Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (32 page)

In front of Carnegie Hall near the Russian Tea Room, there was a crazy man screaming his lungs out, something about “Man is an animal!”—in any case, not very interesting from the viewpoint of language or ideas. People were swerving away from him, but he was tyrannizing the whole street with his insane yelling. Finally I had had enough: I said, “Oh, shut up!” Straightaway he got a happy gleam in his eye. I made a beeline for the coffee shop across the street and sat down at a table, but he came in right after me, and in front of the cash register man and a dozen customers on stools, he began poking his finger at me. I realized now that he was much taller than I had thought. I started making the motion with my hand of patting the waves, the now-wait-a-minute-buddy-calm-down gesture.

“You want me on your back?” he yelled with satisfaction. “Huh? You want ME ON YOUR BACK, mister?!” I had to admit he had a point.

The truncated anecdote: so often this was what I brought home from my walks and tried to work up into something literary. I was squeezing the sidewalks for free entertainment. Often enough, they obliged. Urbanists are fond of comparing the streets of a metropolis to a theatrical set—a tricky metaphor and, by now, a tiresome one. The American theater being what it is today, the streets are probably a more reliable source of diversion. But what they give you, for the most part, are curtain-raisers.

I WALKED, I WALKED. In cold weather I appreciated the chestnut sellers, the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, the chalky elephant-gray lighting of Radio City and the RCA Building, and the way various towers around Midtown were suddenly competing to illuminate their crowns. In hot weather I became a connoisseur of halter tops and sidewalk book vendors.

After years of this peripatetic lyricism, the effect began to wear off. Alone, I'd walk the avenues annoyed, too indrawn to appreciate detail. At times the city bored me with its density, its celebrated this-that-and-the-other. But then, whenever it suited me, I'd fall into my walker-in-the-city act. With Kay, for instance, a woman who dated me, off and on, for years, obligingly playing my femme fatale: when she and I went for a walk, and she began dissecting her depressions, sometimes, to change the subject, I'd show off my famous affection for the streets, pointing out brickwork, mansards, gargoyles, quoins, lampposts attracting snow, cute dogs with curly tails, the asphalt rainbows after a summer storm. She'd say: “It's only when I'm seeing you that New York has that shimmer of enchantment. Because you love it so.”

There is about this walking (usually in the case of men, though not exclusively) an imperialistic vanity, as though you could possess a city by marking it with your shoe leather, side-by-side with a conviction of incurable solitude, that stems from early feelings of powerlessness: mind-locked, onanistic, boastful, defensive, and melancholy (as all flirtations with the infinite must be). Perhaps, like Whitman, I also walked looking for erotic adventure, and, though I never actually picked up anyone on these peregrinations, they were all undertaken under the sign of Venus. I was not looking to find romance itself, so much as to be invaded by sharp glimpses of heart-stopping beauty, to take back with me and muse over in my rooms. It seemed to me that with so many of the women I passed, I could achieve happiness. While my actual bachelor experiences ought to have chastened this naïveté, I never succeeded in rooting out the utopian dream of finding my soulmate, or at least her fleeting paradigm, in the street.

Then I fell in love in my late forties, and remarried. At first I wondered, since the aesthetic response to beauty never dies, if the streets might pose a continuous challenge to my fidelity, mentally if not physically. Of course I still look at pretty women, sometimes longingly, but one main result of marriage has been that I find myself walking less. Manhattan, that mecca for singles, has become less purposefully fascinating, now that the hunt is over. Besides, I am expected at home.

These days, when I walk around Manhattan, often I don't really see the city: that is, I see it in a blur, taking in only what I need to navigate its
streets. At times I'll even perversely read a book as I walk, espying only as much of the streetscape as peripheral vision around the volume's borders will allow. I resent the pressure (which I've put on myself—nobody asked me to!) to find grace in the old lobbies and water towers, or piquancy in the physiognomies of my fellow citizens. Yes, New York is amazing, but must I always pay it homage? As a native son, don't I have the right to take it for granted? How often have I conned myself into being astonished by the Flatiron Building, making believe I was a tourist seeing it for the first time! No more. If New York is going to astonish me, it had better do so without my lifting a finger.

It still does, even if the astonishment is milder. In late May, I love to walk around Greenwich Village in the afternoon and see the three-o'clock sun on the façades of red-bricked, Federal-style townhouses. I think there's some mystery to the light at this time of year, but then I realize it's only that the trees are coming into bloom, and I'm seeing the light filtered through and softened by erose leaves, which cast delicate shadows against the building walls. Also, there's a perfect correspondence in scale: one tree, one townhouse. An equivalence, a relationship. By July, you are so used to the fullness of the trees that you don't notice the light anymore—you notice the heat. And of course in winter the sun is dimmer and the trees are bare. But there really is something miraculous about the sun-licked façades at that time of year. And your energy is higher, because it's fun to walk around in spring with a nip still in the air.

ONE WOULD LIKE TO THINK that fine-grained descriptions at street level, such as can only be provided by a walker's unhurried perspective, will be with us always. Still, I wonder if future writers will continue to walk around the city for the same inspiration. Such Whitmanesque Adamic naming seems passé—worn out partly by the very success of earlier peripatetic writers, who may have exhausted temporarily the impulse to catalog the street's biota.

“We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun…. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain still to discover the mysteries on the sidewalk billboards….” So wrote nineteen-year-old Ivan Chtcheglov in 1953, in a Situationist manifesto titled
Formulary for a New Urbanism.
Between 1953, when Chtcheglov wrote his beautiful whine, and today, the mood has changed: we are no longer bored in cities, because we can no longer take them for granted; we are afraid for them. Svetlana Boym put the matter succinctly in her book
The Future of Nostalgia:
“In the nineteenth century the nostalgic was an urban dweller who dreamed of escape from the city into the unspoiled landscape. At the end of the twentieth century the urban dweller feels that the city itself is an endangered landscape.”

The destructive impact of cars on the urban fabric has made pedestrianism almost counterintuitive. Today's
flâneurs
are mere shadows of their former selves. Today the very notion of a “walking city” begins to sound precious, or curated, like the specially set-aside pedestrian zones in Italian cities that bring people, mainly tourists, together in a fragile mausoleum of an old historical center (called “Downtown” in America) to practice the ancient ritual of walking. What if walking ceased to be a form of entertainment, and became a cultural duty, something “good for you”? Will all future literary meditations take place from behind the wheel? Or is there, as I still believe, an intrinsic, powerfully organic connection between walking and writing, pen and foot, that will survive all future suburbanization of city life?

I don't know: me, I continue to walk around, torn by the conflicting evidence, and writing down my confusions—which are perhaps more a perplexity about my place in the changing urban environment than about the city itself. We now understand, I would hope, that New York City is too big and complex to die; despite apocalyptic predictions in recent decades that New York was doomed, all that happened was that one of its earlier narratives wore out. For now, New York City is between mythologies. There are moments when it pierces you with its dramatic presence; then it fades, gives off an intermittent signal. Nowhere is the idea of New York more variable or inconsistent than on its waterfront, where the void left by the departure of industrial and maritime uses still awaits imaginative replenishment.

15 CAPTAIN KIDD AND PEARL STREET

I
AM WANDERING AROUND THE BASE OF MANHATTAN ISLAND, TRYING TO FIND
119-21
PEARL STREET, WHERE THE PIRATE WILLIAM KIDD LIVED WITH HIS WIFE AND DAUGHTER IN A house built by the previous owner, a Dutch New Yorker named Loockermans. This was desirable waterfront property at the time, as Pearl Street then lay at the foot of the East River, before landfill had extended the island. Loockermans had come over to New Netherlands as a cook's mate, and then gone into the trading business, from which he prospered, being a tight man with a guilder. He also married a widow who owned some property on Pearl Street, and acquired several more houses, including the one he died in, 119-21 Pearl, which was subsequently bought by the not-yet-infamous Captain Kidd.

In
The Iconography of Manhattan Island,
that remarkable, obsessive, labyrinthine work by Isaac N. Phelps-Stokes, a six-volume compendium of maps, prints, and known and obscure facts that took twelve years to compile, between 1913 and 1925, we read:

Valentine's statement in
Man. Com. Coun.
(1858), 515, that Capt. Kidd owned a lot, and built a house upon it, in Liberty St. (see Vol. IV, p. 392), is an error. It probably arose from the fact that there is a record of his buying a lot in Tienhoven St., and that this name, according to Post (
Old Streets,
46) was indiscriminately used for both the present Liberty and Pine Sts. According to the records of the Title Guarantee and Trust Co., Kidd bought land in Tienhoven (Pine) St., at the present Nos. 25, 27 and 29; but so far as known, he did not improve it. His home was undoubtedly on Pearl St., where he lived with his wife in the house built by Loockermans.—See Vol. II, p. 329, and L.M.R.K., III: 950.

It is interesting to note that Robt. W. Chambers, the novelist, who made thorough researches regarding the life of Capt. Kidd in New York before writing his recent historical novel, “The Man They Hanged,” says in answer to inquiry: “This legend of Kidd's house on Liberty St. crops up every few years. I am convinced that it has no foundation, and that the land in question was on the present Pine St. I know of no evidence to show that he built there.”

So get it out of your head that Captain Kidd lived on Liberty. The man lived on Pearl Street, nowhere else.

But where on Pearl? In our day, the street commences across from Battery Park and State Street; I enter it there, conscientiously, determined to explore every inch and grasp its innate piratical soul. Around me is a phalanx of glass towers, with none of the step-backed grace or marbled dignity of the old skyscrapers that formerly constituted your exhilarating, first-glimpse-from-the-ferry skyline of Manhattan. The Broad Financial Center, built in 1986 by Fox & Fowle, is a sort of in-your-face-but-don't-look-at-me black hole stopping thought: curtain wall, indeed. At street level are a few franchise amenities, Starbucks Coffee, Au Bon Pain, Health and Racquet Club, which could be anywhere, like downtown Minneapolis.

Before embarking on this quest to find the site of Captain Kidd's old
house, I had asked the librarian in the Maps Division of the New York Public Library, who knows his stuff, how I could be sure the present property designated 119-21 Pearl Street bore any relation to the seventeenth-century address, and if not, how I could find out exactly where the 1695 property was presently located, and he told me, “Trust your instincts,” which was tantamount to getting rid of me. He did show me a few maps from 1695 and a staff member's handwritten research notes on the changing designations and demarcations of the old streets; from these sources I gleaned that the Pearl Street of Kidd's time had extended from Broadway to Broad Street, after which it changed its name and became Dock Street, then, a bit farther north, altered its name again to Queen Street. In 1725, all three appellations were consolidated into the one, Pearl Street, which currently extends all the way into Chinatown, culminating in the courthouses of Centre Street.

Back to William Kidd. His trade was that of sea captain and, only secondarily, pirate. Besides, in those days, many ships crossed the thin line between commercial, exploratory, and privateering activities. Sir Francis Drake, knighted in his day by Queen Elizabeth, had been a pirate as well as a navigator. There was such a thing as “officially sanctioned piracy,” in which private merchants and governments subsidized buccaneering ventures, splitting the booty with their captains. Kidd had been a sometime pirate in the West Indies, though not quite industrious enough for his cutthroat crew, who ran away with his ship. Giving chase, he tracked them to New York, then a haven for pirates.