New York City

New York City is the hinge between the Washington crew’s regional identity and its emergence as a national Olympic team. The boys encounter the city as a dense, unfamiliar world of crowds, landmarks, and public recognition; they leave from its Hudson waterfront for Berlin and return to a ticker-tape welcome. In these episodes, the city is at once a place to explore, a measure of the country’s scale, and a stage on which the crew’s changing identity becomes visible.

A City in the History of Rowing

New York City’s connection to American rowing reaches back to the sport’s earliest celebrated spectacles. In 1824, four New York City watermen raced four sailors from a visiting British warship in New York Harbor. The crews rowed Whitehall boats from the Battery to Hoboken and back, competing for a thousand-dollar purse before a crowd estimated at between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand people. The race’s strong patriotic charge and immense audience made it the first great rowing spectacle in the United States.

By the 1930s, collegiate rowing drew national attention, but its institutional center of gravity remained in the East. The Washington and California programs had built large followings in the West, yet they had to contend with a long-established eastern tradition and limited resources. That imbalance gives the crew’s eventual passage through New York City a wider significance: the boys arrive not merely as university athletes, but as representatives of a western program entering a national sporting world long shaped elsewhere.

The Crew Encounters the City

While staying in the area before their departure for Germany, the boys explored New York City during a week of intense heat. Their excursions ranged from Grant’s Tomb and Columbia University to Rockefeller Center, Broadway, and Jack Dempsey’s. They tried to board the Queen Mary but were turned away, and they walked through Wall Street, a place their parents’ generation associated with the financial collapse of 1929. The itinerary gave the crew a succession of encounters with institutions, landmarks, and stories they had previously known at a distance.

Coney Island offered a different kind of scale. The boys took the subway there and found a crowded shoreline filled with people escaping the heat of Manhattan. They ate at Nathan’s, rode the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone, and wandered through Luna Park. Their journals also record a less admiring response: Chuck Day found the resort dirty and overcrowded, and judged its residents against the healthier, more vigorous people he associated with the West. The episode makes the crew’s regional outlook plain. New York City could astonish them without persuading them that its way of life was superior.

The most consequential change in their understanding came not from a landmark but from being recognized. In Times Square, a former Columbia oarsman identified Shorty Hunt from a newspaper photograph, then recognized the others as members of the Washington crew. He told them that their recent performances had persuaded him to send his son west to college in hopes that the boy might become a crewman. For the Washington rowers, the exchange made their expanding reputation concrete: they were beginning to be seen not only as university athletes, but as a crew representing the United States.

A View from Above, and a Departure from the Hudson

Joe Rantz’s own moment of perspective came on the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building. He had never flown and had never looked out over a city from such a height. From the observation deck, New York City appeared at once beautiful and unsettling, its streets and traffic reduced to a view far larger than anything he had known. He used a telescope to look toward the Brooklyn Bridge and then across Lower Manhattan to the distant Statue of Liberty. The sight connected the excitement of travel with the coming destination: in a few days, the crew would sail to a country where, as Joe understood it, liberty was under assault.

Before that voyage, the sixty-two-foot Husky Clipper had to be brought aboard the SS Manhattan. On July 13, George Pocock supervised the loading of the shell onto a truck, which carried it through New York City to Pier 60 on the Hudson River. He had carefully sanded and varnished the hull at Travers Island, aiming to give it the fastest racing surface he could. At the pier, however, the long boat could not be maneuvered directly onto the liner. The boys carried it along the dock while searching for a way aboard, then used a steep baggage chute to raise it to the promenade deck. They carried it again to the boat deck, secured it under a tarp, and hurried to a reception already made late by the loading effort.

The following morning, the Washington boys boarded the SS Manhattan with the rest of the American athletes sailing on the ship. The liner carried 325 other members of the 1936 U.S. Olympic team; the full team numbered 382, and not all of its members were aboard. The departure offered a visible contrast to the crew’s earlier, local identity: the boys joined athletes from across the country, carrying small American flags as families and well-wishers gathered at the dock. New York City had been the setting for their first clear recognition as a national crew; from its waterfront, they now began the journey that would test that identity abroad.

Return and Public Recognition

New York City also marked the crew’s return. On their way home from Europe, the boys rode through the city in open-top cars while ticker tape, old phone-book pages, and newspaper scraps fell from the skyscrapers. Joe, born in Sequim, held his rowing jersey above his head. It bore a black eagle and swastika on the front and a red stripe running around the back. In the procession, the jersey carried the visible imprint of the Berlin Games into a city that had earlier introduced Joe to the Statue of Liberty and the breadth of the world beyond his experience.

The city’s two appearances in the crew’s journey thus frame a change in scale. Before the voyage, New York City is a place the boys inspect, sometimes admire and sometimes criticize, while they begin to grasp the national attention their rowing has earned. On the return, its streets become a public setting for their recognition. Between those scenes, the Hudson waterfront serves as their point of departure for Berlin: New York City does not simply interrupt the crew’s journey, but gives its transformation a beginning, a threshold, and a visible homecoming.