Uncle John thought there was nothing under New York’s cities and towns besides dirt and old subway tokens. But as these three stories prove, you never know what’s under your feet.
GROUND ZERO’S WOODEN SHIP
In July 2010, construction workers at Ground Zero were clearing an area between Liberty and Cedar streets to build an underground security center when they hit more than mud and rock. To their surprise, they ran across a 30-foot section of a ship—a very old ship. As soon as the mud-encrusted pieces of hull were exposed to the air, they began to fall apart. So construction stopped, and archaeologists rushed to the site to gather whatever artifacts they could before it disintegrated.
What they found were wooden beams that had made up the vessel’s prow or stern (no one could say for sure which end of the ship they’d found), an anchor, a leather shoe, and a metal and brick object that might have been part of an oven or boiler. But their most stunning discovery was the age of the ship: It was more than 200 years old. The scientists couldn’t say if all of the items had actually traveled on the vessel, and they theorized that the ship probably didn’t sink there. More likely, it was part of the landfill used to extend lower Manhattan’s shoreline in the 18th and 19th centuries.
THE CARDIFF GIANT
In 1869, workers digging a well on a farm in Cardiff, New York, uncovered something amazing—the petrified remains of a 10-foot-tall giant. Geologists and archaeologists immediately labeled the creature a fake, but the farmers who owned the land and their friend George Hull put the giant on display in upstate New York and charged 50¢ a head to see it. The spectacle drew huge crowds.
The “Cardiff giant” was an especially big hit with religious New Yorkers. The Bible’s “Book of Genesis” talks about a race of giant men who once roamed the Earth. (Goliath was one of them.) So, local Christians believed the Cardiff creature proved the giants’ existence. But after about a year—and after making more than $30,000 off the venture—Hull admitted that the Cardiff giant was a hoax. He’d created it in 1868, after a heated theological argument with a local minister. Hull, an atheist, wanted to prove that the minister’s unwavering faith in religion was misguided, so he hired craftsmen to make the giant out of a mineral called gypsum and rough it up to make it look old. Then he had it buried on his friend’s farm in Cardiff. A year later, he hired the well-diggers to exhume it.
Tons of waste produced by NYC each year: 8.5 million.
Hull got some flak for duping the public, but the idea of buried giants remained a huge draw. Circus tycoon P. T. Barnum even created his own giant, claiming that his was the real thing and the Cardiff one was the fake. Eventually, though, audiences became more savvy and both giants’ appeal waned. By 1901, when the Cardiff giant appeared at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, only a handful of people were willing to pay to see it. It changed hands a few more times and eventually ended up in the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown. It’s still there today, under the name “World’s Greatest Hoax.”
THE BURIED TREASURE
In August 2010, two anonymous Brooklyn artists and puppeteers announced a treasure hunt on their Web site, WeLostOurGold.com. They’d buried a wooden chest, they said, filled with $10,000 in golden dollar coins somewhere in New York City’s five boroughs. The “treasure map” they offered was in the form of eight Web video shorts (starring three puppet pirates and a ninja) with clues about where the money was hidden. But there were a couple of caveats: They insisted that the treasure was not in Central Park, writing, “We may be stupid enough to bury all our money, but we’re absolutely not stupid enough to encourage people to start digging up Central Park.” They also maintained that all the clues needed to find the coins could be found in their Web videos.
The guys had been saving the dollar coins for five years, and they hoped that the stunt would bring publicity to their puppet videos. And for all skeptical New Yorkers who doubted whether there really was a treasure chest, one of the creators promised, “You can punch me in the nose if I’m lying to you…which I’m not.”'
As of press time, no one had yet unearthed the treasure, so technically it’s not “found in the ground” just yet. But Uncle John loves a good story…and a good treasure hunt. Happy digging!
Only street names to appear in all five boroughs: Broadway, Clinton, King, and Park.