The Mystery of Hog Island

In 1996, a Queens College geology professor named Nicholas Coch helped to rediscover a forgotten piece of New York history. Coch, a towering man with a booming voice, had sent his students to a beach in Edgemere, Queens, to practice excavation. As they inspected the shore, they came across broken plates, beer mugs, and even a hurricane lamp buried in the sand. After dating the artifacts and reading old newspapers, Coch and his students theorized that the items were remnants of a once-famous barrier island—Hog Island—that was situated off the coast of Far Rockaway. According to the sparse historical sources that they could find, an 1893 hurricane effectively wiped it off the map.

Coch, a coastal geologist, interpreted the disappearance of Hog Island as proof that storms had ravaged and reshaped the coastline far more than previously understood. Only a major storm could wipe out a barrier island, he reasoned, and a hurricane could presumably strike again. His warnings soon reached the Times. A story called “The Little Island that Couldn’t” described Hog Island as a Hamptons-like escape where Tammany Hall politicians held important meetings. “For five cents, ferries carried pleasure-seekers to the island, where they changed into modest swimming costumes inside bathing houses,” the story said. “After dipping their toes in the cool Atlantic, they drank, ate and reveled at the island’s restaurants.” But, in the wake of the hurricane, it went on, “the island sank into the ocean.”

I grew up in Atlantic Beach, New York, a small town on a barrier island just across the water from Far Rockaway, and I first heard the story of Hog Island almost exactly ten years ago, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. My father and I set out on bicycles to take pictures of the devastation in coastal communities, and, during one ride in the Rockaways, we met a man who was scouring the beach with a metal detector.

“What are you looking for?” my father asked.

“Doubloons,” the man replied. “They wash up in the storms.”

The stranger spoke of shipwrecks, hurricanes, and a lost island that once existed off the coast. His story, as romantic as it was improbable, stuck with me. Years later, I began to research New York’s barrier islands, and I became obsessed with finding Hog Island.

Details proved elusive. Old maps tended to be rare and inaccurate, and the few historical accounts that documented the island’s destruction seemed to conflict with one another. “The History of the Rockaways,” a book from 1917 by the historian Alfred Bellot, reported that Hog Island vanished during the hurricane. “Where one day had appeared this excellent pleasure resort . . . the next nothing was to be seen except an unbroken surface of water,” he wrote. But a newspaper article from 1894 seems to indicate that some resort owners had rebuilt their pavilions for the summer season. A local historian, Emil Lucev, believes that another large storm caused Hog Island’s final disappearance in 1903, while the New-York Historical Society notes, “The final demise of Hog Island is apparently undocumented, but it seems to have washed away with the tides sometime in the nineteen-twenties.”

The memory of Hurricane Sandy spurred me to continue searching for clues. I thought that, if I knew Hog Island’s exact shape and location, I could understand how a place so similar to my home town disappeared—and whether it could happen again.

On a rainy April morning a few years into my search, I visited the Long Beach Historical Society, which is situated in a small stucco house that was built in 1909. For a few fruitless hours, I leafed through old maps with the archivists. After a while, I gave up, but, on my way out, I spotted an interesting book in the gift shop and decided that it was worth a trip to a nearby A.T.M. When I returned, I found one of its archivists clutching a map that we had overlooked. We unrolled it and weighed down the edges with an old inkwell and paperweight from their collection.

Before us lay a topographic sheet, or “T-sheet,” created, in 1879, by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, one of the first U.S. scientific agencies that was later folded into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It depicted the area’s bays, barrier islands, and marshes in far greater detail than any map I had seen. Nestled in the lower left corner was Hog Island, its northern edge curved like the back of a great swine.

Crucially, the map contained longitude and latitude lines that charted the island’s exact location—and someone had already left behind some clues. In red and black ink, they had sketched a few modern-day landmarks on the map: the Silver Point Jetty, Park Avenue, the Atlantic Beach Bridge. These were places I encountered practically every day. Some details had changed in the past hundred and thirty years: Atlantic Beach extended farther to the south, and Hog Island reached farther west, into what is now an inlet of water separating the Rockaways from Atlantic Beach. But, if the map was correct, then my home town and Hog Island were essentially one and the same.

In the United States, barrier islands are the dominant feature of coastal landscapes from the Gulf of Mexico to Maine. These dunescapes can be found on every continent except Antarctica and make up about ten per cent of coastlines worldwide. But stand on one long enough—a few years, a decade, a century at most—and you would quickly realize that barrier islands are little more than glorified sand deposits, continually shaped, sometimes violently and rapidly, by wind and water. “Many people don’t understand how dynamic they are,” Cheryl Hapke, a consultant in coastal resiliency and a professor of coastal geology at the University of South Florida, told me. “They just really are ribbons of shifting sand.” In an unfettered state, Hapke explained, barrier islands make coastlines more resilient. They are a first line of defense against hurricanes and nor’easters, and they are naturally adaptable: they grow, shrink, and even migrate as they seek equilibrium with the sea.

Despite their fragility and ephemerality, barrier islands are often heavily developed and densely populated. They include such places as Fire Island, New York; Miami Beach, Florida; Ocean City, Maryland; and the Outer Banks, in North Carolina. At the turn of the millennium, some 1.4 million people lived on U.S. barrier islands; half of them were in the state of Florida. Sanibel Island, one of the communities that was hit hardest by Hurricane Ian, is a barrier island. So is Galveston, Texas, which was a boom town until a 1900 hurricane flooded the city and killed more than six thousand people on the island and mainland. The Galveston Flood remains the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

This summer, I sent the 1879 map to a few experts, including Hapke, along with an overlay depicting the modern coastline. I asked them whether I was interpreting the maps correctly, and how one barrier island could have given way to another. “These T-sheets were remarkably accurate,” Hapke, who spent twenty years at the United States Geological Survey and has studied the coastal dynamics of nearby Fire Island, explained. The margin of error on a T-sheet is generally around ten metres, she added. “If it’s mapped on here, then Hog Island is there,” she said.

Andrew Ashton, a coastal morphologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, agreed, and theorized that, after the 1893 hurricane, Hog Island may have “eventually hit this kind of tipping point where it started moving quickly and fell apart.” Subsequent storms and tides probably pushed the island toward the mainland until it merged with the Far Rockaway shore. A 1908 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that remnants of Hog Island were still in use as a bathing beach, but the inlet that separated it from the shore was by then so shallow that boats could no longer pass. It also described a new sandbar forming to the east—an island, the author posited, that might one day extend to where Hog Island once was.

Nature never had a chance to remake the coastline. Modern technologies enabled developers to stabilize barrier islands, and, therefore, to profit from them; in the twenties and thirties, they dredged the New York City coast and used the sand to extend the neighboring barrier island of Long Beach. A series of jetties and bulkheads were built in an effort to stabilize the island. This time, the island would not move: coastal engineering had locked it in place. Its western end, situated roughly where Hog Island used to be, was named Atlantic Beach.

When I asked Hapke and Ashton what Hog Island’s demise could mean for Atlantic Beach and the many communities like it, they said that it highlights three intertwined forces: the threat of hurricanes, the instability of coastlines, and the risks of waterfront development. “What’s happened in the past tells a story of what we can expect in the future,” Hapke explained. Global warming puts similar landscapes at even greater risk, Ashton said. “Hog Island’s disappearance occurred without climate change and sea-level rise,” he told me. “The dynamic nature of the coast is going to try and continue to reëstablish itself.”

Hog Island can be seen as a parable for other coastal communities, but not a mirror, Hapke and Ashton said. There is probably far too much infrastructure now for an island to disappear in the wake of a single storm. Development has forced barrier islands into an artificial stasis that requires an endless cycle of erosion control, flood protection, and beach nourishment. In a world with higher seas and more powerful storms, these protective measures could become impossible to sustain. By 2100, sea levels around New York will be fifteen to seventy-five inches higher than they were in the early two-thousands, according to one estimate, meaning that smaller storms could one day produce surges on par with Sandy’s. Yet the city is behind on many coastal-resiliency efforts, according to a recent report by New York City’s comptroller; twenty-seven per cent of federal funds allocated after Hurricane Sandy still remain unused. Around the country, some residents of barrier islands are already debating whether to retreat and return these landscapes to seminatural states, or to remain and face the risk.

For me, the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Sandy has brought back vivid memories. I remember standing with my father in the doorway of our home as a cold river of ocean rushed down our street. The wind howled and the rain beat the windows. Fortunately for us, an almost imperceptible slope spared our house from the storm surge, but, nearby, Sandy ripped houses from their foundations and buried others in great drifts of sand. In a natural state, the movement of sand and water would have helped the island find a new equilibrium, but, because the land beneath our homes cannot migrate, residents had little choice but to try to hold it in place.

One day in late summer, not long after my discussions with Hapke and Ashton, I walked to the Silver Point Jetty, which marks the western end of Atlantic Beach, and gazed across the water toward Far Rockaway. Waves washed over the shallows, and sunlight illuminated sandbars beneath the surface. The beach clubs were still packed with revellers enjoying the shore. I tried to reflect on the future of our barrier islands, but the air smelled of salt, and beach grass shimmered in the breeze. This was not a day for difficult choices. In the distance, I could hear the sound of children playing in the surf. I didn’t know if I could ever let go of this place. It is, after all, my home. ♦