Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (25 page)

“Driver, what stream is it?” I asked, well knowing
it was our lordly Hudson hardly flowing,
“It is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing,”
he said, “under the green-grown cliffs.”

Be still, heart! No one needs your passionate
Suffrage to select this glory,
this is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing
under the green-grown cliffs.

“Driver! Has this a peer in Europe or the East?”
“No no!” he said. Home! Home!
be quiet, heart! this is our lordly Hudson
and has no peer in Europe or the East,

this is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing
under the green-grown cliffs
and has no peer in Europe or the East.
Be quiet, heart! home! Home!

Communitas
, the wise, sane little primer on city planning that Paul Goodman wrote with his architect-brother, Percival, in 1960, is skeptical about many neatnik, utopian schemes for separating activities into zones, insisting instead that “urban beauty is a beauty of walking” and holding up for emulation the European piazza: “Squares are not avenues of motor or pedestrian traffic, but are places where people remain. Place of work and home are close at hand, but in the city square is what is still more inter-esting—the other people.” Nobly put. Still, so attached were the brothers Goodman to Manhattan's rivers that they had published a rather mad vision, anti-mixed-use, in
The New Republic
fifteen years earlier, and retrieved it as an appendix to
Communitas.

“A Master Plan for New York” proposed that business and industry be
concentrated into a continuous axis running up the central spine of Manhattan (even though this would mean filling in Central Park!), that the through avenues on either side of this axis should be removed and the land developed as park/residential neighborhoods, right down to the rivers, with the shores turned over to beaches for swimming, boating, and promenades. Arguing that there had always been something wrong about Manhattan's turning inward, instead of being encouraged “to open out toward the water,” they justified the conversion of the greater part of the island's twenty-nine-mile shoreline to sport and residence, by “recognizing that the riverfront in Manhattan proper has diminished in commercial importance and may now be put to another use.” I find it astonishing that these words were written in 1944; evidently some observers, even before the advent of containerization, had already intuited the Port of New York's decline, though it was still playing such a crucial role throughout World War II.

As for their proposal that New York's most beloved creation, Central Park, be totaled, the Goodmans blithely stated, “We should not for a moment venture to destroy this wonderful strategem of the central parks, were it not the case that more and more the river parks have proved their value….” Their love of Riverside Park inspired them to extend the model and turn New York upside-down. Of course much of what they proposed would have been folly, but it provided a template for the many schemes since then, some quite recent, designed to turn the shoreline of Manhattan into a playland of recreation and residence.

As soon as you get above the 79th Street marina you start becoming conscious of the undulating shoreline, which is one of the central beauties of the water's-edge experience. (In retrospect, you register it as an experience that had been denied you farther south, in Downtown and Midtown Manhattan's straight-ruled bulkhead edge.)

Today I am met in the park and shown around by an old friend in publishing, Ann, who overcame cancer a few years back—partly, she is convinced, by learning to cut back on stress and to be more peaceful inside herself. “I would come down to Riverside Park every day and do my cancer-cell meditations while watching the sunset.” To hear Ann talk, Riverside
Park saved her life. Her relationship with it has deepened since she acquired a dog, a little gray poodle named Augie. “The city changes when you have a dog,” said Ann. How? I (skeptic and cat owner) asked. “It becomes friendlier, for one thing,” she answered. Now when she takes Augie on his morning and afternoon walks, she has all sorts of instantaneous engagements with other dog owners, which help construe the park as a community. Some dog owners can be a pain, of course, but when she wants to break away she just blames it on Augie.

Her daily walks with Augie all tend to amble
through
the park's sloping woods and fields, which the dog prefers, though sometimes she takes the route along the water. Today, just to humor me, she accompanies me up the newly installed Cherry Walk. This paved path from about 105th to 125th Streets, painted with a middle stripe to separate walkers from joggers or bicyclists traveling in different directions, hugs the rocky shore. One of the few places along the island's edge you can get down to the water, formerly it was a weedy, flotsam-strewn area, with crushed milk cartons, cellophane wrappers, bottles, newspapers, discarded underwear from derelicts' encampments; but now it is—designed, the precise shades of gray road surface and lime-green stripe obviously much pondered over, and chosen for their tasteful restraint. It looks clean and intended to be walked, no longer an accidental residue of nature. By the waterside is a meadow with dandelions and London plane trees, boulders and riprap; Cherry Walk somehow gives better definition to this wild scrap of Hudson River School vista.

Ann leads me through the Bird Sanctuary (which I never thought in my college was anything more than scruffy woods), and we end up in the 105th Street Dog Run. The coy sign outside it reads dog run 105 ?cursus canis cv, to let us know we are near Columbia and Morningside Heights, the Acropolis of America. Ann tells me that in the morning there's a little cart with tea and coffee outside the dog run. At noon, the hired dog-walkers bring in fifteen dogs on leashes, and the locals stay away. The enclosed area is certainly pleasant-looking and well kept; the graveled ground, the wrought-iron fences, all bespeak an attention to aesthetic detail one rarely sees in dog runs. I am willing to go on record and say it is the nicest dog run in the city. (What do
I
know?) There is a small, enclosed run for Pekineses or puppies, so they won't be threatened by the
rowdier, bigger dogs. A man says to his Airedale, quite as if he were at a children's playground, “Come, sweetie. Let's go, Daddy's cold.”

I LEAVE ANN AND GO ON ALONE. There's handsome, gray Riverside Church in the distance, commanding the skyline for miles around like an ecclesiastical office tower. How Lewis Mumford hated what he regarded as its “fake Gothic,” stained-glass eclecticism when it first opened in 1930, calling it one of America's “dead colossi.” Now no one would think to see it as a betrayal of modernism. If a building stays in one place long enough, all its retrograde sins are forgiven, or better yet, forgotten.

The other major landmark adjacent to Riverside Park is Grant's Tomb, located at West 122nd Street and Riverside Drive. Talk about your dead colossi! This monument was once the destination spot for tourists and locals. Now it is mostly frequented by schoolkids, who listen tactfully to the National Park Service Ranger's rap, before going outside to play kickball on the wide plaza fronting the monument. What to make of the structure itself, that granite neoclassical wedding cake, with Doric columns and a raised rotunda? Once it symbolized respect and dignity; now, it's, well, a mausoleum. (It was in fact partly copied from the original mausoleum, Mausoleus's tomb at Halicarnassus, as well as Napoleon's tomb in the Invalides.) Inside, it's pleasantly cool, and severe and empty enough to impress, with “a scale that seems pitilessly Poe-like in its grandeur,” noted the poet David Shapiro. Beneath the dome are two polished black sarcophagi side by side, wherein repose the remains of General Ulysses Simpson Grant and his wife, Julia. (The old joke went: Who is buried in Grant's tomb?—No one, his body is in a raised sarcophagus. Har! Har!)

Placards inform us that the fund-raising campaign for the monument, organized by Richard T. Greener, the first black graduate of Harvard, attracted ninety thousand donors. On its opening day, April 27, 1897 (declared a full holiday by the State of New York), enormous crowds of a million-plus filled the streets! President McKinley officiated from the grandstand. Grant's Tomb remained near the top of America's most popular monuments until the end of World War I, by which time most Civil War veterans and their families had died out. During my lifetime, it lay
graffiti-marred for years, before it was lovingly restored, under the care of the National Parks Service.

What does it say about us as a people that a monument that once drew respectful millions now barely registers on the public's consciousness? Is it that Americans are amnesiac, or that our taste in monumental architecture has improved? Grant's reputation did go through a slide during the first half of the twentieth century, when he was seen as an alcoholic and an inept administrator; but now that a revisionist movement among historians would rank him higher as a general, chief executive, and memoirist, does that mean his tomb will receive more visitors? Unlikely. Perhaps it is not our taste in monuments so much as our notions about vistas and the sublime that have dramatically changed. A century ago, visitors, still under the influence of the Hudson River School of painting, wanted to look down on the city and the river from a detached height. The skyscraper negated the power of the landscaped overlook, by making it possible to glimpse the city from on high while still in the middle of it.

Finally, Grant's Tomb is “merely” a tomb, with no slide show, no video presentation, no educational outreach program, no temporary exhibits of Civil War gold. Outside the monument is a set of benches, mosaic-tiled and cheerful in a child-friendly, Miró-derivative manner, installed around the monument, to the chagrin of the Grant family. Their faux-naïve sweetness clashes with the chill neoclassicism of the tomb.

AT
125
TH STREET, Riverside Park terminates in a parking area whose grubbiness tells you immediately that you are leaving the realm of the privileged and designed, and entering the fringes of Harlem. There begins Manhattanville. To fathom this mysterious neighborhood to the north of Columbia and Riverside Park, I needed a guide; someone suggested I contact Eric Washington, the unofficial historian of Manhattanville. He agreed to meet me at 125th Street and Broadway, where the grandiose arch of the elevated train confronts the Golden Arches of Big Mac.

Eric turns out to be a gentle, cultivated black man of medium height, who makes his living as a freelance writer. After having been asked to prepare the landmark designation for St. Mary's Church, he became more and
more interested in Manhattanville's history, collecting old postcards and prints of the area (many appeared in his book
Manhattanville: Old Heart of West Harlem
), and now conducts walking tours of the neighborhood. Though he speaks knowledgeably about architecture and urbanism, he has no formal training in these areas, and describes himself modestly as a “neighborhood buff.” Where would local history be without such buffs?

For purposes of definition, he tells me, Manhattanville is the valley that extends north from 125th to 135th Street, and east from the Hudson River to St. Nicholas Avenue. But in its heyday, its name could refer to places below 125th Street (Morningside Heights as an entity did not yet exist) and north of 135th Street.

In 1609, Henry Hudson anchored the
Half Moon
near the inlet of future Manhattanville, and was met by four canoes of natives. A crew member, Robert Jouet, recorded in his journal that “we suffered none of them to come into our ship; they brought very great store of very good oysters aboard, which we bought for trifles.”

In September 1776, the area figured prominently in the Battle of Harlem Heights. George Washington, headquartered slightly north in the Roger Morris house (later the Stephen Jumel Mansion), was debating whether to quit New York. In view of the vastly superior numbers of British troops that General Howe seemed about to land there, and the Continental Army's inexperience, evacuation of the city was inevitable, but after the ignominious defeat on Long Island, Washington hoped to fight a campaign in Manhattan that would at least help season his raw troops. On the first day of skirmishes, in which the Continentals panicked and ran, “Washington promptly came down with two New England brigades to give them mettle and, galloping on his charger to the scene, endeavored to rally the men before they completely dispersed. In a moment of rage, he dashed his hat onto the ground and exclaimed, ‘Are these the men with whom I am to defend America!’ ” wrote Benson Bobrick in his history of the American Revolution,
Angel in the Whirlwind.
Somehow the New York garrison managed to escape up the island's west side. The next day, Washington planned to use the strategic advantage of the steep bluffs at Harlem Heights to stave off the British, and surround them in the low valley of Manhattanville, which was then called the Hollow Way.

As Bruce Bliven tells it in his vivid account
Battle for Manhattan:
“The
General [Washington] did not mean to risk an engagement with the full British force, whatever it was, nor to try to drive the British back toward their camp. But he thought he might be able to lure Leslie's confident light infantrymen a little further north, down from the high ground at Claremont into the Hollow Way, and then cut them off by sending a strong detachment around to the west, up the rocky Morningside Heights bluff, to the rear. Two separate, coordinated actions would be required: a feint in front of Claremont as if the Americans meant to rush up the hill, which would draw some of the British down into the valley, and simultaneously a stealthy encircling march around the left by a force which would be masked from the British by the terrain and the trees. It was among the most elementary of tactical schemes. On the other hand, it was more, in terms of control and synchronized action, than the Americans had yet pulled off.”

As it happened, it was bungled by a premature order to fire, ruining the surprise, and two American commanders, Knowlton and Leitch, were mortally wounded in the process. But the Continental troops recouped and, by the end of the day, had the British in retreat. Though the Battle of Harlem Heights proved inconsequential in terms of territory held, it was immensely important for lifting the troops' morale: it gave the Americans “the pleasure of seeing the backs of British uniforms,” and the knowledge that they could prevail against this enemy, if they were but stalwart enough.