The Big C Rock

Ugly eyesore. Legal graffiti without artistic merit. I don’t know how anyone is allowed to deface natural beauty like this in the city.

@ Drew Martorelli. Valid point about the painted C, the markings of a 1950s agreement between New York Central Railroad and Columbia. However, the cliff face, albeit comprised of natural rock, is still a man-made feature. It is the product of dynamite and human tooling to widen the path of the Spuyten Duyvil Creek for commerce (you can see the original hill in the left of the attached photo). So it makes one wonder: which was the greater defacement of nature?

Great inspirational piece.

We used to swim there in the early 70s. We just called it The Rock and we walked to it from The Concourse to 225th St on Kingsbridge Rd. The water was pretty nasty but it was a lot of fun. We mostly jumped off the western side and it had local names for each jump-off spot, the leap, little Jazz, Diana, Capone’s chair, Big Jazz, low cables, high cables and the Hump which was the very top. Personally I preferred high cables over the hump because the hump was a blind jump so you didn’t see your landing spot until you were in the air and high cables was just a little lower. When the Circle Line came by we would wear our towels like Superman and jump for the tourists. If you try to swim across the channel make sure you don’t get run over by the Circle Line which really happened to us (very hairy). It was dangerous but at that age we thought we were invincible. What a place...

Great, especially for jumping into the Harlem River.