Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (10 page)

All these arcane customs created an insular world in which the longshoremen, exploited by their overlords, nevertheless remained isolated from and suspicious of the surrounding community, unwilling to seek redress from it. Shape-ups continued to be a sham exercise, since the hiring foreman had a list in advance of favored names. Sometimes men who had placated the union officials would sport a toothpick in their hatbrims or behind their ears. That all this gangsterism should come down to a toothpick!

Many of these ingrown practices turn up in the film
On the Waterfront
(1954), some as central issues, others as researched, but throwaway, background details. For instance, in the shape-up scene, a dockworker is seen putting a toothpick behind his ear and instantly getting picked; the foreman subsequently throws on the ground some metal discs he calls “tabs,” which are fought over by the remaining applicants, though what these actions mean could only be grasped by moviegoers already in the know. More familiar to 1950s audiences will have been the general problem of corrupt longshore unions, the code of silence, the fighting priests who crusaded against these practices, and the barrage of Crime Commission hearings investigating waterfront racketeering.

Since most people today know the New York working port only through this film (which was actually shot in Hoboken, New Jersey, with the city's skyline tantalizingly backgrounded), it is worth reconsidering it.
On the Waterfront
is one of those film classics that, to me at least, doesn't hold up: shrill, rhetorical, its plot scheme of guilt and redemption rammed through to the percussive nudgings of an urban-jungle Leonard Bernstein score, its hysteria allows not a moment's relaxed cinematic breathing, save for one courtship scene on a park bench. Certainly Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint are still riveting—she translucent, powder-white, like a Kabuki lioness; he, the sensitive, inarticulate, darkly frowning star, on his way from Stanley Kowalski to Napoleon—yet at no moment can we accept her as a college girl from New Jersey taught by nuns, just as he, for all his charismatic charm, seems incredible as Terry Malloy, the ex-boxer whose brains are partly scrambled, but whose pigeon-loving heart stays tenderly intact. The other acting is aggressively stylized: squashed-face secondaries recruited from the ring and the Actors Studio, led by Lee J. Cobb in his snarling, Yiddish Theater Italian mobster mode; Rod Steiger's robotically mannered vocal hesitancies, meshing in the backseat with Brando's work-ing-class lisp, all fun to watch, up to a point. But Karl Malden is unbearably hammy with his sermons, and the religious symbolism (Steiger dangling spread-armed from a hook, Brando brow-bloodied near the end, Malden yammering that every waterfront victim is a “crucifixion”) seems maudlinly overdone. Screenwriter Budd Schulberg and director Elia Kazan allowed themselves to interpret the waterfront zone as Calvary.

Harry Cohn, the head of the studio that produced
On the Waterfront,
had expected the picture to flop, partly because of its artiness, but the movie did well at the box office and even won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Only the unions were unhappy, protesting what they saw as an unfair emphasis on “labor crime.”

THE WATERFRONT COMMISSION, established in the aftermath of the crime hearings, cleaned up the docks a good deal, especially seeing to it that ex-convicts were driven out of the locals. If anything, they became a little too puritanically strict in their rules against those with criminal
records. Not that the New York waterfront lost all its ties with organized crime; but with the preponderance of shipping relocated, the problem became defused. The Port Authority simply moved the whole operation, lock, stock, and barrel, to container-port facilities in Elizabeth, New Jersey (whose marshland was a lot cheaper to acquire than Gotham real estate), and Port Newark, keeping only a few symbolic pieces of a container port in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and Howland Hook, Staten Island.

Could the city have done a better job of retaining its working port? Were the harbor commissioners asleep at the switch? Teddy Gleason, the head of the ILA, used to say, “You know what I see when I look down at Battery Park City? I see a container port that could have been.” The union itself was partly responsible, having resisted containerization because it was not as labor-intensive as break-bulk cargo. Still, let's say that the harbor commissioners had overcome the union's hesitations, and built a containerized port where Battery Park City now stands. There would still be the lack of a rail hookup, insufficient backup space, and trucks stalled in cobbled streets in downtown Manhattan, probably leading to a new loading racket. Manhattan can never again have a working port. I reiterate this as an antidote to that aching nostalgia (my own included) for the old New York waterfront.

The New York waterfront treated its workforce as cruelly and crudely as any workplace can, while still making you wish it had continued to exist. In 1969—the same year that James Morris, soon to become Jan Morris, published a paean commissioned by the Port of New York Authority titled
The Great Port
(talk about your puff pieces)—the International Longshore-men's Union signed a contract to permit labor-saving mechanization and increased container shipping in exchange for a guaranteed annual income for its members, whether they worked or not. So the longshoremen finally lucked out with a golden parachute—or golden grappling hook—even if it meant trading their jobs in for retirement. The membership, 27,000 strong in 1969, has dwindled to a tenth of that: there are only 2,700 active longshoremen working in the regional port today. Many of them sit in isolation behind computers or in crane cabs, making sure that each container lands where it is supposed to, according to some prearranged master plan.

Sometimes I catch myself wondering—in that old-time liberal, pro-union way one wonders—whether the unions were made the scapegoat for
the port's problems. It seems not entirely coincidental that the Port Authority withdrew virtually all shipping from New York soon after the well-publicized waterfront crime investigations, as if to say, It's the union's fault we can't do business here. But one of the last of the shipping news reporters, Bill White, set me straight: “The union was rotten. No doubt about it.”

White also wistfully told me that New York's working waterfront had been one of the greatest spectacles in the world. With all that movement and noise, and the smells of exotic spices, I don't doubt it: there is something intrinsically interesting about watching such work being performed, as port-watchers in New Orleans or Barcelona can attest. How accessible that spectacle ever was to the ordinary New Yorker, as opposed to a shipping news reporter, is a question. In Manhattan, certainly, there had long been something of a fortresslike segregation between city and port: “Rimmed off from the rest of the city by a steel-ribbed highway,” Daniel Bell wrote in 1962.

Even in 1915, before the highways were built, Poole described in
The Harbor
“an unbroken wall of sheet iron and concrete” with “No Visitors Allowed” signs and watchmen to exclude the public. Not that there weren't good reasons: fear of theft, or safety and insurance concerns. In the end, New York's working waterfront must have been a great urban spectacle, to the extent one could glimpse it in passing, and a forbidden zone, parts of which were as hidden from view as the Imperial Palace in Peking.

5 TRIBECA: THE RIVER PROJECT

A
CROSS FROM A JUMBO OFFICE BUILDING AND THE HIGHWAY SITS PIER
25,
WITH ITS SCRAPPY CARNIVAL ASSORTMENT OF MINIATURE GOLF, BEACH VOLLEYBALL, kiddie rides, and soft ice cream. Next to that is Pier 26, on West Street and North Moore, just below Canal Street. Pier 26 is a wide concrete slab, looking out onto river-washed stubs of rotting timbers, which has been shared for the past decade by two exemplary nonprofit organizations, the River Project, which operates educational and exhibit programs related to river ecology, and the Downtown Boathouse, which runs kayaking and canoe programs.

The River Project, housed in a two-story cinderblock structure, with a trailer-office alongside, has been fondly described by John Waldman
(Heartbeats in the Muck)
as “a resilient cross between a marine biology field station and a TriBeCa neighborhood clubhouse for the outdoor-minded.” It gives off that odor of one-step-from-eviction squatter's idealism, klutzy if endearing voluntarism, and embattled overdrive which might be characterized as
essence de nonprofit.

One Sunday in September I went over to the River Project to watch the scuba divers. On this brisk, windy day, an underwater trash-removal event had been scheduled to draw curious onlookers and raise consciousness about keeping the Hudson River clean. On a floating dock attached to the concrete slab, a young, rotund volunteer organizer in an orange life jacket was directing the flow of divers in the waters at his feet. “Who's going down next?” The eight divers, bobbing in the water like decapitated heads, looked uncertain, no one exactly rushing toward submersion. “Hold on to the dump-line,” he said, “if you're going down. If you're not, clear the space for the others.” The divers were all Hispanic inner-city youths in their teens, part of a group called the Kips Bay Girls and Boys Club (not from Kips Bay, of course, that would be too simple, but from the Bronx). One chubby girl, having completed her dive, half-flopped, half-climbed gracelessly onto the floating deck, saying “Help me!” The organizer did, reluctantly, then leaned over, asked a prettier girl in the water if she was okay, and she tapped her head, a signal that must have meant “everything's all right.” Meanwhile, several people were videotaping the divers, part of that documentation process so dear to nonprofits. The organizer shooed one of the camera people off the deck because she lacked a lifejacket.

A young man, emerging from his dive, his mustache dripping river water, reported that he was unable to extricate any trash because he couldn't see a thing; the water was too murky. “Plus there's too many divers, you keep bumping into each other.”

The adult leader of the Kips Bay Club surfaces a few moments later. Everyone calls him Michael. He is an articulate, gregarious African-American, shaved head, Fu Manchu mustache, handsome, body-builder type, with glittering eyes. Hanging on to the side of the dock, he answers admiring questions about his outfit: “It's a drysuit, Trilaminate, very comfortable. You can regulate the degree of warmth by the layers you wear underneath. See?” he says, peeling back the top to show his dark gray undershirt. “That's Polarfleece.”

He explains that his group is part of the Boy Scouts: a “venture” club set up for thirteen-to-twenty-year-olds. He himself is over forty. It isn't clear to me whether he's paid to do this as a youth worker, or is a weekend volunteer. His rap is that the club is a good way to keep the kids off drugs. “When you've got activities, you don't do drugs, right? I take them lobstering and spearfishing out by Rockaway. There are three hundred wrecks underwater out there. You also come across chunks of the old FDR Drive, nasty concrete, iron poles that they sunk after the highway collapsed.”

“So how was your dive?” a blond, slender, fit-looking woman in her forties, Danish or German, with sun-leathered skin, asks Michael flirtatiously.

“Terrible. Pitch-black. It's okay, I still had a good time.”

“I think swimming, it's a better sport. Because diving you can't see anything.”

“You don't go by visibility, you go by feel,” says Michael. “It's like Braille. Anyway, this makes a good political statement.”

“But there was no trash picked up,” I object. “How is it political?”

Michael smiles, acknowledging the point. “It's more like, ‘We dove the Hudson.’ ”

The earnest Hispanic teenager, who has been sitting on his haunches the whole time listening, pipes up, “Michael, can you help me improve my diving skills? I'm trying to go for underwater welder.”

“That's cool.”

Later, I wander around the various information tables. Some are distributing membership forms for diving clubs in the area. There is also a “Save the Rain Forest” group, with literature protesting the Department of Transportation's use of “wood logged from tropical rain forests for City construction projects.” A gamelan group plays on the makeshift bandstand deck.

Inside the Estuarium, as the River Project's exhibit space is called, are research tanks with handwritten explanatory signs, showing the varieties of estuarial activity. In a tank housing oyster beds, fed by water drawn from the Hudson, a nerdy volunteer, rail-thin, is explaining to several younger girls: “Actually, see, the river is very clean, but there's muck at the bottom, and that's why when you stare down it looks as if it's dirty.” This is a somewhat simplistic explanation of the Hudson's turbidity, but we'll let it stand.

I have set up an interview with Cathy Drew, director of the River Project. She is a middle-aged woman with straw-textured blond hair who walks with a cane, the residue of a serious case of the bends she got while diving. When I allude to that illness, she asks me suspiciously, “How much do you know about me?” I tell her I read about it in John Waldman's book, and she is mollified.