Creative History

  During the unbearably hot summer of 1916--while the horrors of the First World War raged across the Atlantic in Europe--Americans, who as yet were still considered neutrals in the Great War to End All Wars, flocked to the beaches along the eastern seaboard in record numbers. Nowhere was this early twentieth century summer holiday craze more apparent than along the Jersey Shore and at the beaches that were in close proximity to New York City--most notably Coney Island.  By July of 1916 Brooklyn’s Coney Island had already begun to come into its own known worldwide as America’s most popular summertime playground for both children and adults.  Coney Island’s nearest competitor for the title of America’s Beach in 1916 was about one hundred miles south, with a boardwalk all its own and just as famous in its own right, New Jersey’s Atlantic City. During the monumental summer of 1916 in France soldiers from all over Europe were slaughtering one another by the thousands in t...

     Just after midnight on July 30, 1916 Jersey City firefighters responded to reports of a series of small fires burning along the piers on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor. Black Tom is an artificially created island that is located on the New Jersey side of the harbor adjacent to Ellis and Liberty Islands.   Originally, Black Tom had simply been the name given by sailors to a large rock that had stood out above the waterline in New York Harbor.  This rock had become infamous because of the hazards it posed to ships trying to enter and exit Manhattan. For that reason, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the space surrounding Black Tom had begun to be used for dumping refuse and garbage from New York City.  Within the space of only a few years an artificial island was created by all of this landfill and prior to the turn of the twentieth century a railroad was constructed that connected Black Tom Island to mainland New Jersey.  F...