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E. E. Cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), commonly known as e e cummings or E. E. Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. During World War I he worked as an ambulance driver and was imprisoned in an internment camp, which provided the basis for his novel The Enormous Room (1922). The following year he published his first collection of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys, which showed his early experiments with grammar and typography. He wrote four plays; HIM (1927) and Santa Claus: A Morality (1946) were most successful. He wrote EIMI (1933), a travelogue of the Soviet Union, and delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in poetry, published as i—six nonlectures (1953). Fairy Tales (1965), a collection of short stories, was published posthumously.

Cummings wrote approximately 2,900 poems. He is often regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century. He is associated with modernist free-form poetry, and much of his work uses idiosyncratic syntax and lower-case spellings for poetic expression. M. L. Rosenthal wrote that:

"The chief effect of Cummings' jugglery with syntax, grammar, and diction was to blow open otherwise trite and bathetic motifs through a dynamic rediscovery of the energies sealed up in conventional usage... He succeeded masterfully in splitting the atom of the cute commonplace." For Norman Friedman, Cummings's inventions "are best understood as various ways of stripping the film of familiarity from language to strip the film of familiarity from the world. Transform the word, he seems to have felt, and you are on the way to transforming the world."

The poet Randall Jarrell said of Cummings, "No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and the special reader." James Dickey wrote, "I think that Cummings is a daringly original poet, with more vitality and more sheer, uncompromising talent than any other living American writer." Dickey described himself as "ashamed and even a little guilty in picking out flaws" in Cummings’s poetry, which he compared to noting "the aesthetic defects in a rose. It is better to say what must finally be said about Cummings: that he has helped to give life to the language."

Early years
Edward Estlin Cummings was born on October 14, 1894, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Edward Cummings and Rebecca Haswell (Clarke), a well-known Unitarian couple in the city. His father was a professor at Harvard University who later became nationally known as the minister of South Congregational Church (Unitarian) in Boston, Massachusetts. His mother, who loved to spend time with her children, played games with Edward and his sister, Elizabeth. From an early age, Cummings' parents supported his creative gifts. Cummings wrote poems and drew as a child, and he often played outdoors with the many other children who lived in his neighborhood. He grew up in the company of such family friends as the philosophers William James and Josiah Royce. Many of Cummings' summers were spent on Silver Lake in Madison, New Hampshire, where his father had built two houses along the eastern shore. The family ultimately purchased the nearby Joy Farm where Cummings had his primary summer residence.

He expressed transcendental leanings his entire life. As he matured, Cummings moved to an "I, Thou" relationship with God. His journals are replete with references to "le bon Dieu," as well as prayers for inspiration in his poetry and artwork (such as "Bon Dieu! may i some day do something truly great. amen."). Cummings "also prayed for strength to be his essential self ('may I be I is the only prayer—not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong'), and for relief of spirit in times of depression ('almighty God! I thank thee for my soul; & may I never die spiritually into a mere mind through disease of loneliness')".

Cummings wanted to be a poet from childhood and wrote poetry daily from age 8 to 22, exploring assorted forms. He studied Latin and Greek at Cambridge Latin High School. He attended Harvard University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa society in 1915. The following year, he received a Master of Arts degree from the university. During his studies at Harvard, he developed an interest in modern poetry, which ignored conventional grammar and syntax and aimed for a dynamic use of language. His first published poems appeared in Eight Harvard Poets (1917). Upon graduating, he worked for a book dealer.

War years
In 1917, with the First World War going on in Europe, Cummings enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps. On the boat to France, he met William Slater Brown and they quickly became friends. Due to an administrative error, Cummings and Brown did not receive an assignment for five weeks, a period they spent exploring Paris. Cummings fell in love with the city, to which he would return throughout his life.

During their service in the ambulance corps, the two young writers sent letters home that drew the attention of the military censors. They were known to prefer the company of French soldiers over fellow ambulance drivers. The two openly expressed anti-war views; Cummings spoke of his lack of hatred for the Germans. On September 21, 1917, five months after starting his belated assignment, Cummings and William Slater Brown were arrested by the French military on suspicion of espionage and undesirable activities, they were held for three and a half months in a military detention camp at the Dépôt de Triage, in La Ferté-Macé, Orne, Normandy.

They were imprisoned with other detainees in a large room. Cummings' father made strenuous efforts to obtain his son's release through diplomatic channels; although advised his son's release was approved, there were lengthy delays, with little explanation. In frustration, Cummings' father wrote a letter to President Woodrow Wilson in December 1917. Cummings was released on December 19, 1917, returning to his family in the U.S. by New Year's Day, 1918. Cummings, his father, and Brown's family continued to agitate for Brown's release. By mid-February, he, too, was America-bound. Cummings used his prison experience as the basis for his novel, The Enormous Room (1922), about which F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives—The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings ... Those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality." Later in 1918 he was drafted into the army. He served a training deployment in the 12th Division at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, until November 1918.

Post-war years
Cummings returned to Paris in 1921, and lived there for two years before returning to New York. His collection Tulips and Chimneys, was published in 1923, and his inventive use of grammar and syntax is evident. The book was heavily cut by his editor. XLI Poems was published in 1925. With these collections, Cummings made his reputation as an avant-garde poet.

During the rest of the 1920s and 1930s, Cummings returned to Paris a number of times, and traveled throughout Europe. In 1931 Cummings traveled to the Soviet Union, recounting his experiences in Eimi, published two years later. During these years Cummings also traveled to Northern Africa and Mexico, and he worked as an essayist and portrait artist for Vanity Fair magazine (1924–1927).

In 1926, Cummings' parents were in a car crash; only his mother survived, although she was severely injured. Cummings later described the crash in the following passage from his i: six nonlectures series given at Harvard (as part of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) in 1952 and 1953: "A locomotive cut the car in half, killing my father instantly. When two brakemen jumped from the halted train, they saw a woman standing – dazed but erect – beside a mangled machine; with blood spouting (as the older said to me) out of her head. One of her hands (the younger added) kept feeling her dress, as if trying to discover why it was wet. These men took my sixty-six-year old mother by the arms and tried to lead her toward a nearby farmhouse; but she threw them off, strode straight to my father's body, and directed a group of scared spectators to cover him. When this had been done (and only then) she let them lead her away."

His father's death had a profound effect on Cummings, who entered a new period in his artistic life. He began to focus on more important aspects of life in his poetry. He started this new period by paying homage to his father in the poem "my father moved through dooms of love".

In the 1930s, Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs was Cummings' publisher; he had started the Golden Eagle Press after working as a typographer and publisher.

Final years

In 1952, his alma mater, Harvard University, awarded Cummings an honorary seat as a guest professor. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he gave in 1952 and 1955 were later collected as i: six nonlectures.

Cummings spent the last decade of his life traveling, fulfilling speaking engagements, and spending time at his summer home, Joy Farm, in Silver Lake, New Hampshire. He died of a stroke on September 3, 1962, at the age of 67 at Memorial Hospital in North Conway, New Hampshire. Cummings was buried at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts. At the time of his death, Cummings was recognized as the "second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost".

Cummings' papers are held at the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Marriages
Cummings was married briefly twice, first to Elaine Orr Thayer, then to Anne Minnerly Barton. His longest relationship lasted more than three decades with Marion Morehouse.

In 2020, it was revealed that in 1917, before his first marriage, Cummings had shared several passionate love letters with a Parisian prostitute, Marie Louise Lallemand. Despite Cummings' efforts, he was unable to find Lallemand upon his return to Paris after the front.

Cummings' first marriage, to Elaine Orr, began as a love affair in 1918 while she was still married to Scofield Thayer, one of Cummings' friends from Harvard. During this time, he wrote a good deal of his erotic poetry. The couple had a daughter while Orr was still married to Thayer; after Orr divorced Thayer, Cummings and Orr married on March 19, 1924. Thayer had been registered on the child's birth certificate as the father, but Cummings legally adopted her after his marriage to Orr. Although his relationship with Orr stretched back several years, the marriage was brief: the couple separated after two months of marriage and divorced less than nine months later. She had while on a trip to Paris met and fallen in love with the Irish nobleman, future politician, author, journalist, and former banker Frank MacDermot.

Cummings married his second wife Anne Minnerly Barton on May 1, 1929. They separated three years later in 1932. That same year, Minnerly obtained a Mexican divorce; it was not officially recognized in the United States until August 1934. Anne died in 1970 aged 72.

In 1934, after his separation from his second wife, Cummings met Marion Morehouse, a fashion model and photographer. Although it is not clear whether the two were ever formally married, Morehouse lived with Cummings until his death in 1962. She died on May 18, 1969, while living at 4 Patchin Place, Greenwich Village, New York City, where Cummings had resided since September 1924.

Political views
According to his testimony in EIMI, Cummings had little interest in politics until his trip to the Soviet Union in 1931. He subsequently shifted rightward on many political and social issues. Despite his radical and bohemian public image, he was a Republican and later an ardent supporter of Joseph McCarthy.

Poetry
As well as being influenced by notable modernists, including Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, Cummings was particularly drawn to early imagist experiments; later, his visits to Paris exposed him to Dada and Surrealism, which was reflected in his writing style. Cummings critic and biographer Norman Friedman remarks that in Cummings' later work the "shift from simile to symbol" created poetry that is "frequently more lucid, more moving, and more profound than his earlier".

Despite Cummings' familiarity with avant-garde styles (likely affected by the calligrams of French poet Apollinaire, according to a contemporary observation ), much of his work is quite traditional. For example, many of his poems are sonnets, albeit described by Richard D. Cureton as "revisionary... with scrambled rhymes and rearranged, disproportioned structures; awkwardly unpredictable metrical variation; clashing, mawkish diction; complex, wandering syntax; etc." He occasionally drew from the blues form and used acrostics. Many of Cummings' poems are satirical and address social issues but have an equal or even stronger bias toward Romanticism: time and again his poems celebrate love, sex, and the season of rebirth.

While his poetic forms and themes share an affinity with the Romantic tradition, critic Emily Essert asserts that Cummings' work is particularly modernist and frequently employs what linguist Irene Fairley calls "syntatic deviance". Some poems do not involve any typographical or punctuation innovations at all, but purely syntactic ones.

While some of his poetry is free verse (and not beheld to rhyme or meter), Cureton has remarked that many of his sonnets follow an intricate rhyme scheme, and often employ pararhyme. A number of Cummings' poems feature his typographically exuberant style, with words, parts of words, or punctuation symbols scattered across the page, wherein Essert asserts "feeling is first" and the work begs to "be re-read in order to be understood"; Cummings, also a painter, created his texts not just as literature, but as "visual objects" on the page, and used typography to "paint a picture".

The seeds of Cummings' unconventional style appear well established even in his earliest work. At age six, he wrote to his father:

Following his autobiographical novel, The Enormous Room, Cummings' first published work was a collection of poems titled Tulips and Chimneys (1923). This early work already displayed Cummings' characteristically eccentric use of grammar and punctuation, although a fair amount of the poems are written in conventional language.

Cummings' works often do not follow the conventional rules that generate typical English sentences, or what Fairley identifies as "ungrammar". In addition, a number of Cummings' poems feature, in part or in whole, intentional misspellings, and several incorporate phonetic spellings intended to represent particular dialects. Cummings also employs what Fairley describes as "morphological innovation", wherein he frequently creates what critic Ian Landles calls: "unusual compounds suggestive of 'a child's language'" like "'mud-luscious' and 'puddle-wonderful'". Literary critic R.P. Blackmur has commented that this use of language is "frequently unintelligible because [Cummings] disregards the historical accumulation of meaning in words in favor of merely private and personal associations".

Fellow poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, in her equivocal letter recommending Cummings for the Guggenheim Fellowship he was awarded in 1934, expressed her frustration at his opaque symbolism. "[I]f he prints and offers for sale poetry which he is quite content should be, after hours of sweating concentration, inexplicable from any point of view to a person as intelligent as myself, then he does so with a motive which is frivolous from the point of view of art, and should not be helped or encouraged by any serious person or group of persons... there is fine writing and powerful writing (as well as some of the most pompous nonsense I ever let slip to the floor with a wide yawn)... What I propose, then, is this: that you give Mr. Cummings enough rope. He may hang himself; or he may lasso a unicorn."

Cummings also wrote children's books and novels. A notable example of his versatility is an introduction he wrote for a collection of the comic strip Krazy Kat.

Cummings included ethnic slurs in his writing, which proved controversial. In his 1950 collection Xaipe: Seventy-One Poems, Cummings published two poems containing words that caused outrage in some quarters. Friedman considered these two poems to be "condensed" and "cryptic" parables, "sparsely told", in which setting the use of such "inflammatory material" was likely to meet with reader misapprehension. Poet William Carlos Williams spoke out in his defense.

Cummings biographer Catherine Reef notes of the controversy: "Friends begged Cummings to reconsider publishing these poems, and the book's editor pleaded with him to withdraw them, but he insisted that they stay. All the fuss perplexed him. The poems were commenting on prejudice, he pointed out, and not condoning it. He intended to show how derogatory words cause people to see others in terms of stereotypes rather than as individuals. 'America (which turns Hungarian into 'hunky' & Irishman into 'mick' and Norwegian into 'square-head') is to blame for 'kike,'' he said."

Plays
During his lifetime, Cummings published four plays. HIM, a three-act play, was first produced in 1928 by the Provincetown Players in New York City. The production was directed by James Light. The play's main characters are "Him", a playwright, portrayed by William Johnstone, and "Me", his girlfriend, portrayed by Erin O'Brien-Moore.

Cummings said of the unorthodox play: "Relax and give the play a chance to strut its stuff—relax, stop wondering what it is all 'about'—like many strange and familiar things, Life included, this play isn't 'about,' it simply is. ... Don't try to enjoy it, let it try to enjoy you. DON'T TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT, LET IT TRY TO UNDERSTAND YOU. '"

Anthropos, or the Future of Art is a short, one-act play that Cummings contributed to the anthology ''Whither, Whither or After Sex, What? A Symposium to End Symposium''. The play consists of dialogue between Man, the main character, and three "infrahumans", or inferior beings. The word anthropos is the Greek word for "man", in the sense of "mankind".

Tom, A Ballet is a ballet based on Uncle Tom's Cabin. The ballet is detailed in a "synopsis" as well as descriptions of four "episodes", which were published by Cummings in 1935. It remained unperformed until 2015.

Santa Claus: A Morality was probably Cummings' most successful play. It is an allegorical Christmas fantasy presented in one act of five scenes. The play was inspired by his daughter Nancy, with whom he was reunited in 1946. It was first published in the Harvard College magazine, Wake. The play's main characters are Santa Claus, his family (Woman and Child), Death, and Mob. At the outset of the play, Santa Claus's family has disintegrated due to their lust for knowledge (Science). After a series of events, however, Santa Claus's faith in love and his rejection of the materialism and disappointment he associates with Science are reaffirmed, and he is reunited with Woman and Child.

Art
Cummings was an avid painter, referring to writing and painting as his twin obsessions and to himself as a poetandpainter. He painted continuously, relentlessly, from childhood until his death, and left in his estate more than 1600 oils and watercolors (a figure that does not include the works he sold during his career) and over 9,000 drawings. In a self-interview from Foreword to an Exhibit: II (1945), the artist asked himself, Tell me, doesn’t your painting interfere with your writing? and answered, Quite the contrary: they love each other dearly.

Cummings had more than 30 exhibits of his paintings in his lifetime. He received substantial acclaim as an American cubist and an abstract, avant garde painter between the World Wars, but with the publication of his books The Enormous Room and Tulips and Chimneys in the 1920s, his reputation as a poet eclipsed his success as a visual artist. In 1931, he published a limited edition volume of his artwork entitled CIOPW, named for his media of charcoal, ink, oil, pencil, and watercolor. About this same time, he began to break from Modernist aesthetics and employ a more subjective and spontaneous style; his work became more representational: landscapes, nudes, still lifes, and portraits.

Name and capitalization
Cummings' publishers and others have often echoed the unconventional orthography in his poetry by writing his name in lower case. Cummings himself used both the lowercase and capitalized versions, though he most often signed his name with capitals.

The use of lower case for his initials was popularized in part by the title of some books, particularly in the 1960s, printing his name in lower case on the cover and spine. In the preface to E. E. Cummings: The Growth of a Writer by Norman Friedman, critic Harry T. Moore notes Cummings "had his name put legally into lower case, and in his later books the titles and his name were always in lower case". According to Cummings' widow, however, this is incorrect. She wrote to Friedman: "You should not have allowed H. Moore to make such a stupid & childish statement about Cummings & his signature." On February 27, 1951, Cummings wrote to his French translator D. Jon Grossman that he preferred the use of upper case for the particular edition they were working on. One Cummings scholar believes that on the rare occasions that Cummings signed his name in all lower case, he may have intended it as a gesture of humility, not as an indication that it was the preferred orthography for others to use. Additionally, The Chicago Manual of Style, which prescribes favoring non-standard capitalization of names in accordance with the bearer's strongly stated preference, notes "E. E. Cummings can be safely capitalized; it was one of his publishers, not he himself, who lowercased his name."

Adaptations
In 1943, modern dancer and choreographer, Jean Erdman presented "The Transformations of Medusa, Forever and Sunsmell" with a commissioned score by John Cage and a spoken text from the title poem by E. E. Cummings, sponsored by the Arts Club of Chicago. Erdman also choreographed "Twenty Poems" (1960), a cycle of E. E. Cummings' poems for eight dancers and one actor, with a commissioned score by Teiji Ito. It was performed in the round at the Circle in the Square Theatre in Greenwich Village.

Numerous composers have set Cummings' poems to music:
 * In 1970, Pierre Boulez composed Cummings ist der Dichter ('cummings is the Poet') from poems by E. E. Cummings.
 * Aribert Reimann set Cummings to music in "Impression IV" (1961) for soprano and piano.
 * Morton Feldman (1926–1987) in 1951 composed "4 Songs to e.e. cummings" for soprano, piano and cello, using material from Cummings' 50 Poems of 1940: "!Blac", "Air", "(Sitting In A Tree-)" and "(Moan)".
 * The Icelandic singer Björk used lines from Cummings' poem "I Will Wade Out" for the lyrics of "Sun in My Mouth" on her 2001 album Vespertine. On her next album, Medúlla (2004), Björk used his poem "It May Not Always Be So" as the lyrics for the song "Sonnets/Unrealities XI".
 * The American composer Eric Whitacre wrote a cycle of works for choir titled The City and the Sea, which consists of five poems by Cummings set to music. He also wrote music for "little tree" and "i carry your heart", among others.
 * Others who have composed settings for his poems include, among many others: Dominic Argento · William Bergsma · Leonard Bernstein · Marc Blitzstein · John Cage · Romeo Cascarino · Aaron Copland · Serge de Gastyne · David Diamond · John Duke · Margaret Garwood · Daron Hagen · Michael Hedges · Timothy Hoekman · Richard Hundley · Barbara Kolb · Leonard Lehrman · Robert Manno · Salvatore Martirano · William Mayer · John Musto · Paul Nordoff · Tobias Picker · Vincent Persichetti · Ned Rorem · Peter Schickele · Elie Siegmeister · Ann Loomis Silsbee · Aki Takase · Hugo Weisgall · Dan Welcher · James Yannatos · Matthew Peterson

Awards
During his lifetime, Cummings received numerous awards in recognition of his work, including:
 * Dial Award (1925)
 * Guggenheim Fellowship (1933)
 * Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry (1945)
 * Harriet Monroe Prize from Poetry magazine (1950)
 * Fellowship of American Academy of Poets (1950)
 * Guggenheim Fellowship (1951)
 * Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard (1952–1953)
 * Special citation from the National Book Award Committee for his Poems, 1923–1954 (1957)
 * Bollingen Prize in Poetry (1958)
 * Boston Arts Festival Award (1957)
 * Two-year Ford Foundation grant of $15,000 (1959)

Prose books

 * The Enormous Room (1922)
 * EIMI (1933), Soviet travelogue
 * Fairy Tales (1965), collection of short stories

Poetry

 * Tulips and Chimneys (1923)
 * & (1925), self-published
 * XLI Poems (1925)
 * is 5 (1926)
 * ViVa (1931)
 * No Thanks (1935)
 * Collected Poems (1938)
 * 50 Poems (1940)
 * 1 × 1 (1944)
 * XAIPE: Seventy-One Poems (1950)
 * Poems, 1923–1954 (1954)
 * 95 Poems (1958)
 * Selected Poems 1923-1958 (1960)
 * 73 Poems (1963, posthumous)
 * Etcetera: The Unpublished Poems (1983)
 * Complete Poems, 1904–1962, edited by George James Firmage (2008), Liveright
 * Erotic Poems, edited by George James Firmage (2010), Norton

Plays

 * HIM (1927)
 * Santa Claus: A Morality (1946)

Collections

 * CIOPW (1931), art works
 * i—six nonlectures (1953), Harvard University Press

Poems cited
Full text of poetry available at:

General and cited references

 * ISBN 978-0-9829733-0-1
 * Chapter 10.
 * Chapter 11.
 * Chapter 10.
 * Chapter 11.
 * Chapter 11.

title: E. E. Cummings


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East River

The East River is a saltwater tidal estuary or strait in New York City. The waterway, which is actually not a river despite its name, connects Upper New York Bay on its south end to Long Island Sound on its north end. It separates Long Island, with the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, from Manhattan Island, and from the Bronx on the North American mainland.

Because of its connection to Long Island Sound, it was once also known as the Sound River. The tidal strait changes its direction of flow regularly, and is subject to strong fluctuations in its current, which are accentuated by its narrowness and variety of depths. The waterway is navigable for its entire length of 16 mi, and was historically the center of maritime activities in the city.

Formation and description
Technically a drowned valley, like the other waterways around New York City, the strait was formed approximately 11,000 years ago at the end of the Wisconsin glaciation. The distinct change in the shape of the strait between the lower and upper portions is evidence of this glacial activity. The upper portion (from Long Island Sound to Hell Gate), running largely perpendicular to the glacial motion, is wide, meandering, and has deep narrow bays on both banks, scoured out by the glacier's movement. The lower portion (from Hell Gate to New York Bay) runs north–south, parallel to the glacial motion. It is much narrower, with straight banks. The bays that exist, as well as those that used to exist before being filled in by human activity, are largely wide and shallow.

The section known as "Hell Gate" – from the Dutch name Hellegat meaning either "bright strait" or "clear opening", given to the entire river in 1614 by explorer Adriaen Block when he passed through it in his ship Tyger – is a narrow, turbulent, and particularly treacherous stretch of the river. Tides from the Long Island Sound, New York Harbor and the Harlem River meet there, making it difficult to navigate, especially because of the number of rocky islets which once dotted it, with names such as "Frying Pan", "Pot, Bread and Cheese", "Hen and Chicken", "Heel Top"; "Flood"; and "Gridiron", roughly 12 islets and reefs in all, all of which led to a number of shipwrecks, including HMS Hussar, a British frigate that sank in 1780 while supposedly carrying gold and silver intended to pay British troops. The stretch has since been cleared of rocks and widened. Washington Irving wrote of Hell Gate that the current sounded "like a bull bellowing for more drink" at half tide, while at full tide it slept "as soundly as an alderman after dinner". He said it was like "a peaceable fellow enough when he has no liquor at all, or when he has a skinful, but who, when half-seas over, plays the very devil." The tidal regime is complex, with the two major tides – from the Long Island Sound and from the Atlantic Ocean – separated by about two hours; and this is without consideration of the tidal influence of the Harlem River, all of which creates a "dangerous cataract", as one ship's captain put it.

The river is navigable for its entire length of 16 mi. In 1939 it was reported that the stretch from The Battery to the former Brooklyn Navy Yard near Wallabout Bay, a run of about 1000 yd, was 40 ft deep, the long section from there, running to the west of Roosevelt Island, through Hell Gate and to Throg's Neck was at least 35 ft deep, and then eastward from there the river was, at mean low tide, 168 ft deep.

The broadness of the river's channel south of Roosevelt Island is caused by the dipping of the hardy Fordham gneiss underlying the island under the less strong Inwood marble which lies under the river bed. Why the river turns to the east as it approaches the three lower Manhattan bridges is geologically unknown.

Islands
Roosevelt Island, a long (2 mi) and narrow (800 ft) landmass, lies in the stretch of the river between Manhattan Island and the borough of Queens roughly paralleling Manhattan's East 46th–86th Streets. The abrupt termination of the island on its north end is due to an extension of the 125th Street Fault. Politically, the island's 147 acre constitute part of the borough of Manhattan. It is connected to Queens by the Roosevelt Island Bridge, to Manhattan by the Roosevelt Island Tramway, and to both boroughs by a subway station served by the F train. The Queensboro Bridge also runs across Roosevelt Island, and an elevator allowing both pedestrian and vehicular access to the island was added to the bridge in 1930, but elevator service was discontinued in 1955 following the opening of the Roosevelt Island Bridge, and the elevator was demolished in 1970. The island, which was formerly known as Blackwell's Island and Welfare Island before being renamed in honor of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, historically served as the site of a penitentiary and a number of hospitals; today, it is dominated by residential neighborhoods consisting of large apartment buildings and parkland (much of which is dotted with the ruins of older structures).

The largest land mass in the River south of Roosevelt Island is U Thant Island, an artificial islet created during the construction of the Steinway Tunnel (which currently serves the subway's 7 and <7> lines). Officially named Belmont Island after one of the tunnel's financiers, the landmass owes its popular name (after Burmese diplomat U Thant, former Secretary-General of the United Nations) to the efforts of a group associated with the guru Sri Chinmoy that held mediation meetings on the island in the 1970s. Today, the island is owned by New York State and serves as a migratory bird sanctuary that is closed to visitors.

Proceeding north and east from Roosevelt Island, the River's principal islands include Manhattan's Mill Rock, an 8.6 acre island located about 1000 feet from Manhattan's East 96th Street; Manhattan's 520-acre Randalls and Wards Islands, two formerly separate islands joined by landfill that are home to a large public park, a number of public institutions, and the supports for the Triborough and the Hell Gate Bridges; the Bronx's Rikers Island, once under 100 acre but now over 400 acres following extensive landfill expansion after the island's 1884 purchase by the city as a prison farm and still home to New York City's massive and controversial primary jail complex; and North and South Brother Islands, both of which also constitute part of the Bronx.

Tributaries
The Bronx River, Pugsley Creek, and Westchester Creek drain into the northern bank of the East River in the northern section of the strait. The Flushing River, historically known as Flushing Creek, empties into the strait's southern bank near LaGuardia Airport via Flushing Bay. Further west, Luyster Creek drains into the East River in Astoria, Queens.

North of Randalls Island, it is joined by the Bronx Kill. Along the east of Wards Island, at approximately the strait's midpoint, it narrows into a channel called Hell Gate, which is spanned by both the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge (formerly the Triborough), and the Hell Gate Bridge. On the south side of Wards Island, it is joined by the Harlem River.

Newtown Creek on Long Island, which itself contained several tributaries, drains into the East River and forms part of the boundary between Queens and Brooklyn. Bushwick Inlet and Wallabout Bay on Long Island also drain into the strait on the Long Island side. The Gowanus Canal was built from Gowanus Creek, which emptied into the river.

Historically, there were other small streams which emptied into the river, though these and their associated wetlands have been filled in and built over. These small streams included the Harlem Creek, one of the most significant tributaries originating in Manhattan. Other streams that emptied into the East River included the Sawkill in Manhattan, Mill Brook in the Bronx,  and Sunswick Creek in Queens.

History
Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the land north of the East River was occupied by the Siwanoys, one of many groups of Algonquin-speaking Lenapes in the area. Those of the Lenapes who lived in the northern part of Manhattan Island in a campsite known as Konaande Kongh used a landing at around the current location of East 119th street to paddle into the river in canoes fashioned from tree trunks in order to fish.

Dutch settlement of what became New Amsterdam began in 1623. Some of the earliest of the small settlements in the area were along the west bank of the East River on sites that had previously been Native American settlements. As with the Native Americans, the river was central to their lives for transportation for trading and for fishing. They gathered marsh grass to feed their cattle, and the East River's tides helped to power mills which ground grain to flour. By 1642 there was a ferry running on the river between Manhattan island and what is now Brooklyn, and the first pier on the river was built in 1647 at Pearl and Broad Streets. After the British took over the colony in 1664, which was renamed "New York", the development of the waterfront continued, and a shipbuilding industry grew up once New York started exporting flour. By the end of the 17th century, the Great Dock, located at Corlear's Hook on the East River, had been built.

Narrowing the river
Historically, the lower portion of the strait, which separates Manhattan from Brooklyn, was one of the busiest and most important channels in the world, particularly during the first three centuries of New York City's history. Because the water along the lower Manhattan shoreline was too shallow for large boats to tie up and unload their goods, from 1686 on – after the signing of the Dongan Charter, which allowed intertidal land to be owned and sold – the shoreline was "wharfed out" to the high-water mark by constructing retaining walls that were filled in with every conceivable kind of landfill: excrement, dead animals, ships deliberately sunk in place, ship ballast, and muck dredged from the bottom of the river. On the new land were built warehouses and other structures necessary for the burgeoning sea trade. Many of the "water-lot" grants went to the rich and powerful families of the merchant class, although some went to tradesmen. By 1700, the Manhattan bank of the river had been "wharfed-out" up to around Whitehall Street, narrowing the strait of the river.

After the signing of the Montgomerie Charter in the late 1720s, another 127 acres of land along the Manhattan shore of the East River was authorized to be filled-in, this time to a point 400 feet beyond the low-water mark; the parts that had already been expanded to the low water mark – much of which had been devastated by a coastal storm in the early 1720s and a nor'easter in 1723 – were also expanded, narrowing the channel even further. What had been quiet beach land was to become new streets and buildings, and the core of the city's sea-borne trade. This infilling went as far north as Corlear's Hook. In addition, the city was given control of the western shore of the river from Wallabout Bay south.

American Revolution
Expansion of the waterfront halted during the American Revolution, in which the East River played an important role early in the conflict. On August 28, 1776, while British and Hessian troops rested after besting the Americans at the Battle of Long Island, General George Washington was rounding up all the boats on the east shore of the river, in what is now Brooklyn, and used them to successfully move his troops across the river – under cover of night, rain, and fog – to Manhattan island, before the British could press their advantage. Thus, though the battle was a victory for the British, the failure of Sir William Howe to destroy the Continental Army when he had the opportunity allowed the Americans to continue fighting. Without the stealthy withdrawal across the East River, the American Revolution might have ended much earlier.

Wallabout Bay on the River was the site of most of the British prison ships – most notoriously HMS Jersey (1736) – where thousands of American prisoners of war were held in terrible conditions. These prisoners had come into the hands of the British after the fall of New York City on September 15, 1776, after the American loss at the Battle of Long Island and the loss of Fort Washington on November 16. Prisoners began to be housed on the broken-down warships and transports in December; about 24 ships were used in total, but generally only 5 or 6 at a time. Almost twice as many Americans died from neglect in these ships than did from all the battles in the war: as many as 12,000 soldiers, sailors and civilians. The bodies were thrown overboard or were buried in shallow graves on the riverbanks, but their bones – some of which were collected when they washed ashore – were later relocated and are now inside the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument in nearby Fort Greene Park. The existence of the ships and the conditions the men were held in was widely known at the time through letters, diaries and memoirs, and was a factor not only in the attitude of Americans toward the British, but in the negotiations to formally end the war.

Development begins again
After the war, East River waterfront development continued once more. New York State legislation, which in 1807 had authorized what would become the Commissioners Plan of 1811, authorized the creation of new land out to 400 feet from the low water mark into the river, and with the advent of gridded streets along the new waterline – Joseph Mangin had laid out such a grid in 1803 in his A Plan and Regulation of the City of New York, which was rejected by the city, but established the concept – the coastline become regularized at the same time that the strait became even narrower.

One result of the narrowing of the East River along the shoreline of Manhattan and, later, Brooklyn – which continued until the mid-19th century when the state put a stop to it – was an increase in the speed of its current. Buttermilk Channel, the strait that divides Governors Island from Red Hook in Brooklyn, and which is located directly south of the "mouth" of the East River, was in the early 17th century a fordable waterway across which cattle could be driven. Further investigation by Colonel Jonathan Williams determined that the channel was by 1776 three fathoms deep (18 feet), five fathoms deep (30 feet) in the same spot by 1798, and when surveyed by Williams in 1807 had deepened to 7 fathoms (42 feet) at low tide. What had been almost a bridge between two landforms that were once connected had become a fully navigable channel, thanks to the constriction of the East River and the increased flow it caused. Soon, the current in the East River had become so strong that larger ships had to use auxiliary steam power in order to turn. The continued narrowing of the channel on both side may have been the reasoning behind the suggestion of one New York State Senator, who wanted to fill in the East River and annex Brooklyn, with the cost of doing so being covered by selling the newly made land. Others proposed a dam at Roosevelt Island (then Blackwell's Island) to create a wet basin for shipping.

Filling in the river
Filling in part of the river was also proposed in 1867 by engineer James E. Serrell, later a city surveyor, but with emphasis on solving the problem of Hell Gate. Serrell proposed filling in Hell Gate and building a "New East River" through Queens with an extension to Westchester County. Serrell's plan – which he publicized with maps, essay and lectures as well as presentations to the city, state and federal governments – would have filled in the river from 14th Street to 125th Street. The New East River through Queens would be about three times the average width of the existing one at an even 3600 ft throughout, and would run as straight as an arrow for 5 mi. The new land, and the portions of Queens which would become part of Manhattan, adding 2500 acre, would be covered with an extension of the existing street grid of Manhattan.

Variations on Serrell's plan would be floated over the years. A pseudonymous "Terra Firma" brought up filling in the East River again in the Evening Post and Scientific American in 1904, and Thomas Alva Edison took it up in 1906. Then Thomas Kennard Thompson, a bridge and railway engineer, proposed in 1913 to fill in the river from Hell Gate to the tip of Manhattan and, as Serrell had suggested, make a new canalized East River, only this time from Flushing Bay to Jamaica Bay. He would also expand Brooklyn into the Upper Harbor, put up a dam from Brooklyn to Staten Island, and make extensive landfill in the Lower Bay. At around the same time, in the 1920s, John A. Harriss, New York City's chief traffic engineer, who had developed the first traffic signals in the city, also had plans for the river. Harriss wanted to dam the East River at Hell Gate and the Williamsburg Bridge, then remove the water, put a roof over it on stilts, and build boulevards and pedestrian lanes on the roof along with "majestic structures", with transportation services below. The East River's course would, once again, be shifted to run through Queens, and this time Brooklyn as well, to channel it to the Harbor.

Clearing Hell Gate
Periodically, merchants and other interested parties would try to get something done about the difficulty of navigating through Hell Gate. In 1832, the New York State legislature was presented with a petition for a canal to be built through nearby Hallet's Point, thus avoiding Hell Gate altogether. Instead, the legislature responded by providing ships with pilots trained to navigate the shoals for the next 15 years.

In 1849, a French engineer whose specialty was underwater blasting, Benjamin Maillefert, had cleared some of the rocks which, along with the mix of tides, made the Hell Gate stretch of the river so dangerous to navigate. Ebenezer Meriam had organized a subscription to pay Maillefert $6,000 to, for instance, reduce "Pot Rock" to provide 24 ft of depth at low-mean water. While ships continued to run aground (in the 1850s about 2% of ships did so) and petitions continued to call for action, the federal government undertook surveys of the area which ended in 1851 with a detailed and accurate map. By then Maillefert had cleared the rock "Baldheaded Billy", and it was reported that Pot Rock had been reduced to 20.5 ft, which encouraged the United States Congress to appropriate $20,000 for further clearing of the strait. However, a more accurate survey showed that the depth of Pot Rock was actually a little more than 18 ft, and eventually Congress withdrew its funding.

With the main shipping channels through The Narrows into the harbor silting up with sand due to littoral drift, thus providing ships with less depth, and a new generation of larger ships coming online – epitomized by Isambard Kingdom Brunel's SS Great Eastern, popularly known as "Leviathan" – New York began to be concerned that it would start to lose its status as a great port if a "back door" entrance into the harbor was not created. In the 1850s the depth continued to lessen – the harbor commission said in 1850 that the mean water low was 24 ft and the extreme water low was 23 ft – while the draft required by the new ships continued to increase, meaning it was only safe for them to enter the harbor at high tide.

The U.S. Congress, realizing that the problem needed to be addressed, appropriated $20,000 for the Army Corps of Engineers to continue Maillefert's work. In 1851, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, "under Lt. Bartlett of the Army Corps of Engineers," began to do the job, in an operation which was to span 70 years. The appropriated money was soon spent without appreciable change in the hazards of navigating the strait. An advisory council recommended in 1856 that the strait be cleared of all obstacles, but nothing was done, and the Civil War soon broke out.

After the Civil War

In the late 1860s, after the Civil War, Congress realized the military importance of having easily navigable waterways, and charged the Army Corps of Engineers with clearing Hell Gate. Newton estimated that the operation would cost about half as much as the annual losses in shipping. The 2021 book by Thomas Barthel titled Opening the East River: John Newton and the Blasting of Hell Gate traces Newton's work on this project from 1866 to 1885. On September 24, 1876, the Corps used 50000 lb of explosives to blast the rocks, which was followed by further blasting. The process was started by excavating under Hallets reef from Astoria. Cornish miners, assisted by steam drills, dug galleries under the reef, which were then interconnected. They later drilled holes for explosives. A patent was issued for the detonating device. After the explosion, the rock debris was dredged and dropped into a deep part of the river. This was not repeated at the later Flood Rock explosion.

On October 10, 1885, the Corps carried out the largest explosion in this process, annihilating Flood Rock with 300000 lb of explosives. The blast was felt as far away as Princeton, New Jersey (50 miles). It sent a geyser of water 250 ft in the air. The blast has been described as "the largest planned explosion before testing began for the atomic bomb", although the detonation at the Battle of Messines in 1917 was larger. Some of the rubble from the detonation was used in 1890 to fill the gap between Great Mill Rock and Little Mill Rock, merging the two islands into a single island, Mill Rock.

At the same time that Hell Gate was being cleared, the Harlem River Ship Canal was being planned. When it was completed in 1895, the "back door" to New York's center of ship-borne trade in the docks and warehouses of the East River was open from two directions, through the cleared East River, and from the Hudson River through the Harlem River to the East River. Ironically, though, while both forks of the northern shipping entrance to the city were now open, modern dredging techniques had cut through the sandbars of the Atlantic Ocean entrance, allowing new, even larger ships to use that traditional passage into New York's docks.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the East River was the center of New York's shipping industry, but by the end of the century, much of it had moved to the Hudson River, leaving the East River wharves and slips to begin a long process of decay, until the area was finally rehabilitated in the mid-1960s, and the South Street Seaport Museum was opened in 1967.

A new seawall
By 1870, the condition of the Port of New York along both the East and Hudson Rivers had so deteriorated that the New York State legislature created the Department of Docks to renovate the port and keep New York competitive with other ports on the American East Coast. The Department of Docks was given the task of creating the master plan for the waterfront, and General George B. McClellan was engaged to head the project. McClellan held public hearings and invited plans to be submitted, ultimately receiving 70 of them, although in the end he and his successors put his own plan into effect. That plan called for the building of a seawall around Manhattan island from West 61st Street on the Hudson, around The Battery, and up to East 51st Street on the East River. The area behind the masonry wall (mostly concrete but in some parts granite blocks) would be filled in with landfill, and wide streets would be laid down on the new land. In this way, a new edge for the island (or at least the part of it used as a commercial port) would be created.

The department had surveyed 13,700 ft of shoreline by 1878, as well as documenting the currents and tides. By 1900, 75 mi had been surveyed and core samples had been taken to inform the builders of how deep the bedrock was. The work was completed just as World War I began, allowing the Port of New York to be a major point of embarkation for troops and materiel.

The new seawall helps protect Manhattan island from storm surges, although it is only 5 ft above the mean sea level, so that particularly dangerous storms, such as the nor'easter of 1992 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which hit the city in a way to create surges which are much higher, can still do significant damage. (The Hurricane of September 3, 1821, created the biggest storm surge on record in New York City: a rise of 13 ft in one hour at the Battery, flooding all of lower Manhattan up to Canal Street.) Still, the new seawall begun in 1871 gave the island a firmer edge, improved the quality of the port, and continues to protect Manhattan from normal storm surges.

Bridges and tunnels
The Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883, was the first bridge to span the East River, connecting the cities of New York and Brooklyn, and all but replacing the frequent ferry service between them, which did not return until the late 20th century. The bridge offered cable car service across the span. The Brooklyn Bridge was followed by the Williamsburg Bridge (1903), the Queensboro Bridge (1909), the Manhattan Bridge (1912) and the Hell Gate Railroad Bridge (1916). Later would come the Triborough Bridge (1936), the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge (1939), the Throgs Neck Bridge (1961) and the Rikers Island Bridge (1966). In addition, numerous rail tunnels pass under the East River – most of them part of the New York City Subway system – as does the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. (See Crossings below for details.) Also under the river is Water Tunnel #1 of the New York City water supply system, built in 1917 to extend the Manhattan portion of the tunnel to Brooklyn, and via City Tunnel #2 (1936) to Queens; these boroughs became part of New York City after the city's consolidation in 1898. City Tunnel #3 will also run under the river, under the northern tip of Roosevelt Island, and is expected to not be completed until at least 2026; the Manhattan portion of the tunnel went into service in 2013.

20th century
Philanthropist John D. Rockefeller founded what is now Rockefeller University in 1901, between 63rd and 64th Streets on the river side of York Avenue, overlooking the river. The university is a research university for doctoral and post-doctoral scholars, primarily in the fields of medicine and biological science. North of it is one of the major medical centers in the city, NewYork Presbyterian / Weill Cornell Medical Center, which is associated with the medical schools of both Columbia University and Cornell University. Although it can trace its history back to 1771, the center on York Avenue, much of which overlooks the river, was built in 1932.

The East River was the site of one of the greatest disasters in the history of New York City when, in June 1904, the PS General Slocum sank near North Brother Island due to a fire. It was carrying 1,400 German-Americans to a picnic site on Long Island for an annual outing. There were only 321 survivors of the disaster, one of the worst losses of life in the city's long history, and a devastating blow to the Little Germany neighborhood on the Lower East Side. The captain of the ship and the managers of the company that owned it were indicted, but only the captain was convicted; he spent 3 and a half years of his 10-year sentence at Sing Sing Prison before being released by a federal parole board, and then pardoned by President William Howard Taft.

Beginning in 1934, and then again from 1948 to 1966, the Manhattan shore of the river became the location for the limited-access East River Drive, which was later renamed after Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and is universally known by New Yorkers as the "FDR Drive". The road is sometimes at grade, sometimes runs under locations such as the site of the Headquarters of the United Nations and Carl Schurz Park and Gracie Mansion – the mayor's official residence, and is at time double-decked, because Hell Gate provides no room for more landfill. It begins at Battery Park, runs past the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and Queensboro Bridges, and the Ward's Island Footbridge, and terminates just before the Robert F. Kennedy Triboro Bridge when it connects to the Harlem River Drive. Between most of the FDR Drive and the River is the East River Greenway, part of the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway. The East River Greenway was primarily built in connection with the building of the FDR Drive, although some portions were built as recently as 2002, and other sections are still incomplete.

In 1963, Con Edison built the Ravenswood Generating Station on the Long Island City shore of the river, on land some of which was once stone quarries which provided granite and marble slabs for Manhattan's buildings. The plant has since been owned by KeySpan. National Grid and TransCanada, the result of deregulation of the electrical power industry. The station, which can generate about 20% of the electrical needs of New York City – approximately 2,500 megawatts – receives some of its fuel by oil barge.

North of the power plant can be found Socrates Sculpture Park, an illegal dumpsite and abandoned landfill that in 1986 was turned into an outdoor museum, exhibition space for artists, and public park by sculptor Mark di Suvero and local activists. The area also contains Rainey Park, which honors Thomas C. Rainey, who attempted for 40 years to get a bridge built in that location from Manhattan to Queens. The Queensboro Bridge was eventually built south of this location.

21st century
In 2011, NY Waterway started operating its East River Ferry line. The route was a 7-stop East River service that runs in a loop between East 34th Street and Hunters Point, making two intermediate stops in Brooklyn and three in Queens. The ferry, an alternative to the New York City Subway, cost $4 per one-way ticket. It was instantly popular: from June to November 2011, the ferry saw 350,000 riders, over 250% of the initial ridership forecast of 134,000 riders. In December 2016, in preparation for the start of NYC Ferry service the next year, Hornblower Cruises purchased the rights to operate the East River Ferry. NYC Ferry started service on May 1, 2017, with the East River Ferry as part of the system.

In February 2012 the federal government announced an agreement with Verdant Power to install 30 tidal turbines in the channel of the East River. The turbines were projected to begin operations in 2015 and are supposed to produce 1.05 megawatts of power. The strength of the current foiled an earlier effort in 2007 to tap the river for tidal power.

On May 7, 2017, the catastrophic failure of a Con Edison substation in Brooklyn caused a spill into the river of over 5,000 gal of dielectric fluid, a synthetic mineral oil used to cool electrical equipment and prevent electrical discharges. (See below.)

At the end of 2022, gold miner John Reeves claimed that up to 50 tons of ice age artifacts bound for the American Museum of Natural History, including mammoth remains, had been dumped into the East River near 65th Street. Although the museum denied that any fossils had been dumped into the river, Reeves's allegations prompted commercial divers to search the river for evidence of mammoth bones.

Ecosystem collapse, pollution and health
Throughout most of the history of New York City, and New Amsterdam before it, the East River has been the receptacle for the city's garbage and sewage. "Night men" who collected "night soil" from outdoor privies would dump their loads into the river, and even after the construction of the Croton Aqueduct (1842) and then the New Croton Aqueduct (1890) gave rise to indoor plumbing, the waste that was flushed away into the sewers, where it mixed with ground runoff, ran directly into the river, untreated. The sewers terminated at the slips where ships docked, until the waste began to build up, preventing dockage, after which the outfalls were moved to the end of the piers. The "landfill" which created new land along the shoreline when the river was "wharfed out" by the sale of "water lots" was largely garbage such as bones, offal, and even whole dead animals, along with excrement – human and animal. The result was that by the 1850s, if not before, the East River, like the other waterways around the city, was undergoing the process of eutrophication where the increase in nitrogen from excrement and other sources led to a decrease in free oxygen, which in turn led to an increase in phytoplankton such as algae and a decrease in other life forms, breaking the area's established food chain. The East River became very polluted, and its animal life decreased drastically.

In an earlier time, one person had described the transparency of the water: "I remember the time, gentlemen, when you could go in twelve feet of water and you could see the pebbles on the bottom of this river." As the water got more polluted, it darkened, underwater vegetation (such as photosynthesizing seagrass) began dying, and as the seagrass beds declined, the many associated species of their ecosystems declined as well, contributing to the decline of the river. Also harmful was the general destruction of the once plentiful oyster beds in the waters around the city, and the over-fishing of menhaden, or mossbunker, a small silvery fish which had been used since the time of the Native Americans for fertilizing crops – however it took 8,000 of these schooling fish to fertilize a single acre, so mechanized fishing using the purse seine was developed, and eventually the menhaden population collapsed. Menhaden feed on phytoplankton, helping to keep them in check, and are also a vital step in the food chain, as bluefish, striped bass and other fish species which do not eat phytoplankton feed on the menhaden. The oyster is another filter feeder: oysters purify 10 to 100 gallons a day, while each menhaden filters four gallons in a minute, and their schools were immense: one report had a farmer collecting 20 oxcarts worth of menhaden using simple fishing nets deployed from the shore. The combination of more sewage, due to the availability of more potable water – New York's water consumption per capita was twice that of Europe – indoor plumbing, the destruction of filter feeders, and the collapse of the food chain, damaged the ecosystem of the waters around New York, including the East River, almost beyond repair.

Because of these changes to the ecosystem, by 1909, the level of dissolved-oxygen in the lower part of the river had declined to less than 65%, where 55% of saturation is the point at which the amount of fish and the number of their species begins to be affected. Only 17 years later, by 1926, the level of dissolved oxygen in the river had fallen to 13%, below the point at which most fish species can survive.

Due to heavy pollution, the East River is dangerous to people who fall in or attempt to swim in it, although as of mid-2007 the water was cleaner than it had been in decades. , the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) categorizes the East River as Use Classification I, meaning it is safe for secondary contact activities such as boating and fishing. According to the marine sciences section of the DEP, the channel is swift, with water moving as fast as four knots, just as it does in the Hudson River on the other side of Manhattan. That speed can push casual swimmers out to sea. A few people drown in the waters around New York City each year.

, it was reported that the level of bacteria in the river was below federal guidelines for swimming on most days, although the readings may vary significantly, so that the outflow from Newtown Creek or the Gowanus Canal can be tens or hundreds of times higher than recommended, according to Riverkeeper, a non-profit environmentalist advocacy group. The counts are also higher along the shores of the strait than they are in the middle of its flow. Nevertheless, the "Brooklyn Bridge Swim" is an annual event where swimmers cross the channel from Brooklyn Bridge Park to Manhattan.

Thanks to reductions in pollution, cleanups, the restriction of development, and other environmental controls, the East River along Manhattan is one of the areas of New York's waterways – including the Hudson-Raritan Estuary and both shores of Long Island – which have shown signs of the return of biodiversity. On the other hand, the river is also under attack from hardy, competitive, alien species, such as the European green crab, which is considered to be one of the world's ten worst invasive species, and is present in the river.

2017 oil spill
On May 7, 2017, the catastrophic failure of Con Edison's Farragut Substation at 89 John Street in Dumbo, Brooklyn, caused a spill of dielectric fluid – an insoluble synthetic mineral oil, considered non-toxic by New York state, used to cool electrical equipment and prevent electrical discharges – into the East River from a 37,000 gal tank. The National Response Center received a report of the spill at 1:30pm that day, although the public did not learn of the spill for two days, and then only from tweets from NYC Ferry. A "safety zone" was established, extending from a line drawn between Dupont Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to East 25th Street in Kips Bay, Manhattan, south to Buttermilk Channel. Recreational and human-powered vehicles such as kayaks and paddleboards were banned from the zone while the oil was being cleaned up, and the speed of commercial vehicles restricted so as not to spread the oil in their wakes, causing delays in NYC Ferry service. The clean-up efforts were being undertaken by Con Edison personnel and private environmental contractors, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, with the assistance of NYC Emergency Management.

The loss of the sub-station caused a voltage dip in the power provided by Con Ed to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's New York City Subway system, which disrupted its signals.

The Coast Guard estimated that 5,200 gal of oil spilled into the water, with the remainder soaking into the soil at the substation. In the past the Coast Guard has on average been able to recover about 10% of oil spilled, however the complex tides in the river make the recovery much more difficult, with the turbulent water caused by the river's change of tides pushing contaminated water over the containment booms, where it is then carried out to sea and cannot be recovered. By Friday May 12, officials from Con Edison reported that almost 600 gal had been taken out of the water.

Environmental damage to wildlife is expected to be less than if the spill was of petroleum-based oil, but the oil can still block the sunlight necessary for the river's fish and other organisms to live. Nesting birds are also in possible danger from the oil contaminating their nests and potentially poisoning the birds or their eggs. Water from the East River was reported to have tested positive for low levels of PCB, a known carcinogen.

Putting the spill into perspective, John Lipscomb, the vice president of advocacy for Riverkeepers said that the chronic release after heavy rains of overflow from city's wastewater treatment system was "a bigger problem for the harbor than this accident." The state Department of Environmental Conservation is investigating the spill. It was later reported that according to DEC data which dates back to 1978, the substation involved had spilled 179 times previously, more than any other Con Ed facility. The spills have included 8,400 gallons of dielectric oil, hydraulic oil, and antifreeze which leaked at various times into the soil around the substation, the sewers, and the East River.

On June 22, Con Edison used non-toxic green dye and divers in the river to find the source of the leak. As a result, a 4 in hole was plugged. The utility continued to believe that the bulk of the spill went into the ground around the substation, and excavated and removed several hundred cubic yards of soil from the area. They estimated that about 5,200 gal went into the river, of which 520 gal were recovered. Con Edison said that it installed a new transformer, and intended to add new barrier around the facility to help guard against future spills propagating into the river.

In popular culture

 * The Brecker Brothers performed a song named after the river that is featured on their album Heavy Metal Be-Bop (1978)
 * According to its author, Yasushi Akimoto, the noted Japanese song "Kawa no Nagare no Yō ni" – the "swan song" of the noted singer Hibari Misora – was inspired by the East River.
 * In the Seinfeld episode "The Nap", Cosmo Kramer takes up swimming in the East River.
 * In the 2004 film Spider-Man 2, Doctor Octopus's run down lair is situated on the East River. This is also where the final battle between him and Spider-Man takes place and also where he sacrifices himself to stop the fusion reactor he created which would threaten all of New York City.
 * In Forever, the immortal Dr. Henry Morgan is reborn naked in the East River each time he dies.
 * In the final Percy Jackson and the Olympians novel, The Last Olympian, the East River appears as a river spirit in the form of a telkhine. The East River Spirit is a rival to the Hudson River Spirit, but assists the Demigods in the Battle of Manhattan by sinking the Titan's ships.

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title: East River