The Revolutionary War-era hooks drilled into the rocks at Jeffrey’s Hook in Upper Manhattan

New York is a city of hooks—Red Hook in Brooklyn, Corlears Hook on the Lower East Side, Tubby Hook in Inwood, for example. Okay, Tubby Hook is a name that hasn’t been widely used for a century. But in the colonial era, Dutch settlers gave the name “hoek”—later anglicized to “hook”—to the many irregular-shaped spits of land jutting into the East and Hudson Rivers. Most of these hooks disappeared from maps by the early 1900s. In some cases the water surrounding the hook was reshaped with landfill, and therefore the hook no longer existed. Others were de-mapped because forward-thinking New Yorkers chose to rebrand a neighborhood long known as a hook into something less old-world Dutch, which is how Tubby Hook became Inwood. One surviving hook, however, is Jeffrey’s Hook (sometimes spelled Jeffery’s Hook), a prominence just south of the George Washington Bridge inside the parameters of Fort Washington Park. Jeffrey’s Hook—who Jeffrey was seems to have been lost to history—is a…