5 Minutes from now…
If you travel to the Atlantic Highlands, NJ Municipal Harbor and look to the northeast, you will see a two-mile pier jutting out into Sandy Hook Bay. Most times there are United States Naval vessels tied up to the pier. The pier is the port section of Naval Weapons Station Earle.
1848 New York Harbor
An 1849 edition of the American Angling Guide describes a spot near Communipaw and the Jersey Flats this way: “A little below this village” there was hard bottom on the flats, and “a single rock” bare at low water was “called Black Tom.”
Tradition says it took its name from “Black Tom,” a dark-skinned fisherman, possibly a freedman, who lived there for years. His surname, dates, and fate have disappeared from the record, and only the place name remains.
The development years
By the late nineteenth century, industrial land-making had swallowed the tiny rock/fishing mark. The Library of Congress notes that Black Tom was originally a small island near Liberty Island, connected to the Jersey City mainland by a causeway by 1880, and later expanded by landfill operations for the Lehigh Valley Railroad between 1905 and 1916.
By 1916, Black Tom was a dangerous industrial outpost and home to the Lehigh Valley Railroad’s Black Tom terminal, with warehouses operated by the National Dock and Storage Company. The terminal sat just across the water from Bedloe’s Island, now Liberty Island, and close to Ellis Island. Black Tom became part of the harbor industrial machine: railcars, piers, barges, freight, explosives, munitions, oil, and immigrant-era industry all packed along the waterfront. By 1916, it was one of the great choke points for Allied war materiel leaving the United States.
On the morning of Sunday, July 30, 1916, roughly two million pounds of war materials were stored in freight cars and on barges. One especially dangerous vessel, identified as Johnson Barge No. 17, held a massive load of TNT or dynamite.
The end of the world
Shortly after midnight, small fires were spotted around the yard. Some guards reportedly tried to fight them. Others ran, knowing what was sitting in those cars. The Jersey City Fire Department was called, but by then the scene was already becoming an inferno. At about 2:08 a.m., the great blast came.
Another major explosion followed later, around 2:40 a.m. The force was astonishing. Windows shattered across Jersey City, Hoboken, Bayonne, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. The blast was compared to a 5.5 magnitude earthquake and was felt or heard far beyond the harbor.
Shrapnel struck the Statue of Liberty, damaging the statue and helping lead to the permanent closure of public access to the torch. Ellis Island was battered; immigrants and staff were evacuated by ferry. The National Park Service notes that debris rained on Bedloe’s Island for hours, damaging buildings and embedding fragments in the statue’s side facing Black Tom.
110 years later, the human toll is still reported differently by different sources. The FBI gives four dead; other accounts and memorial sources give higher estimates, sometimes seven or more, partly because people lived and worked on boats and barges around the harbor margins and those casualties could have been overlooked.
Why?
By the next day, the question that was pervasive in everyone’s minds was “How did the fires start?”
German agents operating in the United States. Michael Kristoff, Kurt Jahnke, and Lothar Witzke sabotaged the munitions depot to stop supplies from reaching Britain and France. The FBI calls it a clear act of sabotage, and the National Park Service describes it as a deliberate German attack before America formally entered World War I.
Black Tom was not simply an explosion. It was a warning that modern warfare had crossed the Atlantic before American soldiers did. It showed that railroads, piers, factories, warehouses, immigrant neighborhoods, police departments, and national symbols could all
become part of a foreign battlefield.
The FBI and historians have pointed to Black Tom as one of the shocks that exposed America’s lack of a real counterintelligence structure and helped push the country toward stronger espionage and sabotage laws, including the wartime security framework that followed in 1917.
1943
The explosion at the Black Tom rail yard in 1916 shocked the area. The Military knew they needed a more secure and safer location for the storage and transport of munitions than in a dense urban area. As with all such decisions, the debate continued for decades.
According to Wikipedia, the USS El Estero pulled into New York Harbor in early April 1943, where she waited her turn to load munitions at the long finger pier of the New York Port of Embarkations Caven Point Terminal off Jersey City, New Jersey.
She had taken on 1,365 tons of mixed munitions on April 24, 1943, and was preparing to depart at approximately 5:30 PM, when a boiler flashback started a fire on oily water in her bilges, which quickly grew out of control. The ship was moored directly opposite two other fully loaded ammunition ships and two ammunition-laden railroad boxcars. More than 5,000 tons of ammunition was in immediate danger of being set off by the fire on El Estero (comparable to a tactical nuclear weapon).
Despite valiant efforts to extinguish the fire, the conflagration was not containable. In a daring display of bravery, fireboats towed the burning vessel to shallow waters off the narrows, despite the realization that her cargo could explode at any moment. When they reached an area deemed safe, they pumped 38,000 gallons of seawater into El Estero’s holds via hoses until she sank, extinguishing the fires.
What is considered to have been the single greatest threat to New York City during World War II passed without major incident or loss of life.