As New Yorkers braced for Hurricane Sandy on Monday, the memory of another superstorm swirled in the air – The Great Hurricane of 1938, which devasted Long Island and the Eastern Seaboard 74 years ago this fall.
That storm, known as the “Long Island Express” or “The Great New England Hurricane of 1938,” was initially expected to hit Miami, but surprised the East Coast after it changed direction and started speeding towards New York and New England on Sept. 21 with winds moving between 60 and 70 mph.
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Hurricane warnings weren’t even issued at first, and many residents didn’t know about the danger until they saw the winds pick up or their homes begin flooding.
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The storm, also dubbed the Yankee Clipper, claimed 700 lives – including 10 in New York City – and injured 708.
4500 homes, cottages and farms were destroyed, according to SUNY Suffolk professor Scott Mandia, while 15,000 were damaged.
Cars also took a beating – roughly 26,000 vehicles sustained damage in the storm – while 2 billion trees were reportedly wiped out across New York and New England.
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The full extent of the destruction totaled over $300 million, according to MSNBC.
New York City ducked the most dangerous parts of the storm, according to the office of Emergency Management, as it was impacted by the hurricane’s weaker “left side,” while Long Island bore the brunt of the damage.
But the city did suffer serious flooding, wiping out power above 59th street in Manhattan and in the Bronx.
The Empire State Building reportedly swayed in the high-powered winds while the East River overflowed, and the IND subway line (now known as the Eighth Avenue line) lost power.
The hurricane hit Long Island around 3:30p.m. in the afternoon on the 21st, according to Mandia, and incredible photos and video captured on the coast at the time show homes being dislodged from their moorings and crashing into each other as they are swept along in the waves.
Dozens of people were killed in the region, and their bodies were reportedly laid out on the lawn of a country club in Westhampton the day after the storm.
The hurricane stretched well beyond New York, flooding areas in Connecticut and Cape Cod, as well as Rhode Island, where parts of Providence were deluged in 20 feet of water.
“In downtown Providence a flying sheet of fabricated metal cut a man in half,” Yankee Magazine writer James Dodson wrote in 1988, in a piece chronicling the hurricane. “Display windows blew out of shops; a woman was sucked through a restaurant’s plate-glass window. Falling trees crushed motorists in their cars. A rat floated down Main Street, bobbing on an empty gasoline can.”
Bill Cawley, a young reporter from Rhode Island, gave an eyewitness account about the shock of seeing the death toll in his hometown of Westerly.
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“I reached the outside world today after witnessing the scenes of horror and desolation that came in the hours after a tidal wave, hurled miles inland by a hurricane…two days ago,” he wrote in a story that ran on the front page of the Washington, D.C. Evening Star. “I counted bodies — row upon sickening row of them — stretched out in the old town high school after all the city’s morgues were filled. When I left at four o’clock this morning, there were 74 dead and almost 100 missing.”
Ed Jackson/New York Daily News
One family, trapped by flood waters due to the Great New England Hurricane, received help from neighbors.
Despite the destruction, one unexpected positive outcome did emerge from the storm.
The devastation reportedly helped solve the unemployment crisis that had been lingering since the Great Depression, as thousands of people were able to find work on Long Island helping to clean up and repair the damage.
