Through the Ice

There’s gold in them

thar hills of junk automobiles and other scrap.  Ferrous and nonferrous metal can be changed into some gold, but

this season, it needs to crush its way through the export-of-a-previous-century to get there.   That export was

ice, the gold of days before refrigeration.  Here’s an article about Hudson River ice harvesting with lots of statistics, photos, and drawings.

See the piles and cranes in the distance to the right?  That’s where scrap metal gets consolidated in Jersey City before being shipped out.

Many thanks to Dennis Willard for fotos 3 and 4 above, showing Atlantic Salvor towing scrap through the ice in Coxsackie.  I wrote about scrap metal and my old Subaru  about four years ago.

As to the long-gone global ice trade, savor these articles on ice from the Northeast traveling all the way to Brazil, and India.  There used to be gold in them thar lakes and ponds.

And while we’re talking of cargoes southbound on the Hudson, the foto below,

again thanks to Dennis Willard, shows Atlantic Salvor pulling scrap past relics of the ice trade:  the chimney used to channel smoke for the steam engine at the R. & W. Scott Ice House in Nutten Point.  Many thanks to Dennis for capturing and explaining this.  Click here for Michael Cooney’s Upstate Earth for further info.