That storm did not directly hit Jersey City or New York City, but passed to the east and hit Long Island. Still, it is considered one of the most severe storms to ever hit New York City.

“New York has seldom suffered more by the elements,” the August 25, 1893 New York Times reported. “The low parts of the city, the districts lying along the waterfronts on both the east and the west side were flooded. The rain washed out gutters and manholes and did much damage to many of the streets. Hundreds of chimneys were tossed down like playthings, and roofs were ripped off as if with a knife.”

However, the Times noted, the damage was worse in Jersey City and Brooklyn, “because of the less substantial character of the buildings in those two cities.”

While the story doesn’t mention flooding in Jersey City, based on its account Lower Manhattan, we’re pretty sure there must have been flooding here as well, given the topographical similarities.

“An extraordinarily high tide attended the closing hours of the cyclone. The water rose up over South Street, and was at the top of the sea wall at Battery Park,” the Times wrote. “Old boatmen said they had never before known the tide to rise so high.”

And a little more than 70 years before the 1893 storm, the only modern-day hurricane to directly pass over parts of New York City came to town.

“[It] pushed the tide up 13 feet in one hour and inundated wharves, causing the East River and the Hudson River to merge across lower Manhattan as far north as Canal Street,” according to a 2005 story in LiveScience. “Deaths were limited since few lived there at the time.” (Only 152,000 people lived in New York City in 1821; today that number is at an estimated 8.2 million.)

Image: An August 24, 1893 weather map of the hurricane over our area, via the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Instead, it crashed in South Jersey’s Pine Barrens, about a mile from Chatsworth. Just before 5 pm, the train, which was carrying 47 passengers, jumped the rail tracks that had been damaged due to a massive rainfall. There were 32 injured passengers and one death — a cook in the dining car, the only one to topple on its side, died later from being scalded.

Rail authorities dispatched a relief train from Jersey City after 9 pm; it traveled down to the accident site before returning to the waterfront at nearly 2 am with those passengers who were able to keep traveling. Railroad inspectors reportedly found the dining car damaged beyond repair, and the car body spent the remainder of its days off the rails serving as a freight station near Communipaw Avenue. And the Blue Comet itself didn’t fare much better, only serving for about two more years. It made its final trip on September 27, 1941.

FURTHER READING:

• The Philly Inquirer scored an interview this year with one of the first people on the scene of the crash (he was then just a 13-year-old boy).
• NJPineBarrens.com has an excellent and detailed retelling of the crash.
• A forum post on NJPineBarrens.com has some great photos of the present-day accident site.

Photo of Blue Comet sign at Liberty State Park’s Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal by GK tramrunner229

- NY Fed Prez in JC: The man who runs the Federal Reserve’s most powerful bank visited Jersey City’s waterfront yesterday, telling city officials the Fed is “trying to do everything we can” to get the economy moving again.

- Charges Dropped: Charges have been dropped in the North Carolina case involving a former Jersey City woman whose bones were found in a backpack after a judge ruled that cremation of her bones destroyed the defense’s ability to conduct tests.

- Crime Blotter: A Jersey City man trying to steel wood panels from a West Side Avenue church was arrested early Thursday morning, while a 25-year-old Jersey City man was stabbed by two masked assailants on Wednesday night near McGinley Square.

In Statewide News:

- Redistricting: A Tea Party group’s lawsuit attempting to dump the new map that sets the boundaries for New Jersey’s 40 legislative districts will probably be dismissed, a state judge said Thursday.

- Sexual Assault Law: Gov. Christie signed legislation yesterday that will make rape victims not responsible for the cost of forensic testing related to their cases.

- History: Students are using new technologies to locate centuries-old graves at a slave cemetery in Upper Saddle River.

It’s all part of a public art project which will have its cornerstone event this Sunday at the laundromat. Skvirsky is one of five participants in The Laundromat Project‘s 2011 Create Change Public Artist Residency program, which aims to connect communities and artists in meaningful ways. Her project, ASK ME: TELL ME, was started with the goal of, as she puts it, “creat[ing] an archive considering the laundromat as a site of Jersey City history by documenting the transitions it has undergone over the years and activate the space for stories from residents about its current role within the community.”

This Sunday all Jersey City residents are invited to take part in the public art project, when Skvirsky will be facilitating a free art workshop that offers access to drawing, photography and sound recording. Participants will learn about the city’s history and be invited to record their impressions of how Jersey City’s landscape is changing through redevelopment, gentrification and demographics.

After Sunday’s event, Aguilera will create a series of place-based postcards that will act as a living archive of Jersey City and will be made available for free this fall, via a kiosk located at Lucky Laundromat. Participants in the archive will also receive a copy of their contribution.

“Making artwork in the laundromat has led to exchanges with Jersey City residents about how their neighborhood is changing, uses of public space and how they see themselves in a future Jersey City,” the artist says of the project.

THE DETAILS

ASK ME: TELL ME Public Art Project; Sunday, August 21 from noon to 6 pm; Lucky Laundromat, 577 Jersey Avenue.

On the back page of the just-released Summer 2011 issue of NEW, we asked readers:

Around 1918, when this picture postcard was made, this Jersey City building was home to the Monarch Art Photo Studio, M&J Bothe Union Badge Makers and Costumers, and Davidson Jewelers (“official railroad watch inspector!”). The building that now stands on the same corner was back in the news this spring — why?

After several readers wrote in with incorrect guesses, we received the first correct guess this morning. Mark Morchel, who used to live in Jersey City but now resides in Kearny, will receive a $50 gift certificate to the Iron Monkey for winning.

His answer?

“The parting shot is the building in which Barcade recently opened. 163 Newark Ave.”

Indeed it is. The building at the corner of Newark and Barrow has undergone plenty of changes over the years; the fine folks at the New Jersey Room of the Jersey City Free Public Library helped us track down several historic images of the site — the 1918 picture postcard, as well as a slightly more familiar shot from 1983 or so, seen below.

And here is an exterior of the building just before Barcade opened on April 22 of this year.

And for the curious, here’s the back side of the early 20th century picture postcard.

On a gorgeous Thursday afternoon, the sun washes over the tombstones of John F. Collins (1878-1922) and his wife, Anna Collins (1882-1943). The Historic Jersey City & Harsimus Cemetery is filled with life from bird chirps and daddy longlegs scurrying along the gravel driveway. A man in a pair of blue jeans and a black T-shirt walks towards me. As he gets closer, I notice his face is sunburnt and his forearms are blurry with tattoos. Setting down a weed-wacker, he asks, “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for John Wilson,” I say.

“You’re looking at him,” he says, extending a hand.

Since 2009, Wilson has been the appointed caretaker of the Historic Jersey City & Harsimus Cemetery, which sits on Newark Avenue just west of the Turnpike extension. He was working as a small contractor in Downtown Jersey City when he began volunteering at the cemetery on Saturdays. For six months, Wilson would show up on weekends to lend a hand, be it with gardening, stone resetting or leveling portions of the grounds.

“He is a wonderful man, and was one of our earliest volunteers,” says Eileen Markenstein, the president of the cemetery’s Board of Trustees. “We knew that we wanted John to be our full-time caretaker and live on the premises.”

Wilson had no idea how tremendous of a task that would be for him.

“When I showed up, there was still a lot of work to be done. You couldn’t make out a bunch of the stones and there were weeds covering up the grave sites,” he says. “You see that mausoleum?” he asks, pointing to a 16-foot granite structure. “We thought it was a bush!”

As Wilson leads me across the grounds, he speaks with an air of authority and pride over the plots of lands he watches over. He tells stories about Captain Albert. S Cloke, a Civil War veteran, and John H. Guthrie, a member of the 69th N.Y. Infantry in the Spanish-American War, both of whom are buried here, while pointing out that the cemetery’s diversity mirrors Jersey City’s.

“There’s Polish, Russian, Irish…” he says. “It’s non-denomination[al] here, and I really like that.”

Wilson lives in the two-floor on-site caretaker home, along with a stray tomcat named Fucko. He says that before he moved in, there were several homeless people and wild animals squatting in the house. Today his residence is filled with historic documents and artifacts pertaining to the cemetery, including Revolutionary War canon slag and a quarter-ton combination safe. The home is being renovated into a museum for the cemetery.

While the nonprofit cemetery is not selling any new plots, Wilson says there have been about 20 funerals in the past three years for families who already have relatives within the cemetery. Pulling back on a Marlboro cigarette, he recalls shoveling snow and dirt for a fresh grave on a freezing January morning, assisted by the light from his pickup truck.

This is not to say that Wilson is without assistance. The cemetery hosts many volunteer projects throughout the year, including an annual cleanup from Middle School #4 on Bright Street and from large corporations like Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Axa insurance and Bank of America. Students from Seton Hall University come on Saturdays to plant flowers and rosebushes.

“They come by the busload,” Wilson says of the Seton Hall volunteers, “because there is always something to be done here and it’s extremely rewarding work.”

Nevertheless, Wilson speaks of the cemetery’s need for additional funding and donations. To finance operational costs and new lifting equipment, the cemetery holds fundraising events and has become an unlikely, if welcome, part of the Jersey City arts and culture scene, hosting art exhibitions, plays and live music events. Last fall’s Ghost of Uncle Joe’s fundraising show, for example, helped to raise over $4,000 for the cemetery, and it is expected to return to the graveyard this October.

“Oh yeah! Everybody has clean fun,” Wilson says of the music events. “I grew up listening to AC/DC, Alice Cooper, Zeppelin and the Stones, so I’m all about rock ‘n’ roll.”

Living in a graveyard may seem like a spooky way to support oneself, but Wilson doesn’t seem to mind. When asked about the first time he saw skeletal remains, he shrugs his shoulders.

“They’re just bones; they can’t do nothing” he says, adding that he does sometime have to chase off “late-night teenagers” who climb the fence into the cemetery (something Wilson admits to having done himself as a kid growing up in the Heights).

Caretaking is a full-time job, which Wilson says leaves little time for going out and socializing, so he sometimes entertains friends at his place instead. Today is one of those days, and a few of Wilson’s buddies begin to approach us with a cooler full of beer. The plan is to have a lunchtime beer or two, work around the grounds some more, and then perhaps a quick barbecue before a 6 pm board meeting with the Parks Coalition. Several bawdy jokes are exchanged over Budweisers, and Wilson takes this opportunity to reflect on the merits of his decidedly odd job.

“It’s not a bad gig at all,” he says. “I’m on a 20-year mission here. You just never leave a stone unturned.”

Want your event listed on our calendar? You can submit it yourself — just click here and follow the simple instructions.

TODAY

Sirelo Entertainment takes over the Creative Grove Artist Market today for its monthly Creative Grove Under Siege event, featuring African drumming and Zumba dance demonstrations and a lot more, in addition to all the usual Creative Grove goodness (2 to 8 pm). Later on, Sushi Tango hosts a bluegrass and county music night (9 pm).

SATURDAY

You can learn a little bit about one neighborhood’s rich past at the Lafayette History Festival & Tour, which is at Ercel Webb Park from noon to 4 pm, with the tour of landmarks beginning at 2 pm. Saturday night, two very talented acts — Shayfer James and Kelly St. Patrick — play a free show at the Lamp Post (10 pm).

SUNDAY

The annual Santacruzan street fair runs all day at the intersection of Marin and 2nd in Downtown Jersey City; expect lots of live music, dance, food and arts & crafts (starts at noon).

MONDAY

The Historic Jersey City & Harsimus Cemetery hosts its third annual “Honoring Our Heroes” memorial day celebration, featuring live musical tribute, a walking tour of the cemetery and more (1 pm).

The nonprofit group Save Ellis Island received kudos for its work to preserve the “lesser-known south side” of the historic immigrant portal, which included hospital buildings, isolation wards, and “was central to the development of public health policy in America.”

The restoration work is vast, as it focuses on a total of 29 buildings in that area of the island. The group hopes to eventually build The Ellis Island Institute and Conference Center on-site, which it says “will provide an ideal venue for civic discussion of issues that arise from the historic themes of Ellis Island.”

Save Ellis Island was praised by the state for its “tireless” work to promote the preservation of the south side.

“The Powerhouse and Ward G presented unique challenges: how to conserve the most compelling spaces in a state of arrested decay while rehabilitating structures for new government/non-profit partnership use,” the state says in a news release. “Architect Jan Hird Pokorny Associates is working with engineering firm Robert Silman Associates on a plan to achieve this balance.”

The awards are given out by the Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) Historic Preservation Office and the New Jersey Historic Sites Council. Ellis Island was the only local project to win an award this year.

“The people who have worked to preserve these pieces of our past prove that the spirit of preservation is alive and well in New Jersey,” DEP Commissioner Bob Martin says in a statement. “Because of their efforts, important snapshots of our heritage and our architectural past have been preserved for future generations to learn from and enjoy. I commend all who worked on these projects for their dedication and vision.”

Photo: Save Ellis Island

This year’s Excellence in Preservation Awards will go to Hudson County for its work restoring the exterior of the historic Brennan Courthouse (seen at right), and to Carol Losos and Judson Weaver of Armstrong + Cohen Architecture for their restoration of, and creative addition to, their circa-1860 Ogden Avenue mansion.

Meanwhile, this year’s Preservation Initiative Awards will go to the Newark Archdiocese for the salvage and relocation of 19th-century glass art from the decommissioned Saint Boniface Church to the newly constructed Holy Name Mausoleum Chapel, and to the developer and architect behind Washington Pointe, a residential building across from the main post office branch on Washington Street.

“The annual awards ceremony is our opportunity to recognize, in a very public way, those who have preserved our local heritage and historic resources,” JCLC president John Hallanan says in a statement. “Whether it is homeowners who went the extra mile to restore their home, a developer who adaptively reused a landmark, or a civic organization that raised awareness about a local treasure, a public ‘Thank You’ is the least we can do to show that efforts to keep history alive is important to the community.”

Also receiving awards this year are author James Fisher, whose On the Irish Waterfront is a rich history of the Hudson County and New York City waterfront in the early half of the 20th century (see Jonathan Fitzgerald’s JCI profile of Fisher for much more on him); Dr. Jonathan C. Gibbs, who was the first African-American Chief of Surgery at the old Jersey City Medical Center; and the Washington Park Association, which works to preserve and improve the county park that straddles Jersey City and Union City.

The awards ceremony is open to the public; for more on the award-winners, click here.

THE DETAILS

Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy’s 2011 Preservation Awards Ceremony; Thursday, May 26 from 6 to 9 pm; at the Loew’s Theatre, 54 Journal Square. Tickets are $25, and include a buffet, dessert, wine, live music and a tour of the historic movie palace (they will be available at the door for purchase).

Want your event listed on our calendar? You can submit it yourself — just click here and follow the simple instructions.

TODAY

Olga Slavnikova, dubbed one of the “crucial figures in Russian literature,” is at the Museum of Russian Art for a meet-up and discussion (6:30 pm), and the Loew’s kicks off a weekend of film with a screening of Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon (7:45 pm).

Art House Productions hosts the next-to-last performance of its new original comedy Murder on Ice (8 pm tonight; final show at 8 pm on Saturday), while a wine tasting fundraiser for Grace Church Van Vorst will feature live music and a glimpse at the spring photography show on display (7 pm). Also on the fundraising front is the first-ever awards dinner for Animals Need You Kindness Corps Inc. at the Moose Hall (7 pm).

There are several live music options tonight as well: Lucky 7′s hosts a free show by one of Jersey City’s finest bands, The One and Nines, along with three other stellar acts — Fairmont, The Porchistas and The Old Glorys (8 pm); singer-songwriter Ari Hest is at the Brennan Coffee House (7:30 pm); and bassist Patrick Andy brings his band to the Hope Center (9 pm).

SATURDAY

Two worthwhile festivals are on tap today. There’s the massive Everything Jersey City Festival on Central Avenue in the Heights (11 am to 6 pm) — we have plenty of details about this festival in our preview story — and also the Spring Festival of Children, which is at Van Vorst Park (10 am to 5 pm). If you’re up in the Heights for the festival, why not take a walking tour through the mid-19th century Washington Village, which sits along the eastern edge of the Heights? The event is the latest in a series of Preservation Month events put together by the Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy (1 pm).

Elsewhere during the day, Liberty State Park hosts a walk into its natural interior area (1 pm), and there’s an “Iron Chef-styled” cooking competition at Newport Centre mall (1 pm).

In the evening, the Loew’s continues its weekends of visually compelling films with back-to-back screenings of 1978′s Days of Heaven (6 pm) and the 1927 silent film Sunrise (8:15 pm). Marvin Berry & The New Sound, Blackout Stereo and Box Set play a free show at Lucky 7′s to celebrate JCI contributor Zac Clark‘s birthday (8 pm); and The Bad Parts and Rainbow Fresh play a free show down the block at the Lamp Post (10 pm).

SUNDAY

Preservationist Joshua Parkhurst will lead a walking tour through Downtown Jersey City’s Italian Village district in another Preservation Month event (noon), and what better way to follow that than with a screening of Pane Amaro (Bitter Bread) at Casa Colombo? The film, first screened on Italian Public Television, is touted as the “first comprehensive look at the Italian-American experience tracing Italian immigrants from victims to leaders in American society” (4 pm). Later on, the Sunday Night Film Forum hosts a screening of the 2007 documentary Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience at the Jersey City Art School (7:30 pm).