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kept working, and American supply ships
arrived there laden with tanks, aircraft,
and fuel oil for the English war effort.
Once the ships unloaded their cargo, they
needed ballast to make the journey back
across the Atlantic. Since most of Bristol’s
85,000 destroyed buildings were lying
in little bits, the ships filled up.
The ships offloaded the rubble in Man-
hattan, in the East River, and New York
built on top of it, creating reclaimed land
just east of Bellevue Hospital between
23th and 34th Streets. Some of this new
land became the foundation for an exten-
sion of the FDR Drive highway, and some
became a triangular plot of land jutting
into the river that was known at the time
as Bristol Basin but which is now a com-
plex of apartments buildings and busi-
nesses called Waterside Plaza. Across
the road from the hospital, on a low wall
by the river, a plaque reads:Beneath this East River Drive of the city
of New York lie stones, bricks and
rubble from the bombed city of Bristol
in England ... Brought here in ballast
from overseas, these fragments that
once were homes shall testify while
men love freedom to the resolution and
fortitude of the people of Britain. They
saw their homes struck down without
warning ... It was not their walls but
their valor that kept them free.— John Maloney, former Principal
Archaeology Officer, Museum of LondonQ: After all the bombings and devastation of European
cities during World War II, where did they put all the
rubble? I have seen locally where a building or two
have been demolished and the rubble trucked away,
but where would the massive piles of rubble from
entire cities be shipped?
—Jose Emilio Hernandez, Union Beach, New JerseyA: As reader Hernandez correctly points out, the millions of
tons of bombs dropped by both the Allied and Axis powers left
an indelible mark on Europe. Dozens of cities, including
London, Bristol, Warsaw, Dresden, Frankfurt, and Berlin—and
nearly all other major German cities—suffered significant
damage or were completely razed.
In continental cities, much of
the post-bombing rubble was
used as hardcore, a base foun-
dation upon which concrete or
other solid construction mate-
rials can be laid for building
(or rebuilding, in this case).
Additional bomb rubble was
either dumped in old quarries
or used for embanking rivers,
as barriers against coastal ero-
sion, or to help build up low-
lying areas of land.
The vast bulk of London’s rubble was dumped in East Lon-
don’s Lea Valley, where the River Lea flows down to join the
Thames. So much detritus was deposited in Hackney and
Leyton Marshes that the Museum of London estimates it raised
the ground by up to 10 feet in numerous places. This is the area
where, a half-century later, organizers built the Olympic Park
for the 2012 Summer Olympic games.
Rubble from Bristol found a more interesting resting place.
Bristol is a major British port city that suffered horribly from
bombing; it was almost leveled by the war’s end. But the portBristol, England, native Cary Grant christens
a plaque in 1974 (above) at New York’s “Bristol
Basin” ( foreground, left), built atop rubble
from his bombed-out hometown ( below).