Ice Bridge

It was a winter of so relentless cold that men now old still remember their uncles and fathers talking about the first and only time they ever walked across the Hudson ...

The year was 1934, and such was the cold snap then that one February morning in Beacon the thermometer bottomed at 34 degrees below zero--a record of frigidity unbroken to this day. The Hudson River froze solid, with ice in the channel 18 inches thick. The Ferryboat Orange damaged its rudder in the ice and was out of service for a week during that extended cold, leaving only the ferry Dutchess to navigate through the hazardous conditions back and forth between Newburgh and Beacon.

Perhaps it was the combination of disrupted ferry service and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of adventure that, on the weekend of February 15 and 16, caused more than 500 people to walk across the river to and from Newburgh---a sight unseen since 1920, the last time the Hudson froze safe enough here to walk upon. In Newburgh, hundreds were seen skating off South Street pier. Others, because of fields of "laddy cakes" frozen together, walked out with skates on their shoulders to mid-river where the ice was smoother. It was to be the epitome of an old-fashioned winter--the kind of cold that the old timers had bragged about and said only they had ever experienced ... until that February of 1934.