“We need them boats! Them clinkers!” shouted one.
Dozens of canal boats, rowboats, clinkers and dinghies floated free among the icebergs which had torn them from their moorings. How to capture the craft was the question.
Harry Bullen of 102 Louisiana stood stymied at the edge trapped by the water. He had been walking along Elk Street when he spotted a dray with coils of hemp rope stacked in the back and nobody watching. He looped each arm through two and absconded with the four. He took off running toward home with his bounty. Turning the corner onto Louisiana St. he was as much surprised by the police officers and patrol wagon as he was the flood spreading out in all directions. That’s when Ed Stanton raced up. Jim Sullivan recognized Bullen from his many run-ins with the law, arresting him a number of times for stealing patent medicines, silks, liquor and such from rail cars, Bullen’s crime of choice.
“Bullen!” hollered the Detective. “Get over here, now!”
With the flood at his front, the police both front and back, and himself laden down with heavy coils of filched rope, he surrendered without protest.
“Let’s see them ropes you got!” Sullivan bellowed as he surmised the predicament. Bullen sheepishly handed over one of the coils. Sullivan unraveled the rope and began tying a loop in the end. “Let’s see if I can lasso me an oarlock like a cowboy!” he shouted, desperation in his voice. He struggled with the knot and failed. Then tried and failed again.
“Here, Sully. I know how to do it.” Bullen reached for the rope. Sullivan for a moment glared at the nerve of the kid. Then he thought better of it and handed over the rope. Bullen fashioned a lasso within a few seconds and to the astonishment of the officers, began spinning a loop over his head before releasing it toward the clinker. He captured the boat’s oarlock on his first try, and together they pulled the clinker toward them. As they all piled in, Bullen unfastened the rope and said “I’ll catch us another!” And then he did.
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It was a half basement that, because it had remained entirely dry for years, became a repository for great amounts of the alderman’s family’s needless stuff. Small windows were located high on the basement walls right beneath the eaves of the low ceiling. Seen from the outside the windows were located below the ground level within a window well. Because the wells were not filled with snow due to the thaw, some measure of quickly fading light was thankfully filtered into the dank cellar space. Empty wooden barrels, stacks of bushel baskets, cheap Larkin catalog furniture, an armchair in need of upholstering ever since Mickey had torn the stuffing out in a fit of mongrel frustration, shelves of canned peaches and pickles and apple sauce, rusting yard tools stored for the winter, unlabeled crates holding items now forgotten. Annie came upon the Ever Ready boxes right away and grabbed one.
Unaware to anyone not paying close attention, bergs of ice had continued to lodge and accumulate beneath the Michigan Street bridge by the minute, forming a solid dam downstream from the family’s Hamburg Street houses. Its mass held back the river to the point where the swiftly swelling volume of thaw water sought an escape via the most convenient routes of least resistance, one of which was South Street along the watercourse’s north bank. In a flash, flood waters poured into the street and quickly engulfed South Street and the streets perpendicular to it. Included were the Alderman’s and the Detective’s Hamburg Street structures. Giant ice floes were carried along by the swiftly expanding surge, smashing into parked automobiles and carriages. Waiting tethered horses screamed in shock and panic as icy water swirled around their legs. The few people fully aware of what was happening began to shout warnings as they sprinted for their lives. A swell topped by eight inch thick ice floes collided with the alderman’s house, the glacial mass smashing right through the cellar windows. Freezing cold black river water gushed into the dim basement. Annie had no idea what was happening before the frigid soup enveloped her and the cellar’s accumulation of flotsam began to swirl around, blocking her escape route back to the stairs. The lamp was extinguished and she was now in near-total darkness, unsure of exactly where the stairs were.
Hannah heard the crash and Annie’s shout and grabbed an oil lamp off the kitchen table to investigate. At the open cellar door she was horrified to see water rising to the height of nearly the second step from the top. She began screaming, “Annie! Annie!! God help us! Annie?”
Jenny began to wail. Sophie the servant girl rushed in and screeched “Kurwa mać!”
Annie’s number three son John Jr., attracted to the ruckus, flew down the stairs from his bedroom. His heavily napping younger brother James remained sound asleep.
The initial shock of cold that encompassed Annie was almost immediately followed by a fierce impulse to survive. The water rose over her head in an instant. She held her breath. Despite freezing water numbing her eyeballs she was able to perceive light coming from above from the oil lamp that Hannah held. Instinctively she swam toward it. The volume of her clothing, multiplied by the debilitating numbness overtaking her limbs, rendered her efforts exhausting. She could not hear the frantic voices at the head of the stairs howling and weeping. She groped and grasped trying to recognize by feel anything at all familiar. Abruptly her forehead collided underwater with a wooden step. Intuitively she felt for the next one higher up, then the next.
Hannah tried her strongest to hold him back, but Junior jumped into the maelstrom, landing on the third step from the top up to his waist. Hannah reached out and grabbed his collar at the precise moment that Junior felt a familiar hand grasp around his calf. He tried to reach for his mother but Hannah’s grasp was impeding him. Without a thought he turned his head and bit hard into his aunt’s hand. Reflexively she yelped and let go. Junior stooped downward groping into the glacial sulfur-stinking pool and found his mother’s arm. Adrenalin pumping through his little muscles provided him a strength nothing short of super human. As he raised her sputtering head above the water the gross weight of her dress tried its best to defeat his effort. Hannah, elated by Annie’s appearance, stepped into the water, bracing herself with one hand on the rickety railing so as not to tumble in. She grabbed the back of Annie’s dress. Together, Junior and Hannah hauled her out.
Annie lay on the floor choking and gasping. Although now safe she nevertheless violently kicked and skittered away from the cellar door in terror, trying to get as far from the death trap as fast as she could. Together they aided her. Water was yet rising above the cellar level. It began spilling across the floor of the side entrance hallway on which she lay. Up four more stairs from the hallway to the kitchen in unison they pulled her toward the blazing stove freshly stoked with wood for cooking supper. How glad Annie was at that moment that she had not given in to the alderman’s demand for a modern gas model.
“Sophie,” gasped Hannah out of breath from fear and exertion, “go get Annie’s bathrobe! And some blankets!” Within seconds Sophie returned arms full.
“Children, turn around. Don’t look!”
Annie was in shock, still not fully comprehending quite what had happened. The children turned away. Together Sophie and Hannah stripped off Annie’s leaden dress, then her undergarments. Neither had ever before seen Annie naked. Annie shook furiously. Sophie undid the garters and pulled off Annie’s stockings. She had lost her shoes in her struggle to save herself. Sophie wrangled to get Annie’s robe on her, she not able to control her near-paralyzed limbs voluntarily. Next they wrapped her in a woolen blanket, then another. Hannah pulled a kitchen chair away from the table, setting it close to the fire, and eased her into it. Sophie filled an enameled pan with warm water for Annie’s feet. The children and Sophie swarmed around her, hugging and crying and rubbing her to warm her up. Her soggy clothes lay in a heap on the floor smelling of waste both industrial and human.
Junior parted the curtains and looked out the window to see the neighborhood entirely flooded. The volcanic glow from the Union Ironworks’ furnaces directly across Hamburg Street reflected red upon the black
water. Mighty geysers of live steam arose from the Ironworks’ puddler trenches as freezing water invaded the property and flowed over molten iron, exploding, the resultant poisonous fog completely enveloping entire buildings. Scores of ironworkers shouted and clambered up the four massive hoists to escape the rising floodwaters.
Junior ran up the stairs to wake brother James, who despite the terrible shouting had slept right through the crisis.
“Jimmy! Wake up! There’s a big flood! Water’s fillin’ up the back hallway! Hurry!” Junior grabbed a leg and pulled his dead-to-the-world younger brother out of bed. Groggily James lashed out at his attacker. “Wake up, stupid!” shouted Junior. “Momma’s nearly just died!”
At that, James snapped out of it, jumped up from the floor and raced downstairs on Junior’s’ tail.
Suddenly, Hannah remembered David, home all alone. She panicked. Horrible possible scenarios filled her head. She looked desperately out the window. It looked as if the house had been cast into the Arctic ocean. She had no way of leaving. Ice floes and water waist deep at the very least made the prospect of her crossing the yard to her house impossible and dangerous.
Hannah raised a window hoping to shout to David, but the storm window was affixed solidly to the outside and the double windows at her own house made it doubtful that David would ever hear her. She tried the telephone. It was dead.
Downriver, a massive lake freighter delivering its Midwestern bounty heaved heavily upstream toward its designated elevator, its propeller whirling furiously beneath the surface. The Michigan Street jack knife bridge lifted on command, and the mighty ship plowed through the ice dam that had formed there like butter. A tidal wave enveloped the ship without deleterious effect other than slowing its progress slightly as the seiche swept past and raced headlong for Lake Erie.
Rowing fiercely among the First Ward’s houses on lower Louisiana Street, and making little headway, the police in their commandeered clinkers suddenly went nowhere. Their oars scraped bottom. The waters were now quickly receding, leaving behind an eerie accumulation of ice floes for as far as the eye could see. Jim shouted to Stanton and the others to return to the patrol wagon. They abandoned the boats, ran back up Louisiana Street to where the wagons were parked and climbed aboard. There Mush barked furiously, angry at having missed all the fun. With Sullivan, Geary, Lynch, Stanton all living in houses within two blocks of one another, they headed back down Louisiana Street to South Street. They dodged one stranded ice floe after another. The patrol wagon got hemmed in by bergs at Vincennes Street. The horses could proceed no further. Jim Sullivan and Geary lived the farthest away, about three blocks. The men vacated the wagon and raced for their respective homes on foot. Jim slipped and slid and knocked his shins a few times as he sprinted through the maze of sizable icebergs in the near-dark, terrified over his family’s welfare.
“The water’s goin’ down now!” shouted Junior as he peered out the window while the others worked over Annie. She vomited into a pail. She was in shock.
“I’ve got to get home to check on little Davey!” said Hannah. “I’ll be right back Annie! Hold tight!!”
She hesitated momentarily after opening the side door. There was yet standing water but it was no more than two inches deep. No matter, she was already soaking wet and freezing cold from the waist down. Hannah was stupefied by the number and size of ice floes that now overspread the yard, the alley, the street. Sloshing next door between and among them she entered her house to find little David napping peacefully on the sofa, the fire in the stove lazily glowing and the stew, for some fortuitous reason, not burning. Within seconds Jim flew into the house and shouted, “Is everyone all right?”
He was out of breath, and leaned heavily against the kitchen door frame for support. “My God, Hannah! You’re saturated!”
“Just wait til I tell ye what’s happened, Jim!” she began, teeth chattering.
The Regatta
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Buffalo Morning Express Monday June 15:
SCULLING ON THE BUFFALO RIVER
Mutual Rowing Club Held Its Most Successful Annual Regatta Yesterday
BIG BOOM IS PREDICTED
Thousands Viewed the Sport and South Buffalo Made Its Usual Holiday of the Affair.
None who viewed the enthusiastic throng which was attracted to the vicinity of the Buffalo River yesterday by the 22d Annual Regatta of the Mutual Rowing Club the most successful in the organization’s history, could deny that the future of the sport of sculling in Buffalo is a very happy prospect. Judging by the enthusiasm with which the affair was greeted, the sport of rowing here is on the eve of another brilliant period. Thousands of spectators gathered along the Hamburg Street dock front of the Buffalo River, off the South Street home of the club. Predictions were freely advanced that while the Mutuals have done splendidly in keeping alive interest in sculling, practically unaided in recent years, they will soon have a capable assistance. Other clubs are springing up and local rivalry promises to give place to inter-club competitions before very long.
The Celtic Rowing Club has been reorganized and in a few days the Celtics will have a new four-oared shell from W. H. Davy of Cambridgeport, and then the boys from The Island will take up rowing in earnest. The Lighthouse Social Club, which has handsome new quarters near the lighthouse station, expects to take up rowing at once and join in the general boom for the most fascinating of sports with those who love outdoor athletics.
Two of the most interesting spectators at yesterday’s regatta were James Murphy of the old Celtic Rowing Club, former manager of James Griffin, for years champion oarsman of the city, and Michael J. Byrne of the old West End Rowing Club. As they stood on the dock together, viewing the sport, the old-timers agreed that it was very probable that the intense interest felt in local rowing in other days will be revived. Years ago Buffalo boasted several good rowing clubs and they seem likely to be renewed.
The course of today is a mile and a half, with a turn. Owing to its triangular shape, it is difficult to make fast turns, but laid out as it is, inside the new breakwater in the lake, the course is one of the best in the country. Had the oarsmen of the old days enjoyed such facilities instead of having been compelled to resort to the Erie Canal, where the Fourth of July regattas were rowed for prizes offered by the city, the prospect is that many of the old clubs now dead would be in evidence today. At best the course in the Canal was tortuous and many fouls were recorded, a general wrangle following each regatta until the public and oarsmen alike sickened on the sport. Present facilities are satisfactory to both spectators and participants.
Many Gather For The Sport
Yesterday thousands gathered for the day’s programming testifying to the hold which the popular Mutuals have on the Community. South Buffalo made a holiday of the affair, so to speak. During the lulls in the program the Bavarian Band played selections from a specially prepared stand on the water front.
The best race was a junior single-shell race between John Collins and S.V. Kelley. Kelley led at the start, but Collins gradually overtook him and won the race by a boat length. Time: 11:06
The second race was a junior four-oared between crew No. 1 : J. O’Donnell, bow; G. Roberts, No. 2, John Linn, No. 3; and F. Chilcott, bow. L. Jordan, No. 4; James Conners, No. 3; Ed W. Dray, stroke. Crew No. 2 took the lead at the start but Crew No. 1 began to spurt and passed No. 2 and won by three lengths, time 13:20.
The third race was a single scull race between William M. Aman, the champion oarsman of Western New York, and Ed W. Dray. Aman led all the way and won by two lengths.
The next event was a double clinker race between the Mutual and Lighthouse clubs. The Lighthouse crew won the race by 10 feet.
The last race was a special event between two senior four-oared crews. This race was the best and most exciting event of the day. Many of the spectators were pleased to see Mike Kelleher rowing again. Mike is one of the best men in a four-oared boat that the Mutual Rowing Club has ever produ
ced. The personnel of the crew were: Crew No. 1: William M. Aman, bow; M. Kelleher, No. 2; N. Whelan, No. 3; John Murphy, stroke. Crew No. 2: M. Lovell, bow; T. Hartnett, No. 3; P. Murphy, No. 2; Ed Dray, stroke.
Hot Finish By The Fours.
Both crews made a beautiful start. Crew No. 2 took the lead and held it for about one quarter mile. Crew No. 1 increased its stroke to 36 and passed Lovell’s crew. At the buoy, crew No. 1 was half a boat length ahead and rapidly increased its lead to three lengths when it passed the mile and a quarter buoys. Crew No. 2 began to sprint and as it came on the crew No. 1 was only a boat length ahead. Then the spectators saw one of the most excited finishes ever seen in a club race. Stroke Murphy broke his seat in the last 130 yards and rowed without a seat almost to the finish. This handicapped Captain Aman’s crew, but they rowed like fiends. Crew No. 2 crept up on them inch by inch and won the race by two feet. The spectators thought it was a dead heat, but cheer after cheer rang out when the winners were announced.
Murderers, Scoundrels and Ragamuffins Page 15