Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (44 page)

I like to start at the very tip of Red Hook, where the magnificent Van Brunt's and Beard Street Stores, arched brick warehouses from 1869, line both sides of the street heading to the water. (In appearance, they're cousins to the Empire Stores, near the Brooklyn Bridge, also built in the post–Civil War era—if anything, more impressive.) The windows of the Van Brunt Stores buildings on the eastern side are mostly boarded up and look possibly derelict, though a sign informs you of their hours of operation. It's a curious thing about old warehouses that even when they're still functioning, they often look abandoned, their mute, underfenestrated concrete or brick façades giving no clue either way. Across the way, at Beard Street, the very same brick façades have been spiffed up and rented out to a variety of businesses, including a woodworking shop and a film sound stage. If you keep on past the warehouses you come to a little public space, a lip of park at the water's edge across the harbor from Liberty Island, that lets you look the Statue of Liberty straight in the eye. For once, you are facing her head-on.

Nearer to shore, there's an odd, crescent-shaped breakwater, the Erie Basin, ugly with parked cars impounded by the police department, though how they drove onto it is a mystery, since from this angle the spit of land seems attached to nothing.

Going back along the Stores to a side street lined with trolley tracks, which bisects the endless warehouses, you will come upon a magical little inlet with police boats and other small craft docked on either side. By the way, somewhere in the Beard Street Stores is, or was, the Trolley Museum; on certain occasions the objects of its collection were wheeled out and set on these selfsame tracks. It makes me feel like Methuseleh to remember that I rode trolleys as a boy, growing up in Brooklyn, and now they are trotted out as exotica, like barouches. There is also, moored nearby, something called the Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge, painted a deep brick red, open on weekends and rentable for children's parties; it was transported to Red Hook to show twenty-first-century Brooklynites what nineteenth-century barges were like. Verging toward a melancholy realization that everything may someday end up entombed in its own curatorial institution (the Museum of Dental Floss, the Museum of Mid-List Writers), I am distracted from it by the happier thought that the vista before me is remarkably untrammeled. One is privileged to see the little canal, the fishing boats, the warehouses, all as it must have been forever, or at least the past hundred years. The factories and warehouses on the canal have that brilliantly additive, piece-by-piece, higgledy-piggledy look of tropical green stucco alongside corrugated aluminum that Frank Gehry works so hard to achieve.

You can also look out, a block away, toward a most remarkable wreck of factory transformed into melted cheese. This was a suite of buildings connected by chutes, owned by the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, which had been an immensely profitable enterprise for importing and refining much of the sugar in North America. After his regime collapsed, the whole complex caught fire—some suspect arson, though the watchman assured me the conflagration was started by machinery—leaving the beams and floor structure irretrievably dripping, pendulous, like a modernist sculpture on an apocalyptic theme.

Sometimes I think I can only relax in a site that has not been specifically earmarked for leisure, but where there is still some commercial or
industrial activity, or the ghost of same, to contemplate: docks or factories or the like. At least that's my preference. Surrounded by the intermingling currents of river and ocean estuary crisscrossed by tugs and barges, you get an unobstructed view of the Statue of Liberty to your left, the brick officers' quarters of Governor's Island to your right, while across the harbor are the cranes and forklifts of Port Jersey and, beyond this, Newark and Elizabeth, New Jersey, where most of the Port of New York ended up. Just beyond the steel jetty, a bit to the south, you can see that mixture of rotting timbers, tall grass, jagged rocks, and wharfside warehouses which constituted the 1970s–1980s New York waterfront, after it had been given up as a port but before it had begun to be “rehabilitated.”

If you go along Beard Street, you pass a walled-in shipyard, with a dry-dock of skilled Greeks still repairing the bottoms of boats, though now they grumble about the lack of work. (Newport News gets most of the ship-repair business these days.) An Argentine freighter, abandoned by its bankrupt owner, rusts in the harbor, waiting patiently to be rescued by some adventurous entrepreneurs. In this very same shipyard, some years back, a damaged freighter was stashed for six months by its owner, while he tried to raise the money to pay for repairs. Its Central American crew, most of whom spoke no English, was afraid to venture out past the gamy Red Hook projects into the city; and since the owner had stopped paying them, though he still brought them food, they had essentially become slaves pinioned to the ship. (This episode formed the subject of Francisco Goldman's fine novel
The Ordinary Seaman.
) Nowadays they would merely have to venture a few blocks inland and they would come across a soccer park used heavily by Central Americans, with some of the best weekend street food to be had in New York City.

Now back to the Manhattan waterfront.

DISTINCT FROM OTHER GREAT CITIES of the world, Manhattan is almost pathologically averse to letting you wander to the river's edge and get close enough to touch the water. It has erected a prophylactic wall of fences and other physical barriers that overprotectively stave off potential accidents, intentional harm, and, most of all, liability suits. It was not always thus. A sampling of one year's city coroner reports in the early nine
teenth century bears out how frequently and casually Death visited the waterfront:

A
CKERMAN,
C
ORNELIUS
—suicide by drowning, b. New York, age 29 (6 Feb. 1826)

A
CKERMAN,
D
UKE
—drowning while going on board sloop
Lowell
(27 Oct. 1835)

BAPTIST, ISAAC—drowning when he fell from the wharf (21 Aug. 1836)

BARCELO, JAMES—suffocation from charcoal fumes on board the brig
Merced,
b. Spain, Age
c.
33 (6 Feb. 1826)

BERRY, NELSON—hemmorhage of the lungs, b. on the ocean, a rigger by occupation, a sailor all his life, age 35. He has been married to his wife Sarah for 7 years. He has no children. (26 Aug. 1839)

BIRRCKENBECK, BENJAMIN—fall from the gangway of ship
Panthea,
age
c.
45 (10 Mar. 1841)

BOISE, JACOB—blowing up of flagship
Fulton
at the Navy Yard (4 June 1829)

BUNDY, EDWARD (colored)—accidentally knocked from main deck to the lower hold of the ship
Silver de Grace
by a tierce of rice (12 Jan. 1836)

A simple notation of “drowning” was as frequently entered as any explanation for decease. Wrote Kenneth Scott, in his Introduction to
Coroners' Reports, New York City, 1823-1842:
“Inasmuch as New York was a port, drowning was an extremely common form of death. Many, especially when intoxicated, lost their lives when trying to board a vessel or go ashore.” Alcohol blurred the line between accidental and intentional self-destruction. Perhaps it was this pattern of “border crossings” that eventually led the municipal authorities to place the river's edge off limits to its citizens.

There is a scene in Chaplin's
City Lights
(1931) that makes you realize the degree to which access to the water's edge means, in part, the freedom to commit suicide. On a simple river-walk, below a bridge or elevated promenade, a soused millionaire is getting ready to drown himself with a rope and a heavy stone. Charlie the Tramp waddles blithely down the staircase attached to the bridge and takes up a river-walk bench for the
night, when he notices the would-be suicide's preparations. He tries to convince the man that life is worth living (“Tomorrow the birds will sing”), in the process entangling himself with the rope and the wealthy, self-destructive sot, so that both keep landing in the drink and having to pull themselves out. A fine bit of physical comedy—but what strikes me is how easy it was in yesterday's cities to do away with oneself by drowning.

A century ago, “the river” had a fateful ring. It connoted suicide, especially for destitute women or prostitutes overtaken by despair. Such women were often said to end up “in the river.” Beyond the actual incidence of such tragedies, the realist school had a penchant for drowning denouements, a residual romanticism that popped up in “fallen women” narratives worldwide, from Vienna to Tokyo, around the turn of the twentieth century: the victim of social forces was shown poised on the bridge, ready to jump.

In Stephen Crane's
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
(1893), the author describes the moments preceding his heroine's death through the invocation of ominous waterfront imagery: “The girl went into the gloomy districts near the river, where the tall black factories shut in the street and only occasional broad beams of light fell across the pavements from saloons…. When almost to the river the girl saw a great figure. On going forward she perceived it to be a huge fat man in torn and greasy garments. His grey hair straggled down over his forehead. His small, bleared eyes, sparkling from amidst great rolls of red fat, swept eagerly over the girl's upturned face…. Chuckling and leering, he followed the girl of the crimson legions. At their feet the river appeared a deathly black hue.”

The customers as well would sometimes end underwater. James McCabe, nineteenth-century chronicler of New York's secrets, wrote of men enticed by “prostitutes, connected with professional thieves and assassins…. More than one has found his grave in the Hudson, dragged there in the darkness of the night, after being drugged by poisonous liquors and robbed of his valuables.”

The river was also the repository of another sad human cargo. In 1858 a committee established to investigate the treatment of abandoned children reported that “our own Hudson and the East River carry with them to the Atlantic, with the returning tide, the dead bodies of infants cast out by unfeeling mothers.”

That New York rivers continue to serve as a mortuary for suicides and homicides may be seen by the bodies fished out each year, around mid-April, by the harbor police, during what has come to be called “Floaters Week.” But the river is no longer morbidly connected in the public's mind with the fate of fallen women—not because streetwalkers' lives have so improved, but because narrative tropes exhaust themselves.

CORLEARS HOOK IS A RIVERFRONT AREA on the Lower East Side, near Gouveneur Hospital and below Grand Street. From 1820 to 1850, it had the distinction of being one of three main concentrations of commercial sex in New York. Some even claim Corlears Hook was responsible for the term “hookers” as a synonym for prostitutes, though this may be carrying local pride too far.

On that same Saturday night in early September, I visit Corlears Hook, now a public park bisected by the FDR Drive. On the inland side is a playground with basketball hoops, toddlers' climbing equipment, and tree-lined paths. I cross a highway overpass to get to the river side, where a grassy lawn, on which several black families have set up their own picnic tables and are barbecuing chicken and steaks, slopes down to the water. I feel the heat from their flaming grill carried uphill in a warm night wind. The smell of lighter fluid mixes with the brackish river. The grass is littered with plastic cups. There are no signs of prostitutes or vice; the park has expunged all that. It is a peaceable community scene, but something still tells me it is private. I wander over to a ruined, abandoned amphitheater, marked extensively with graffiti. The amphitheater seats appear to be in still-usable condition, but the roof is a mess, hole-ridden and parts dangling. I wonder when the city will get around to repairing it. It waited so long to fix the Goldman Concert Shell in Central Park that there was no saving it.

On one side of the Corlears Hook Amphitheater stage, I come upon a sign that says:

Waiting for Godot

Aug 9-16    FREE

7:30 pm

Now I don't know what to think. Is the trashed-out condition of the band shell merely a set design, or has some guerrilla theater troupe, bringing classics to inner-city neighborhoods, decided to make witty use of the dilapidated stage for its Beckett production? Farther north begin the playing fields of the East River Park. This generous amenity along the waterfront, with softball fields and tennis courts, extends from Corlears Hook all the way up from the Lower East Side to the East Village. Unfortunately, this part of the waterfront promenade is currently fenced off to the public, because of damage done by marine borers to the seawall, which will cost an estimated $30 million to repair.

On the ballfield, a man and a boy (I presume father and son) are kicking a soccer ball. The bank of lights are on, as though in preparation for a night game, but no one is using the facility except for this one man and boy, and I'm not sure how they even got into the playing area, given the fact that it's so fenced off. Then why are the stadium lights on? Are they turned on automatically, at a certain hour? Walking out of the park, past a lone wino glued to his bench, toward Henry Street, a creepy feeling overcomes me: alone at night, expecting to have come upon a festive atmosphere, and instead finding very few people outside.

I go back to my house to read up on the East River Park. It seems to have been part of Robert Moses' visionary attempt at waterfront improvement, in tandem with building perimeter highways in the late 1930s, shortly after his enlargement of Riverside Park on the West Side. According to the authors of
New York 1930
, Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, and Thomas Mellins, “Corlear's Hook Park on the Lower East Side was nearly doubled in size through landfill, from 8.6 to 15.5 acres, and constituted the southern section of a fifty-three-acre East River Park. The main portion of the enlarged park ran between the highway and the East River, extending south from the Williamsburg Bridge to Jackson Street and north to Tenth Street, and was accessible via a footbridge at the park's southern end near the Vladeck Houses, a public housing project of 1940. Redesigned by the Park Department, Corlear's Hook Park included sports facilities, playgrounds, a waterfront promenade, an outdoor concert area with a capacity for 2,000 spectators, and tree-shaded lawns intended to serve, as Francis Cormier, a landscape architect for the Park Department, put it, as ‘gossip centers.’ ”