DESTROYER 38: BAY CITY BLAST

Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy

CHAPTER ONE

If Jesus had walked across the tiny cove that was the harbor of Bay City, New Jersey, no one would have bothered to think twice about it. The debris and rubble and flotsam and jetsam that packed the murky oily waters was so thick that anyone could have walked on the water there.

The city was tucked into two hundred acres of shoreline and upland on the coastline of New York Bay between Jersey City and Hoboken.

The upland was an average of only eighteen inches above sea level and when it rained for more than twelve minutes, every cellar in Bay City flooded. When Bay City was booming, no one had seemed to mind. There was plenty of money for plumbers. There was enough for everyone. Hot dog salesmen got rich. Loan sharks wore vicuna. The city's bookies wintered in Florida, at least until that time each year when they had to come back and remind their subordinates that honesty was the best policy.

The city had grown around its small seaport. Since the Thirties, graceful ocean-going liners and sturdy tankers had loaded and unloaded at the two concrete piers on either side of the bay twenty-four hours a day. The Holland Tunnel to New York City and New Jersey's heavy-duty road system were only minutes away. Bay City had blossomed. Twenty-two thousand people were packed into its small area, making it the most densely populated city in the United States.

It all came unglued right after the Korean War. New methods of shipping and larger ships required more upland area for trucks to park. They required deeper channels and bigger piers and the city fathers of Bay City refused to make any improvements in the harbor. One day everyone looked up and found that Bay City's shipping business had gone to Port Elizabeth to the south and to Hoboken to the north.

Like automobile rust, the process of urban deterioration was irreversible. By 1960, the population of Bay City had dropped to ten thousand. Fifteen years later, it had been cut in half again.