Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (35 page)

NOT ALL THE ACTION near the docks was heterosexual. Hart Crane described, in his allusive manner, in the “Cutty Sark” section of
The Bridge,
picking up a tall sailor with a “shark tooth” on a chain, and a host of confused sea yarns. The Ohio-born Crane, who became a habitué of the New York waterfront, portrayed the city's edge in this poem as a site of amorous opportunity, quenched torches, and inevitable separation:

Outside a wharf truck nearly ran him down
—he lunged up Bowery way while the dawn
was putting the Statue of Liberty out—that
torch of hers you know—

I started walking home across the Bridge….

Michael Berube, in his book about homosexuals in the military,
Coming Out Under Fire,
wrote that a different “sexual folklore” about each branch of the service existed among gay civilians during World War II. “Generally they believed sailors to be the most available and marines the least. Sailors acquired this reputation because they were out at sea without women for long stretches of time, they were younger than men in the other branches and their tight uniforms looked boyish, revealing, and sexy …”

Those tight white uniforms were featured prominently in the postwar 1949 movie
On the Town.
But the New York awaiting the sailors in port for the day was a Technicolor-benign, tourist place—a far cry from von Sternberg's sinful docks. The MGM musical begins at 5:57 A
.
M. on the Brooklyn docks, with a romantic view of the New York skyline in the background. The pier, a white battleship moored next to it, is nearly empty, except for a yawning watchman making his early-morning rounds. Three minutes later, at 6 A
.
M., a whistle blows, and hundreds of sailors pour out of the ship as if shot from a cannon, ready to make the most of their shore leave in the big city. Our heroes, Gene Kelly, Jules Munshin,
and Frank Sinatra, leap about as they sing the wonders of New York, and, in the montage that follows, seem almost jeté-borne, careening from the Brooklyn Bridge to Wall Street, Chinatown, the Statue of Liberty, Washington Square, Grant's Tomb, Central Park, Rockefeller Center, on to Times Square. (This opening ten-minute “New York, New York” number was in fact the only part of the film shot on location; the rest was filmed on the Metro lot in Hollywood.)

Let us leave the U.S. enlisted sailor here, in this afterimage of frolicsome tourist enthusiasm and good fortune. With the closing of naval bases in the metropolitan region, the cute white uniforms of our sailors were seen less on the streets of New York, except for the annual Fleet Week or an occasional celebratory parade of ships.

But what about his brother, the merchant seaman? How is he faring these days? To get an idea, I went down to the Seamen's Church Institute on Water Street in the South Street Seaport. It is the oldest institution of its kind, having continuously served merchant seamen in New York from the mid-nineteenth century. Affiliated from the start with the Episcopal Church, the Seamen's Church Institute (SCI) helps seamen regardless of religion or nationality. For fifty-odd years, from 1913 on, it operated a seamen's residence and meeting-place out of a large Dutch Colonial building on 25 South Street, nicknamed “the Doghouse,” which became something of a landmark. With most of the shipping transferred to New Jersey, and with the newer ships spending less time in port, the institute realized it had less of a hotel function to perform. To stay close to its served population, it opened a large clubhouse, the Institutional Seafarers' Center, in Port Newark, New Jersey (the gender-neutral term “seafarers” has become preferable to “seamen,” more accurately reflecting the increasing presence of women employees—some 20 percent of the cruise-ship labor force, for instance). The SCI also had a new headquarters built for itself in Lower Manhattan. This shiny red building is discreetly contextual, designed by James Stewart Polshek and Partners to fit in with the older, Federal era, red-brick structures on Water Street, its tower alluding to a lighthouse and its roof to the deck of an ocean liner.

The new building has a chapel, a gallery exhibiting some of the institute's extensive collections, and a recreational wing; when I visited, I saw a half-dozen elderly seamen hanging out in a café, silently watching or pretending to watch television. But the bulk of the building is taken up with adminis
trative offices, devoted to SCI's educational programs in computer navigational skills, its training program for clergy to become port chaplains, and its Center for Seafarers' Rights, which protects mariners who encounter legal or labor problems, while lobbying for their improved well-being.

In his 1992 book
Trouble on Board: The Plight of International Seafarers,
Paul K. Chapman, a former SCI chaplain, analyzed some of the shipping industry's labor abuses. To keep wages depressed, it has increasingly employed a maritime workforce from the Third World, which is overwhelmingly Asian (the Philippines and China being the main suppliers), along with a growing number of seamen from Eastern Europe (the Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey). The workers, often coming from economically depressed areas, are reluctant to make complaints for fear of being blacklisted in the future. Very few Americans work on foreign-owned vessels today, because the pay scale is too low and because they are considered too demanding and are therefore passed over for employment. They
are
desirable as officers; even so, there is a worldwide shortage of trained maritime officers, now approaching crisis proportions.

Of the two kinds of vessels, cargo and cruise ships, the worst labor abuses have occurred in bulk cargo ships that fly under “flags of conve-nience”—that is, the owner of the ship may be of one nationality, but chooses to register the vessel with an obliging country such as Panama or Liberia, thereby enabling the owner to skip paying certain taxes and to dispense with certain inspections. As ships have become so labor-intensive and expensive (it costs at least $100 million to build a cargo ship, and more for a cruise liner), it is hard for any individual to own one, so that often the “owner” turns out to be a syndicate or corporation, dispersed over several nationalities; and when trouble occurs on board, it becomes exceedingly difficult to track down the owners, much less get them to take responsibility. The sorts of troubles Chapman encountered (the port chaplain not only ministers to seafarers' spiritual needs, but visits every ship in port, to ascertain if conditions on board are amiss) include officers beating mariners bloody; owners defrauding mariners of some or all of their wages; vessels being maintained so poorly that they keep breaking down and become unsafe; and crews being compelled to inhabit filthy, cramped quarters with stopped-up toilets, or to eat miserable slop, or to sleep on floors without bedding. Women employees often complain of sexual harassment.

Maritime unions, which might otherwise come to the workers' rescue, tend to be weak, especially in Third World countries; and united union action is hard to organize, when so many members are scattered over the seven seas. As for getting the nation under which the flag is registered to administer justice, that objective seems close to impossible. Chapman concludes: “There are no enforceable international standards of operation for the internal affairs of the ship. International practice does not impose any particular responsibility on the ship's flag state…. In effect, the internal management of the ship is no longer controlled by a sovereign state but a sovereign shipowner.” In this laissez-faire maritime climate, is it any wonder that piracy is making a comeback?

Beyond flagrant rights violations, seafarers routinely suffer the more subtle stresses of boredom, physical constriction, lack of recreation (on cruise ships they are forbidden to mingle with the passengers, or to be seen in many areas of the ship), and long separation from their families. Even the luxury cruise, an expanding and highly profitable part of the shipping industry, often provides stingy living quarters and substandard fare for the crew. Finally, contemporary ships are more automated, employ smaller crews, and, time being money, stay for only the shortest periods in port. Hence the whole waterfront-district culture, with its boardinghouses, saloons, exotic pet shops, and opportunities for sin and redemption, has become a thing of the past. While this may not seem like much of a loss to some, it means the modern seafarer is basically trapped on board year-round, with scant opportunity for any release, carnivalesque or chaste.

You begin to wonder whether conditions have actually improved for the seafarer over the past 150 years, since Melville's first voyage, or whether these improvements are now in danger of getting rolled back. The good work of the Seamen's Church Institute continues, defending seafarers, for instance, against recent attempts by the industry to cut back traditional provisions for medical care. With ship tonnage worldwide predicted to double or treble, the quiet struggle of a seagoing, low-income workforce to maintain itself in the face of increasing technical skills requirements and cost-cutting managerial measures can only become more visible in the years to come. New York may once again have to take notice of the concerns of these peripatetic laborers who touch, however fleetingly, on its shores. In the larger scheme of things, they are not going away.

17 THE SOUTH STREET SEAPORT AND THE FULTON FISH MARKET

W
HENEVER I WALK AROUND THE SOUTH STREET SEAPORT, IT BOTH DEPRESSES AND BAFFLES ME. IN THIS DISPIRITING MALL
(
THE HISTORIC DISTRICT was “saved” by extracting every last ounce of its vitality, then injecting it with the formaldehyde of Ann Taylor, the Gap, and the other national franchise stores), the only authentic remnant of the old area is Carmine's, a decently garlicky Italian restaurant that you can still smell a block away. I go in and order a plate of spaghetti with garlic and oil and a Bass Ale. Fortified, I am ready to explore the new Seaport. I enter a stationer's, which is self-consciously done up like an old printer's shop, with antique
presses in back, ready for demonstrations, à la Colonial Williamsburg. The people behind the counter are so friendly, and business so slow, that I end up buying a scratchpad I don't need for three dollars, with a drawing of a galleon on the upper left-hand corner. Everything has nautical imagery: the note cards, stationery, pen sets. What a life, I think, to be stuck in such a contrived spot day after day; and yet the owner looks contented enough.

Outside, there are signs for the South Street Seaport Museum, and I do find a storefront gallery with an exhibit about steamship travel, but aside from that, the museum is one of those fata morganas of the waterfront. “We are a museum without walls,” Peter Neill, the museum's president, explains. I suppose its main collection consists of historic ships located on the nearby piers: the four-masted
Peking,
built in 1911; the
Wavertree,
a three-masted square-rigger from 1885; the steel-hulled
Ambrose Lightship,
built in 1908; and three working vessels—the schooners
Pioneer
and
Lettie G. Howard,
and the tugboat
W. O. Decker.
Still, when they say “museum” I keep expecting to find a regular edifice with serious, room-after-room exhibits. How old-fashioned of me.
*

As for the surroundings themselves, I am grateful that they did not tear down these Federal-style buildings when so little is left of the texture of old, early-nineteenth-century New York, and to have them as a connected ensemble is even more worth cherishing. And yet they seem mummified, so sandblasted and repointed and sign-cutesified are they. Is it a neighborhood? A theme park? An architectural cemetery? Part of the confusion comes from the lack of demarcation between the museum and the retail components. It is as though the museum were three-fourths gift shop. The dispersed, uncentered nature of the South Street Seaport Museum is disturbing: we are asked to see the old ships in the harbor, and the façades of the buildings, and the prints or photographs in the gallery, as all part of the “collection.” It won't do, unless we are to edit out the brew-and-burger joints, the Banana Republic boutiques, as also part of the collection. Yet the Seaport Museum continues to put out materials suggesting it is doing exactly what its mission meant it to do, making me feel that I am not get
ting some secret Masonic-type connection that is being confidently asserted. Perhaps the reason may be that the museum is run by seafaring buffs, for whom the sheer display of scrimshaw and schooners within sight of water is enough to arouse in their minds the synthesizing romance of the Old Port. Whether they have communicated to the lay public their arcane passion is questionable, but perhaps it is because we are unsure what standard we are asked to bring to this “museum.” Surely not aesthetics, as we might at an art museum: the scrimshaw displayed is not the best example of any folk artist, nor it is asserted to be. Historical resonance? But how can we grasp the history of a place so full of animated, jumbled sensation as the old working port, in an atmosphere so stripped of any pulse? How can New York, having strangled to death its port (whatever the valid reasons for doing so), turn around and ask us to celebrate that once-mighty engine of commerce, in the most sterile and manicured of surroundings, frequented mostly by tourists?