Skip to main content

The Great Sawed-Off Manhattan Hoax Hoax

Image
By
Image result for sawing off manhattan
This is the part of Manhattan that allegedly needed to be sawed off, fifty years after the hoax.  Note that it still hasn't sunk by this point.




One of the better known hoaxes in the history of New York City is the famous “sawing off” of the lower end of Manhattan.  The story goes that a ship’s carpenter, a man known simply as Lozier, got to talking with a number of lower Manhattan tradesmen one day in 1824 about how built-up the island was getting.  The story goes that it was widely feared that lower Manhattan would get so heavy with buildings that it would tip over and sink into the harbor.  A solution was proposed: cut the lower part of the island off, float it out into the harbor, spin it around 180 degrees, and reattach it, thus balancing out Manhattan and preventing it from sinking.  Lozier gathered a number of workers who met at where the Bowery and Broadway split, and another group to meet at the corner of the Bowery and Spring Street.  They were to be ready to work, and save Manhattan Island!



On the day the project was supposed to start, the workmen were there, but Lozier wasn’t.  Naturally the workmen were furious, and naturally Lozier made himself scarce for a few months!  Somewhere along the way, people realized that since islands don’t float, they won’t sink.  Thus was born a legend allowing all of us, no matter what we do, to shake our heads and marvel at how stupid other people can be, and we’ve been marveling at this story for… how long?  Well, though this is said to have taken place in 1824, the first written account of the Sawed-Off Manhattan Hoax dates from 1862.  By this time, Lozier was long dead, and there wouldn’t likely have been many victims of this prank still alive.  Researchers have searched archives of New York newspapers from 1824 and all over the 1820s, and have found nothing referencing this hoax.  So what does this mean?



What it means is that the existence of this hoax is almost certainly a hoax!  It’s a good story, the kind that people might enjoy believing, but there’s no evidence to suggest that this prank ever happened.  Still, it’s been repeated and shared many times since its first reference in 1862.  I remember hearing about it in elementary school over a hundred years later.  But there’s no evidence that this ever happened.



How could people be gullible enough to keep sharing a story without checking its veracity?  Who does that?  That might be a good question to ask yourself the next time you want to forward that unsourced story someone posted on the internet!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How the Lemon was Invented

By
Lemons How do you make a lemon?  Silly question, isn’t it?  You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right?  That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy.  Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow.  You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true.  The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma.  (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar .  I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.)  The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years.  The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits.  One f...
6 comments
Read more

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

By
Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”.  It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice.  Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes.   I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult?  Yes… and no.   The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult.  It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser .  Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word.  One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game...
1 comment
Read more

The Whoopie Cap

By
What can you do with your father’s old hats?  If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.”  Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right.  Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s.  In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats?  The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style.  Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice.  But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too.  When that happened, you’d ju...
Post a Comment
Read more