Well, the Hitchcock-on-Hudson contest has concluded, the entries are in, and it is a tie! (Jeter the dog is not one)
While we await additional information about one of our winners we will announce Chris DeMontravel of Mohegan Lake, NY. Chris provided three locations sited through the window of the train on which Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint travelled in the Alfred Hitchcock film, North by Northwest, and a fascinating and enjoyable history of each.
Because we had so many good entries, I have included here a quick Hudson River sunset from the conclusion of the same movie scene from North by Northwest. Anyone want to identify it for a copy of Jim Heron's Denning's Point: A Hudson River History? (You have until Sunday midnight -- click here to view the clip).
Chris describes herself this way:
I am Catholic and an active member of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton parish in Shrub Oak. I live in Mohegan Lake, NY. I moved up here about 16 years ago when my sister had her first baby. I am the proud aunt of two nieces (now 16 and 14). My family all live in the area. I am the director of MIS for Jackson Lewis, a national labor and employment law firm. Hobbies are gardening, bird watching, and walking my parents’ dog, Jeter (a schnauzer). My family and I love traveling, especially on cruises. My brother and I love Hitchcock movies and puzzles which is how we found your contest.
We had quite a variety of entrants. One writer, certain she would win, called earlier Sunday to inquire after her prize. Chris named J.C. Turner Lumber Yard, Tappan Zee Bridge, and Sing Sing. But it was the completeness and specificity of her answers that put her over the top.
A special mention to artists John and Ann Hulsey who replied all the way from Lawrence, Kansas! (Visit their website/studio here.)
Among others sites named by our 29 brave entrants are the Palisades, Hastings-on-Hudson, Annaconda Wire and Cable, Irvington, the Hudson Highlands, Tarrytown, Pollopel Island and Bannerman's Arsenal, Sloop Hill, and the tip of Denning's Point.
Here is Chris' entry:This was so much fun! Thank you. The landmarks I think I see are: The JC Turner Lumber Yard, Tappan Zee Bridge, and Sing Sing Prison.
If I am right, here is some history on them:JC Turner Lumber Yard:
J.C. Turner was no newcomer to the lumber industry. Born in Albany, New York, shortly after the Civil War, he had moved with his family to Michigan while still a child, eventually graduating from Hillsdale College. Turner then entered the sales department of the firm of Joseph Rathbone, a wholesale white pine distributor with facilities in Chicago. One day while selling in East St. Louis, Turner encountered a barge loaded with cypress shingles, became greatly impressed with the quality of cypress wood, and persuaded Rathbone to send him to Louisiana to investigate further. Soon he and Rathbone had built a cypress mill at Harvey, across the Mississippi from New Orleans, which eventually became the Louisiana Cypress Lumber Company.
Turner pioneered in successfully marketing cypress in northern states. Around 1895, he organized the J.C. Turner Cypress Lumber Company and built a wholesale distributing cypress lumber yard at Irvington on the Hudson River in New York. At first he shipped cypress up from Louisiana. Then, discovering cheaper schooner rates from Florida ports, Turner began to search out Florida sources of tidewater cypress, and by 1910 bought cypress from about a half dozen or more Florida sawmills. In 1910 he built a double band-saw mill at Centralia, Florida. Thus Turner had considerable lumber, and specifically cypress lumber, business experience before joining Burton & Swartz in buying Big Cypress Swamp timber. Having bought Big Cypress Swamp timber, the J.C. Turner Lumber Company and the Burton & Swartz Cypress Company formed the Lee Cypress Company, named after Lee County, Florida, to hold the newly acquired timber.Turner died in 1923, Burton in 1926. Meanwhile, the Burton & Swartz Company continued milling out timber in Taylor and Lafayette counties until about 1937 or 1938, thereafter selling off the firm's inventory of milled cypress until it was exhausted about 1941. Their Perry mill continued to operate until 1943 under the Burton & Swartz name, at which time the J.C. Turner Lumber Company bought 54 percent interest from the Burton estate and 6 percent from Swartz, who died a year later.
It should be recalled that Turner had always owned 40 percent of the Perry plant, and thus now had complete ownership. That same year, 1943, the J.C. Turner firm started milling cypress from the Big Cypress Swamp. In 1944 the Lee Cypress Company took over operation of the Perry plant, and the firm changed its name in 1947 to Lee Tidewater Cypress Company.
Tappan Zee Bridge:
The Governor Malcolm Wilson Tappan Zee Bridge, almost always referred to as the Tappan Zee Bridge, or simply the Tappan Zee, is a cantilever bridge in New York over the Hudson River at one of its widest points, the Tappan Zee, named for an American Indian tribe from the area called the "Tappan" (zee being the Dutch word for "sea"). It connects Nyack in Rockland County with Tarrytown in Westchester County and is the only highway crossing of the Hudson between the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge, over which the eastern Interstate 84 traverses, and the George Washington Bridge (Interstate 95).
Construction started in March 1952 and it opened for traffic on December 15, 1955. The total length of the bridge and approaches is 16,013 feet (just over 3 miles, 4.881 km). The cantilever span is 1,212 feet (369.42 meters) providing a maximum clearance of 138 feet (42 m) over the water. The bridge is about 25 miles (40 km) north of Midtown Manhattan; the Manhattan skyline can be seen from the bridge on a clear day. The bridge is part of the New York State Thruway mainline, and also designated as Interstate 87 and Interstate 287.The span carries seven lanes of automotive traffic. The center lane can be switched between eastbound and westbound traffic depending on the prevalent commuter direction; on weekdays, the center lane is eastbound in the morning and westbound in the evening. The switch is accomplished via a movable center barrier which is moved by a pair of barrier transfer machines. Even with the switchable lane, traffic is frequently very slow.
The bridge is one of the primary means of crossing the Hudson River north of New York City; it carries much of the traffic between southern New England and points west of the Hudson. In 1994, the name of Malcolm Wilson was added to the bridge's name upon the 20th anniversary of his leaving the Governor of New York's office in December 1974, though it is almost never used when the bridge is spoken about colloquially.
As of January 2009, each eastbound passenger car pays a toll of $5.00 cash, or $4.75 via E-ZPass. In 2009, the Tappan Zee Bridge was featured on The History Channel "The Crumbling of America" showing the infrastructure crisis in the United States.
Sing Sing:
Sing Sing Correctional Facility is a maximum security prison in the Village of Ossining, Town of Ossining, New York, United States. It is located approximately 30 miles (48 km) north of New York City on the banks of the Hudson River. Ossining's original name, "Sing Sing", was named after the Native American Sinck Sinck tribe from whom the land was purchased in 1685. Sing Sing houses approximately 1,700 prisoners. There are plans to convert the original 1825 cell block into a museum.
In March 1796, legislation was passed requiring the building of two state prisons in New York, one in Albany and the other somewhere in southern New York. In addition to the plan for the construction of the two prisons, there was to be appointed a "Board of inspectors," whose job was to "statedly visit the prisons, purchase clothing, bedding, raw materials for manufacturing purposes and to keep an account of the earnings and expenses of each prison the law also provided that the state governor and Council were to appoint a "Keeper, who was to be of some mechanical profession." No prison was built in Albany, but one was constructed in Auburn, beginning in April 1815 and opening a year later.
In 1825, the New York Legislature gave Elam Lynds the task of constructing a new, more modern prison. Lynds was the warden of Auburn Prison and a former Army captain. He spent months researching possible locations for the prison, considering Staten Island, The Bronx, and Silver Mine Farm, an area in the town of Mount Pleasant, located on the banks of the Hudson River. He also visited New Hampshire, where a prison was successfully constructed by inmate labor, using stone that was available on site. For this reason, by May, Lynds had finally decided on Mount Pleasant, located near a small village in Westchester County with the unlikely name of Sing Sing. This appellation was derived from the Indian words, "Sinck Sinck" which translates to "stone upon stone".
The legislature appropriated $20,100 to purchase the 130-acre (0.53 km2) site, and the project received the official stamp of approval. Lynds hand-selected 100 inmates from his own private stock for transfer and had them transported by barge along the Erie Canal to freighters down the Hudson River. On their arrival on May 14, the site was "without a place to receive them or a wall to enclose them"; "temporary barracks, a cook house, carpenter and blacksmith’s shops" were rushed to completion. When it was completed in 1826, Sing Sing was considered a model prison, because it turned a profit for the state. Lynds employed the Auburn system, which imposed absolute silence on the prisoners; the system was enforced by whipping and other brutal punishments.
After Lynds left in the wake of a scandal involving the pregnancy of a female prisoner, conditions at the prison began to deteriorate. Fires and disease became common, and in 1861, the governor called in the Army to quell a riot. Another notable warden, besides Lynds, was Lewis Lawes. He was offered the position of warden in 1919, accepted in January 1920, and remained for 20 years as Sing Sing's warden — a position which had been filled by nine separate people in the nine years prior to 1920, one of those for only three weeks. What he found was a facility that had lost any semblance of order through decades of neglect and abuse. Records documented 795 male and 102 female prisoners at Sing Sing; a head count turned up only 762 and 82 actually present. "How these missing prisoners had left the prison or when, could not be ascertained," he said. Worse still, for one prisoner who had been incarcerated for five years, there was no record of admission or retention history. He was declared a "volunteer," and released on the spot. Also, more than $30,000 in cash was missing from prison bank accounts, and there was no trace as to where the money went.
Lewis Lawes made many positive changes and put inmates in positions within the prison he knew he could trust. For example, when Lawes came across Jimmy DeStefano on the prison roster, he recognized the name from when the inmate was a young orphaned boy running the streets of Little Italy with Al Capone and the Five Points Gang. Knowing he could be trusted and depended upon to do one of the most stressful assignments in Sing Sing Prison, he assigned him as the barber in the Death House. He remained in that position longer than any other inmate barber ever had. During the five years he was barber, he gave 46 men and one woman their final haircuts. The woman, Ruth Snyder, was executed for murdering her husband in order to gain insurance money. A New York Daily News photographer hid a camera on his ankle, and the moment the first jolt of electricity passed through Ruth Snyder's body, he snapped the most famous and only picture ever taken during an execution. This photo is still in demand today. Before Warden Lawes, documented punishments were brutal, and described a long history of abuse by both prison guards and wardens; this changed under Warden Lewis E. Lawes, who implemented historic reforms.
Thank you for your consideration! And, again, for the contest. That was fun. -- Chris
Remember, if you are interested in taking a second try, and win Jim Heron's book, click here.
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