Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (60 page)

So much for predictions. Today, dwarfed by bigger, more modern bridges on both sides of it, the High Bridge looks somewhat dinky and hybrid; many of its supporting arched masonry piers were removed in 1923 (because they blocked navigation), and replaced by a central steel span, which cost it much of its historical charm. It is still the only original aqueduct structure left in Manhattan, and the oldest remaining bridge linking Manhattan to the mainland. Regrettably, its fine pedestrian walkway has been closed for decades. Actually, it was reopened for a brief spell several years ago, and then almost immediately shut down—officially for “structural repairs,” though the real reason was that someone had dropped a brick from it onto a passing Circle Line boat. This is how temporary decisions evolve into permanent ones in municipal government. Were I put in charge, I would open the bridge to strollers for three hours each Sunday,
as a start, and hire a guard, or else erect side-fences tall enough to prevent the launching of projectiles.

*
Koeppel quotes the skeptical response of one of the engineers, Fayette Tower, in a letter to his younger brother: the low bridge presented “decided advantages of economy and utility—yet the citizens of N.Y. have suffered the load of some 8 or 10 millions for construction of the Aqueduct to be increased by the addition of half a million just for Architectural beauty in a place where there is little necessity for it.”

At the Manhattan end of the High Bridge stands the Highbridge Water Tower, a 200-foot-high landmark that can be seen for miles. This octagonal, gracefully tapering structure with slender slit windows looks almost like a medieval campanile. It was built in 1866-72, shortly after the Civil War, and was designed by John B. Jervis, the same chief engineer of the Croton Water System who supervised the construction of the High Bridge. The water tower's purpose was to increase hydraulic pressure by employing two pipes, one thinner than the other, and capitalizing on the effects of gravity; a pumping station and a reservoir, which held 11 million gallons of water, crouched next to the tower. (After the city replaced the Croton water system, Robert Moses transformed this reservoir into a public swimming pool, still in popular use.) At the height of its operation, the water tower helped move 80 million gallons of water a day into Manhattan. Now it sits idle, like the minaret of some forgotten religion.

Though originally constructed for practical purposes, not public visits, it was so well built, inside and out, that it has since been restored and given landmark status. I have been inside it, during the one day a year when the public is invited. The Urban Park Rangers give an annual tour, for which I signed up. Most of the tour-takers seemed ancient (is this how I will spend my retirement years?); but there were a few younger couples and some college-age, athletic-looking single guys, who charged to the front of the ascent. You took a spiral staircase, beautiful cast-iron steps with diamond-shaped dropouts; the landings had spare, wood-planked floors; the walls in the tower were solid granite; the views phenomenal. On one landing I paused to catch my breath, and heard an old man climbing the steps sigh to his wife, “I forgot to take my pill.”

When I got to the top, a tense man with a serious-looking camera shooed me aside, saying apologetically, “I don't like people in my pictures.” I wandered over to the Urban Park Ranger, who was explaining that the water tank that used to be at the top had been vandalized and burned. But that fire was a good thing, maybe, he said, because it paved the way for a complete restoration. I thought it grand, too, that the city had polished the water tower's interior to jeweled perfection, but strange that it should have spent so much money on a facility almost never open to the public.

IN ORDER TO MAKE SENSE of Highbridge Park, I decided I needed to ask the New York Restoration Project for its perspective on the park, and the whole North Manhattan waterfront. Fortunately, I had an inside contact: the NYRP's assistant director, Amy Gavaras, was an old acquaintance of mine.

I meet Amy at Starbucks on Second Avenue and Ninth: her boss, Joseph Pupello, is parked in his SUV outside, ready to start the tour. When I step into the car he is on the phone to his little boy, about one year old, and his mother, who is baby-sitting. He rolls his eyes impatiently and long-suffering at his mother's conversation, trying to get off the phone so he can say hello to me. Finally he does, shaking my hand and explaining, “It's the first time my mom has had the kid overnight. She knows what to do, she's raised half a dozen children, but she's a little—you know, she had to have both hips replaced—”

“Frail?” I offer.

“No, she's not
frail.
You should see my mother!” he says. An intense ex-dancer-choreographer, now obsessed with gardens and parks, he works for Bette Midler, who started the New York Restoration Project with her own money; so he's either caught Bette's brassy, campy, putdown style, or has always possessed it. He has a bit of the standup comic in him, including the mournful downside between jokes.

I ask him about the NYRP. He starts in with his corporate rap. “Our purpose is to make the private sector feel comfortable, to give them a ‘scenario’ for a site that they can see themselves fitting into.”

“Plus, we have to make the public sector feel comfortable, too,” Amy reminds him from the backseat.

“Yeah, like we want to be partners with government. This means having to change the way government operates, because they don't know how to be partners. As soon as they see someone's interested in a problem, they retreat, they get very passive. And with the community, we want to offer ourselves as a long-term partner. They keep thinking we're going to go away. We're not going to go away. That's why we say, ‘Give us a contract. Then you know we'll do what we say we will.’ ” He's already aggravated and bored thinking about it, talking this nonprofit-brochure lingo.

We're off to Highbridge Park. I tell him my initial impressions from recent explorations: “That park has a schizoid nature, one part of it is wilder than any other park in Manhattan, less landscaped, closer to its aboriginal form, maybe—”

“But you gotta understand that most of the vegetation is invasive species. Japanese knotweed, ailanthus, all those weeds.”

“Right. Anyway, one part is wild, the other part is anchoring this transportation node, all these columns from highway ramps in the middle of the park.”

“Yeah.” He gets it immediately. “That Mayan ruin thing. Like there had been a civilization and then nature had overrun it.”

“One of Robert Moses' engineers said that they'd turned the area into the biggest bowl of concrete spaghetti he'd ever seen,” Amy contributes.

“We call Highbridge Park Robert Moses' roadkill,” says Pupello.

Moses and his engineers had to find a way to link up the Major Deegan Expressway and the Harlem River Drive and the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the new Alexander Hamilton Bridge and the old Washington Bridge and the Highbridge Aqueduct, by putting in “twenty-two separate ramps and eighteen separate viaduct structures,” reported Robert Caro in
The Power Broker,
all in an incredibly narrow, steep embankment. They had to fabricate individual slender concrete columns to make it fit; the result was a tour de force of engineering, but a heckuva strange use of park space. I am wondering to what degree Highbridge Park had been invaded with such a cat's cradle of infrastructure because its surrounding neighborhood was poor and politically powerless, and to what degree that construction was unavoidable or maybe even necessary. Is there a way to make the best of it—to celebrate this commingling of wild nature and concrete spaghetti?

“Highbridge Park is so complicated, such a mixture of problem and potential,” I say, breaking the silence. “You could spend your life on it.”

“Please,” he says sardonically. Not a happy thought.

We pass by an underpass, unremarkable-looking but tidy. “This used to be Tire Alley. We cleaned out 10,000 tires in there.” He tells me that the NYRP cleaned up every illegal garbage dump in northern Manhattan, on the east and west sides: an essential precondition to further improvements. I am sensing a mixture of pride and frustration in his voice, because much
of what his organization has accomplished remains invisible to the uninformed eye: to the degree it worked, it looks normal now.

He is driving slowly, very slowly north along the Harlem River Drive, inspecting the landscaping, the paint jobs, telling Amy to make a note of this or that. He is either incredibly picky or totally focused on house-keeping-type details. Rarely is he satisfied. Whenever he sees signs of other work crews he asks Amy, “Are those our people?” She'll say, “No, I think it's the DOT, they started repairing the outer fence last week.” Or, “That's DEP; they're supposed to have relandscaped that lower part when they went in and fixed the sewer.”

“They'd better,” he grumbles.

Now we arrive at his current pride and joy, Swindler's Cove. At Tenth Avenue and Dyckman (the equivalent of 200th Street), we drive past a newish public school, P.S. 5, which has red-frame windows and cheerful chromatic details. We pass, on the left, a fenced-in pond that Pupello says has been cleaned up only recently by the city, thanks to a community activist named Ted Bocacas, editor of a local handout paper named the
Uptown Dispatch,
who complained to the authorities that the garbage-laden Sherman Creek could become a breeding-ground for West Nile virus–carrying mosquitoes.

The driveway beside the school is clogged with teachers' cars parked on both sides of the narrow road, with just enough room for a vehicle to pass between. Pupello wants to clear up who has jurisdiction over this driveway, to make sure fire trucks can get back there in an emergency. Although it looks like school property, Pupello insists it's been mapped as an official street. If it's a street, then the Department of Transportation has responsibility for it; if not, then the Board of Education. Both agencies refuse to claim it at the moment.

At the end of the driveway is a chain-link fence, which stopped me the first time I began poking around there alone. This time, with the NYRP's assistance, I am ushered into the enchanted Swindler's Cove.
*
First you see a vegetable garden and a round tent like an inverted hogan. “There's God,” says Pupello, pointing to a gardener, serenely solitary, self
motivated, and self-sufficient in appearance, named Edwards Santos, who has been working for the NYRP for several years. Having begun as an intern, he has been given more and more responsibility, to the point that this garden and much of the adjoining land can be considered his baby. He also helps oversee the construction, by high school students, of rowing gigs (two of which are parked in the tent). The vegetable garden—zucchini, squash, peas, and onions—is largely the effort, overseen by Santos, of students from the adjoining public school and from a nearby junior high. Santos shows us a bunch of redbud trees he is about to plant, donated to the project from Chelsea Gardens.

*
This raffish-sounding name has nothing to do with past swashbuckling, smuggling activities in the area, but was the name of one of Bette Midler's employees, who died young.

Sloping away from the garden down to the water is what will someday soon, I think, be an amazing new wetlands park. It allows you to go right down to the riverbank: no promenades cantilevered above a highway, no highway to cross. I know of only a few spots in Manhattan, one at the farthermost end of Inwood Park, one in Fort Washington Park near the George Washington Bridge, and one in Riverside Park near Columbia, that have similar access to the water. Knowing how paranoid the city government usually is about accidents or suicide, I ask Joseph how he gets around that insurance problem.

“You can't be paralyzed by ‘liability fear,’ ” he says. “I don't see it as a problem. You're not going to stop people from killing themselves no matter what you do. They can jump off an esplanade. They can drown themselves in the bathtub.”

I agree. “You can't ‘protect’ people from the natural world.”

He points to an area near the balustrade where they plan to build a boathouse, which they will use to train high school students in rowing—especially young women, through a federal program called Title 9—who can then become champion rowers and get college scholarships. Pupello subscribes to the fait-accompli principle: establish facts on the ground. “First you figure out what service they need, then you develop it and offer it to them. Don't wait for them to approve it first. The Board of Education refused to let students row during school hours, for fear of accident, but they said the students could work on building the boats during the school day as vocational training. So we made the rowing an after-school activity.”

Pupello points out some egrets and cormorants that have settled at
the water's edge: proof that wildlife is returning. They are sunning themselves on pilings near the spartina grass, which was planted by the Department of Transportation as part of a million-dollar “mitigation” project. By law, in return for every square foot of landfill, the offending party is supposed to help mitigate the loss of natural wildlife by restoring another section of the waterfront to wetlands. Sometimes this wetlands mitigation process becomes a futile, expensive exercise in deflecting guilt; but here it seems to have worked beautifully. A family of mallards is already wallowing in the mud. As we walk along the newly “aboriginal” wetlands, Pupello indicates the concrete foundation where a boathouse stood, and the remains of a shuffleboard court. This lot used to be part of a functioning boating culture, like the marina directly across the island at Dyckman Street; now it will be turned into something wild.

Once we leave their fenced-in park, I am shown the two adjoining plots of Sherman's Creek. The first, padlocked, belongs to a boat club. I peek in and see some rusty hulls and a very decrepit boathouse close to disintegration, the ensemble looking basically like a junkyard. The edges of the creek are choked with garbage. The club members are mostly
goombah
old-timers who hang around the boatyard drinking beer. It's a seedy scene, but the city, which has been leasing to the boat club for forty years, is loath to kick out a taxpaying business that alone has shown interest in previously abandoned property.