New York City: Sunswick Creek “the past is never dead… it’s not even past.

Sunswick Creek
Queens, NYC
Sunswick Creek was a wide, fish-filled stream
in Queens through the 19th century. Its origin
was in Long Island City, and it flowed about
two miles north-west until its outlet in the East
River. The mouth of the stream—and today
the mouth of the combined sewer and storm
drain tunnel that it has become—is Hallett’s
Cove, a wide inlet just below the Hell Gate
channel in the East River.
Most of the land through which the
Sunswick ran was part of Ravenswood, which
was a separate village until the 1870
incorporation of the entire region into Long
Island City. Before it was Ravenswood, it had
been known as Sunswick, from the Algonquin “Sunkisq.” The word connotes a powerful or wise woman, and one possible
etymology is that such women came to the area to look for herbs or medicinal plants in the marshes and swamps that
extended in a broad swath around much of the creek.
The entire creek still remained visible aboveground as late as the 1880s, and its disappearance was a slow process
because rather than the actual enclosure of the stream itself in a tunnel, it was instead the construction of more sewage and
drainage tunnels throughout its watershed that eventually led to the stream’s disappearance above-ground. The biggest step
in this process came in 1893, when a combined sewer tunnel was built along the route of the Sunswick’s outlet into the East
River. This was a brick tunnel running underneath Broadway, in the shape of an arch with a rounded floor, eight feet high
in the center and nearly fifteen feet wide. Further inland, this tunnel narrows to a seven-foot diameter tunnel, before
branching out to the south and north. Serving as both sewer and storm drain, it was the first major sewer tunnel in the
region. As more sewers were built in the following decades—especially after the 1909 opening of the Queensboro Bridge and
resultant growth in population in Queens—they fed into this channel like branches connecting to a trunk. As drains and
sewers ere built, the water that had once been the visible Sunswick Creek disappeared into these networks and flowed
underground instead. The old bed of the creek itself remained visible aboveground well into the 20th century, but without
water flowing in it few people knew what it had once been.

Left: the region in 1873. Below: a map of the same area today;
arrow points to the mouth of Sunswick Creek (now the site of the
Combined Sewer Outfall for the sewer that replaced it)