Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (46 page)

One reason the cove feels sequestered and cozy is that there is not excessive distraction from the highway, which is raised above ground at this point. Another reason is that the old Marine and Aviation Pier, at the northern end, nests the cove with a crescent-shaped, visually delimited space. A winding serpentine wall does a good job of dividing bike path from esplanade, gives the park a more natural, wavelike flow, and increases your sense of event as you walk the length of the park. Elegantly spare wooden chairs with perforated stainless-steel backs, three to a table, are placed at strategic viewing spots before the river, ready for an impromptu picnic, gin rummy game, or sunset meditation.

Farther inland, several open shelters, made of Alaskan cedar, have been strategically placed to separate the park visually from the highway. This clever, award-winning design is the work of Johanson and Walcavage, the plantings by Ila di Pasquale. Eventually the park simply stops, where the
project's budget gave out, and becomes a blacktop lot, from East 21st to East 23rd Streets. Plans are under way to erect here an environmental education center, with classrooms designed in accord with the latest sustainable-architecture principles by a leading “green” architect, Colin Cathcart. The center will sport a light pavilion look, meant to blur the lines between building, water, and landscape. Photovoltaic panels will be installed to trap the sun's energy, and 100 percent of the power will be supplied by sun, water, and wind.

Stuyvesant Cove Park is the fruit of more than twenty years' stubborn struggle on the part of its community. Actually, the effort to build a park here goes back much longer, as Ann Buttenweiser notes in
Manhattan Water Bound:
“In 1835, the Common Council's Committee on Wharves, Piers and Slips touted the benefits ‘to health and ornament’ that sea and exercise would provide if the city were to reserve thirty acres at Stuyvesant Cove … for a park,” but the project was abandoned in favor of leasing the land to shipping.

In the 1970s, Community Board 6, concerned that it had the lowest per capita amount of public open space in the city, began to campaign for a park at the cove. In 1990 the community fought off a mega-development called Riverwalk that had been planned as a platform of luxury towers over the cove, and proposed instead a waterfront park. All the land along the cove's edge belonged to the Economic Development Corporation, which had to be persuaded to surrender its plans of adding to the city's tax coffers and accept a waterfront park. The EDC still envisioned installing a restaurant or shopping center to pay for the park's upkeep, but the community association implausibly persuaded the EDC to accept an environmental study center, funded by grants, which would invite local schools to participate, and use the cove as a learning laboratory, studying how to create a habitat for migratory birds and monarch butterflies.

The vision animating the park is so intensely ecological and “natural” that you need to take a step back to grasp just how wonderfully contrived it is, given what used to be on the site. I mean the huge construction dock of the Transit Mix Concrete Corporation, with its detachment of barges and cranes. Transit Mix was one of many concrete plants that dotted the waterfront. William Kornblum, now a CUNY sociology professor, recalls
in his genial book about sailing New York Harbor,
At Sea in the City,
what it was like when he held a summer job there in 1961:

The yard and the dock were among the most active ready mixed concrete supply sites in the city. Its silos for construction materials towered four or five stories over the East River Drive. The dock on either side was crowded with barges carrying mountains of sand or gravel or Lelite, a lighter composition aggregate for floors and other interior cement jobs. From this dock on the East River had come a great deal of the concrete for all that good housing along the river, as well as for innumerable commercial sites inside the island. The controversial Pan Am Building (later Met Life) was going up then, to destroy perhaps forever the beautiful expanse of Park Avenue and its silhouette of Grand Central and its lower-rise office building. We were pouring its concrete well into the overtime evenings.

Eventually all these concrete plants, considered unsightly and inappropriately industrial for the new waterfront, were removed. In fact, not a single concrete plant remains in Manhattan—as though its populace had lost sight of how much the island's prosperity rests on new construction, or had forgotten, perhaps, that concrete was usually necessary to said construction. Although the concrete industry has become more mobile, setting up temporary yards and dismantling them when a job is done, many construction sites still rely on the stuff being trucked in. Since wet cement has a transportation life of only sixty to ninety minutes before it over-hardens, many Manhattan construction sites suffer costly shutdowns when cement trucks, coming from the outer boroughs or beyond, are delayed in heavy traffic.

The Transit Mix Concrete Corporation having long since quit the scene, Stuyvesant Cove Park is certainly a miraculous improvement over the vacuum left there by its passing. I can remember visiting the area several years ago and seeing nothing but parked cars, garbage, and the occasional rat.

The Gulf filling station on East 23rd Street, still in operation, is a reminder of the cove's industrial past. The former Marine and Aviation Pier, its art deco lettering faded but visible against the roofed structure extending over the water, has been consigned to parking. Just north of it
is a narrow marina, taken up with charter yachts and gaudy showboats rented out for parties, such as the
Paddlewheel Queen,
which seem to have strayed a long way from the Mississippi.

Where the cove completes its parenthesis, and the shoreline juts out once again, there appears the Waterside residential complex, with the United Nations International School tucked into its southern end. It would be nice to follow the river at this point, but the UN School has blocked off all public access for security reasons. The school itself is a graceless, precast-concrete ocher block with a round blue UNIS logo pinned on like a breastplate, which is scarcely enticing enough to merit challenging its off-limits demeanor. If you want to reach Waterside's (theoretically) fine open public space along the waterfront, which is usually closed for repairs, there is no way to cross through at ground level; the gate for that purpose is almost always closed, so you have to take an interminable escalator up, cross the barren, windswept plaza, and then follow a set of stairs down again to the river. By that time you will have been surveilled by any number of security guards, cameras, and wary residents.

Most waterfront housing in Manhattan is built on the inland side of the highway, but Waterside rises on the river side, making it the exception. Built in the early 1970s, the 1,470 units of what were originally subsidized middle-income housing were designed by Davis, Brody & Associates, using the firm's signature Cubist, cut-diamond profile. I always get a guilty feeling when I come upon Waterside; I want to like it more than I do. Its spartan brown towers loom up impressively, the tops of them protruding like giant periscopes, and if modern buildings were judged only as sculpture, they would be entirely satisfying. They have rigor and intelligence and formal consistency. But they are not friendly. Especially at the ground level, the severity of their unvaried, dark brown brick façade is off-putting. Nor can you penetrate them from the ground in any way, the lower floors being all used for garages.

The upper platform is one of those grim, windswept, empty expanses that make you yearn for the lost art of plaza making. A semi-deserted supermarket, restaurant, dry cleaner, liquor shop, card store, hair salon, and ATM together put forth a forlorn attempt at neighborhood retail. Children play ball or ride their scooters on the bleak plaza, imperviously resourceful,
as always. A few of the towers seem to stand on stilts, like Le Corbusier's
pilotis,
providing remarkable views through their hollowed-out bases.

Waterside puts me in mind of the Castel Sant'Angelo, the harsh Roman fortress on the Tiber. It feels cut off from the city. The ground level is all garage, and you can't cross the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive unless you're suicidal, so the only way of crossing the road on foot is to take an overpass. On the other hand, there are buses and taxis right outside the door; and not every part of the city has to be in the thick of things.

Waterside represents an experimental model of the sort of housing complex that once threatened or promised (depending on your point of view) to cantilever over New York's waterways. Above and beyond the issue of turning over the river's edge to high-rise housing, there are certain cautionary lessons to be derived from Waterside: its façades and foundations have suffered extensive leaks from water damage, which have proven very costly to repair. The owner, Richard Ravitch, naturally wanted to raise rents substantially to pay for repairs and the tenants, whose reasonable rents had been protected by state Mitchell-Lama subsidies, were up in arms about this prospect. In the end, a deal was brokered to limit rent increases, in exchange for a multimillion-dollar tax break extended by the city to the owner. And the Mitchell-Lama tenant subsidies went out with the tide.

NORTH OF WATERSIDE, access to the river turns even dicier. You cross the ever-darkened street beneath the FDR Drive and walk along the inland side, past Bellevue Hospital Center, famous for its psychiatric unit (“Bellevue,” once synonymous with the place they sent you when you went nuts), past NYU Medical Center, past the Water Club, a pleasantly retro, upscale restaurant masquerading as a barge, and one of the rare opportunities to have a drink and enjoy the view along the river side of the East River. A bit farther north is the 34th Street Heliport, where those in a hurry can catch a chopper to the airport or the Hamptons, and where, each night, hungry men line up to receive a free meal from the Coalition for the Homeless volunteers.

I witnessed one such meal run on a hot Sunday evening in June; the temperature had reached 93 degrees earlier in the day. The van, one of two
that started off at 6:45 P
.
M
.
from the side entrance of St. Bartholomew's Church on East 51st Street, held more than three hundred meals as well as three regulars and myself. The driver and leader, Bill Dean, was a very tall, bald lawyer in his mid-sixties who showed up in the sweltering heat wearing a blue blazer, a straw hat, and a tie, looking as though he had just stepped out of a Louis Auchincloss novel. Coincidentally, I knew Dean from another life, when he had coaxed me into organizing a reading series at the New York Society Library. An avid fan of Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” which he presses on everyone, he is one of those quintessentially do-gooder New Yorkers in the best possible sense: he has been distributing meals to the hungry for thirteen years. The other two, also long-term volunteers but more casually dressed, were Stefan, an Austrian-born graphic designer, and Al, a gruff-voiced man with a goatee who worked for a telecommunications company. As we drove to our first stop, the talk was mostly World Cup soccer and gossip about women volunteers.

The van pulled up under the highway ramp beside the heliport (farther upriver loomed the United Nations Secretariat building, catching the end of a sunset); and about thirty men, who had been waiting patiently for us, began to form a single line. An estimated two-thirds of them came from the Bellevue Men's Shelter, a few blocks away; the rest lived “outside.” I asked if the men at the shelter did not receive meals there, and was told that they probably did, but were still hungry. Because the weather was so hot and the uptown kitchen, where Coalition for the Homeless meals were prepared, is not air-conditioned, the kitchen staff had decided to go with sandwiches. We handed each person in the line the wax-paper-wrapped sandwich (beef bologna and cheese), an orange, and a small milk carton. One man, a beer-barreled, grizzled oldster, grumbled first that it was only a sandwich and not a cooked meal, and second that he couldn't get two sandwiches. “We've a lot of stops to make tonight,” explained Dean, “so only one per person.”

“Hey,” the oldster said, “if I'm gonna get fucked, I wanna be kissed, too.”

He was the only ingrate. The other men, drawn from every race, were uniformly polite, often muttering words of gratitude. I was struck by how clean, presentable, and “normal” (i.e., fit and work-ready) most of them looked. Some attempted to lighten the embarrassment by banter. “Do you have any condiments?” said a Hispanic man with a pencil mustache, and
we gave him a packet of hot dog mustard. “May I trade this in for some Grey Poupon?” he joked.

OUR NEXT STOP WAS CHINATOWN, at the parking lot in front of the Criminal Court Building on Centre Street. There, a much larger group had assembled in two lines, male and female. The distaff line consisted of Chinese grannies, interested in collecting the bargain of free food. The men, however, looked gaunt and beaten down. One black man gestured angrily at the elderly Chinese women and said, “Hey, give me two sandwiches! I'm
really
homeless, not like them over there.” Stefan would occasionally slip the requester another sandwich.

At the third stop, in front of the Battery's Staten Island Ferry Terminal, the group awaiting the Coalition's van looked much more down and out: hair matted, clothes dirty, expressions addled. Many slept in the park, some camped out in the ferry terminal, others hid in doorways of the Financial District. Here the rule of one food item per customer went by the boards, and we handed out as many sandwiches or milk cartons (for some reason, oranges were disdained by this crowd) as requested. Those who could not bring themselves to ask for two at a time lined up patiently again for seconds or thirds. Among these was a young woman of movie-star beauty, with an angelic smile—I assume she was a crack addict, though I might have been completely wrong. Next, boxes of clothing were distributed. A slight, nervous man, dodging around the edges, blurted, “I'm living outside. Can you give me two shirts?”