The Cave of the Sibyl - Hoboken, NJ

[Dwight Livingston]

From the Times today - http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/nyreg ... ref=slogin

HOBOKEN, N.J., June 21 — The Cave of the Sibyl, where Virgil’s prophetess received Aeneas before leading him to the underworld, was a vast cavern in southern Italy with a hundred mouths. When the Sibyl spoke, her words came in a hundred voices.

A cave today in Hoboken has a similar name, but lacks some of the grandeur. The prophetess is spelled “Sybil,” and the cave’s lone mouth was sealed shut this month with loose dirt.

Nearby, teenage skaters show off in a riverside park, and cars dash by on Sinatra Drive, mostly unaware that this 20-foot-deep cave has its own enthralling history, and possibly historical treasure waiting to be found. It was a 19th-century retreat for wealthy New Yorkers who drank from the fresh spring inside the cave, paying a penny a glass for water that was thought to be medicinal.

In 1841, the bloodied body of Mary Cecilia Rogers drifted to shore near the mouth of Sybil’s Cave, and into legend, the subject of a thriller by Edgar Allan Poe. By the late 1950s, the cave and its magnificent facade had disappeared into the rock and shrubbery.

Then, two and a half years ago, the cave was rediscovered by a group of local explorers who had consulted historical drawings and photographs and prowled the landscape for months in search of it. The mayor of Hoboken, who has led the effort, promised to have the cave excavated and restored as a tourist attraction. But after a flurry of excitement and a few days of exploration — among the finds was old graffiti etched in a serif typeface — the cave was closed, with an orange stop-work order pasted on a sign that had alerted passers-by to its existence.

The cave is carved in a cliff face and sits on property owned by the Stevens Institute of Technology, which gave Hoboken permission to go inside “and then reversed it,” demanding that the city provide proof of insurance, said Mayor David Roberts. Contractors have backed out of the project, and the city’s building inspector has asked for engineering surveys and traffic studies.

(continues, see link above)

[Sean Ryan]

I've been doing a ton of research on this cave the past few years. The development's like molasses. But land in Hoboken is scarce, and the cave has a view of the Empire State Building, so eventually something will come of it. And unlike most cave dilemmas, the entrance is plowed shut with dirt, so the cave won't get trashed while people are dragging their feet.

[Dwight Livingston]

That's great, Sean. Good luck with the project.

The article says it's twenty feet deep - is that right? Are they talking about a twenty foot horizontal extent or does it go back farther?

Dwight

[Sean Ryan]

Nope, that's about it. Technically, it's not a cave, since it's manmade. The rocks of the Palisades cliffs are mostly hard diabase, an igneous rock, but by Hoboken a much softer serpentine rock got pushed to the surface. You can break it off in your hand. The Lenni Lenape indians used it to make tobacco pipes out of, and the name Hoboken might go back to a Lenni Lanape word for pipe.

It got dug out around the 1830s, when Hoboken was a popular tourist desitnation for people living in the stench and squalor of New York. They would take a ferry across the Hudson, and here was this bucolic stretch of woods. Sybil's Cave would be naturally cool, and glasses of spring water were sold for a penny. Nowadays, with 40,000 people living above the cave, that water's probably not potable.

The Stevens family dug the cave out, at the base of the cliff. At the top was their mansion. That's since been turned into the Stevens Institute of Technology. There's rumor of a tunnel dug down from the mansion to the ground, 70 feet below, but if it exists, it's been sealed well enough to spur a hundreds years of bored engineering students.