederle-queens-gazette","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/315036\/","title":{"rendered":"Gertrude Ederle – Queens Gazette"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\"Gertrude<\/a><\/p>\n

Gertrude Ederle, \u201cWorld\u2019s Greatest Woman Swimmer.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Queens Gazette printed an article on July 24, 2024, focusing on Gertrude Ederle in 1924. Some early paragraphs are repeated here. 1926 would prove to be Gertrude\u2019s triumphal year.<\/p>\n

One hundred years ago.<\/p>\n

Born on October 23, 1905, and raised in the west 60s in Manhattan, Gertrude Ederle learned to swim at the family summer cottage in Highlands, New Jersey. Her father, Henry, was a butcher and provisioner at their family shop on Amsterdam Av\u00adenue. Gertrude lived much of her later life in Flush\u00ading, Queens. Her life links to Queens are many. She died in Wyckoff, New Jersey, in November 2003, at age 98, and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.<\/p>\n

Gertrude started swimming at a young age, set\u00adting her first records at age 12. From the early 1920s Gertrude began to set and amass numerous national and world records in swimming distances from 100 to 800 meters. In 1922, one fine afternoon at Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, Miss Ederle broke seven swimming records for various championship events. From 1921 to 1925, Gertrude held 29 offi\u00adcial world and U.S. swimming records.<\/p>\n

Miss Ederle stepped into the international spot\u00adlight as an eighteen-year old United States Olympic swimmer, at the 1924 Paris, France Olympic Games. Gertrude won two Bronze Medals (3rd place) in the Women\u2019s 100-meter, and then the 400-meter freestyle races, both individual events. As a member of the 4X100 Meter freestyle relay team, Gertrude Ederle became an Olympic Gold Medal\u00adist. Gertrude wasn\u2019t as successful as she had hoped to be at the 1924 Paris Olympics, yet a gold and two bronze medals were quite the haul for the 18-year-old New Yorker. Miss Ederle had bigger fish to fry as she went professional and set her focus upon distance swimming.<\/p>\n

A highly motivated swimmer destined for aqua-glory, Gertrude attempted distances even the best swimmers would not wish to swim. In 1925, she swam from the Battery in lower Manhattan south through the narrows separating Brooklyn and Staten Island, to Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Some sources say her over-seven-hour swim was only 16 miles, another stating it was a 21-mile swim. The distances sometimes varied based upon the tides, currents, and wind, which sometimes caused a swimmer to actually swim farther than the officially listed distance. This was a common occurrence. All these years later, this epic marathon swim, officially mapped at 17.5 miles, is called the \u201cEderle Swim,\u201d hosted annually by NYC Swim.<\/p>\n

Many saw this swim as a precursor to a future attempt at swimming across the English Channel, completed by only five men. That same summer of 1925, on August 18th, Gertrude attempted and failed to swim across the English Channel. She fired her trainer after the failed attempt, some spec\u00adulating that her trainer sabotaged her near success\u00adful crossing effort.<\/p>\n

After training for a year and swimming to in\u00adcrease stamina and distance, she set off from Cap Gris-Nez, France, where her 21-mile swim was truly arduous as currents, tides, and time were fac\u00adtors in keeping her from the accepting shores of England. Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim across the English Channel on August 6, 1926. Her epic swim took 14 hours and 34 minutes, as her \u201c21-mile\u201d crossing became the equivalent of a 35-mile swim, due to stormy conditions taking her off course. She made landfall at Kingsdown, Kent. Determination, indeed.<\/p>\n

New York City, Gertrude\u2019s hometown, regaled her with a ticker tape parade down the \u201cCanyon of Heroes\u201d on Broadway, in lower Manhattan, on Au\u00adgust 27, 1926.<\/p>\n

This writer has a personal family link to the Ed\u00aderle family. My father, born in 1926 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, lived above the Ederle Butcher Shop at 66th Street and Amsterdam Av\u00adenue. Gertrude\u2019s parents, Henry and Gertrud, owned and ran the butcher shop. My Dad would tell a story that his mother, my Grandma, observing from a second-floor window, would put him out\u00adside the butcher shop in a stroller, and allowed him to gladly accept a piece of meat or bread in which to nibble on. They were poor prior to the Great De\u00adpression, beginning in 1929. Things like that hap\u00adpened, back then. Additionally, the press nicknamed Gertrude \u201cTrudy,\u201d yet, according to my Dad, family and friends called her \u201cGertie.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gertrude\u2019s many, many hours in the water ex\u00adasperated the onset of deafness as it would burden her terrifically in her later years. She would teach deaf children to swim through the Lexington School for the Deaf in Manhattan, the school now located in East Elmhurst, Queens.<\/p>\n

Gertrude Ederle would, in later life, swim at the Aquacade on Meadow Lake at the 1939-1940 New York World\u2019s Fair. Her name is honored at that site by the Gertrude Ederle Terrace and Caf\u00e9, by a NYC Parks Dept. recreation center and playground on West 60th Street in Manhattan, and by a park in Highlands, New Jersey. Nicknamed \u201cGertie,\u201d \u201cTrudy,\u201d and \u201cThe Queen of the Waves,\u201d Gertrude Ederle would go on to be called, by then President Calvin Coolidge, \u201cAmerica\u2019s Best Girl.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are a fair number of books written about Gertrude Ederle\u2019s youth, swimming career, and later life. I recommend the excellent 2024 movie, \u201cYoung Woman and the Sea,\u201d subtitled: \u201cHow Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World,\u201d based upon the 2009 book by Glenn Stout.<\/p>\n

For journalists, writers, and historians, anniver\u00adsary years celebrate great human achievements and horrific world events. Perhaps another writer can expand upon these words in 25 or 50 years when we have cause to mention Gertrude\u2019s amazing 1926 feat once again.<\/p>\n

Gertrude Ederle, a New York woman through and through, is best remembered for her swimming across the English Channel in 1926. We celebrate her here today, 100 years later. On August 6, 1926, as Gertrude waded into the cold French ocean surf, the gutsy American announced, \u201cEngland or drown is my motto.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gertrude Ederle, \u201cWorld\u2019s Greatest Woman Swimmer.\u201d The Queens Gazette printed an article on July 24, 2024, focusing on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315037,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-315036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315036","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=315036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}