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Bound by Green, Washington and Bay Streets this power house still stands and the H&MRR ran the rail lines that have become the present day PATH System between New York & New Jersey. This building was always in sight, from about September 1998 to March 1999, when a project to replace large underground water pipes excavated the middle of Bay and some of the other surrounding streets to a depth of 12 feet. The excavated soil was piled up in two large piles across the street, from the power house, on the West side of Washington Street. 'The Piles', as we called them, were able to be metal detected at any time, day or night. The 12 foot deep excavations, in the middle of the streets, were also available for metal detecting and bottle digging, after the workers had gone home and on weekends. Hey, it was before 911 and a totally different world, you could dig and detect to your heart's content as long as you didn't get in the way. These large excavations bore down into Harsimus Cove which is seen as a marsh land on c 1820-30 maps of Jersey City. By 1855 the area was completely filled in with dredged soils from the Brooklyn Naval Yard and New York Harbor as well as household waste and the waste from local businesses. Maps from 1855 and later show this area, of Harsimus Cove, as having streets. Therefore, any metal detecting target was from 1855 or before, an ideal situation. At the time Ernest Bower, Jim Dews and myself went metal detecting here many times. We even took my son Joseph for a few hours and found six 1850s dated large cents, in what must have been a lost change purse, in addition to enough items to fill an 8x12 inch Riker display case, on just that trip alone, which lasted only a few hours. Although I only went to this site about a dozen time and as I recall, Ernest and Jim went daily for about 6 months and the following images show just some of the fruits of their efforts.