The Bottom of the Harbor (19 page)

Close to shore are some barges that are still being used. They are drawn up in a straggly row, facing the shore, and narrow, zigzaggy footwalks built on piles made of drift lumber go out to them. These are second-hand railroad barges. They were once owned by the Pennsylvania, the Erie, the New York Central, the Jersey Central, and other railroads that operate barge fleets in the harbor. Their bottoms are sound and their roofs are tight, but they got too old to be jerked this way and that by tugs in a hurry and bumped about and banged into (most of them are over forty years old, and several are over sixty), so they were discarded and sold. Some are owned by shadfishermen, who move them up or down the river at the start of the shad season and tie them up along the bank, each fisherman placing his barge as close as possible to his row of nets. The fishermen eat and sleep aboard them and use them as bases while the shad are running, and then return them to the flats and keep them there the rest of the year and store their equipment in them. Others are owned by boat clubs. There are seven boat clubs on the Edgewater riverfront, and four are quartered in secondhand railroad barges. One club, the Undercliff Motor Boat Club, owns two, but uses both for the winter storage of its boats, and has its quarters in an old queen of an oyster barge named the
G.M. Still.
The wholesale oyster companies in New York City used to carry on their businesses in specially built barges that were docked the year round at piers on the East River, just north of Fulton Fish Market. These barges had two or three decks, and could hold huge stocks of oysters. They were top-heavy but beautifully made. Some had balconies with banisters shaped like tenpins on their upper decks, and the offices in several had mahogany paneling; the reputation of an oyster company partly depended on the splendor of its barge. There were over a dozen oyster barges on the East River at one time, and all were painted a variety of colors and all had ostentatious black-and-gold nameboards across their fronts and all flew swallowtail pennants; people visited the waterfront just to see them. The
G. M. Still
was the last to go. It was owned by George M. Still, Inc., the planters of Diamond Point oysters, and its final East River location was at a pier at the foot of Pike Street, under the Manhattan Bridge; it was there for a generation. In 1949, the city took over this pier, and the Still company was unable to find another, so it moved ashore, and sold the barge to a dealer in old boats, who sold it to the boat club. The
G. M. Still
is almost eighty years old—it was built in 1880—and the recent years have been hard on it. Even so, not all the teardrops, icicles, scallops, and other scroll-saw curlicues that once ornamented it have disappeared, and its last coat of paint under the Still ownership—black, yellow, white, orange, and green—has not entirely faded, and the balcony on the bow end of its upper deck looks as regal as ever.

Although Edgewater is only a short ride by subway and bus from the heart of New York City, it has some of the characteristics of an isolated and ingrown old town in New England or the South. The population is approximately four thousand, and a large proportion of the people are natives and know each other, at least to speak to. A surprising number of them are related, some so distantly that they aren't at all sure just how. The elderly people take a deep interest in local history, a good deal of which has been handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth, and nearly all of them who are natives consider themselves authorities on the subject. When these elderly people were young, quite a few men and women bearing the names of the original Dutch and Huguenot families were still living in old family mansions along River Road—one old man or one old woman living alone, as often as not, or, in some cases, two old bachelor brothers or two old spinster sisters living together, or an old woman living with a bachelor son or a spinster daughter—and they remember them. They know in a general way how the present-day old families are interrelated, and how several of these families are related to the original families. They can fish around in their memories and bring up vital statistics and stray facts and rumors and old jokes and sayings concerning a multitude of people who have been dead and gone for a generation, and can point out where buildings stood that have been torn down for fifty years. Sometimes, in the manner of old people in old towns, unable to tell only a little when they know so much, they respond to a simple question with a labyrinthine answer. One day, shortly after I began going up to Edgewater, I became acquainted with an elderly native named Henry R. Gaul, and went for a walk with him. Mr. Gaul is a retired oil-company executive. For many years, the Valvoline Oil Company operated a refinery on the riverbank in Shadyside, and Mr. Gaul was chief clerk there. He is secretary of the Undercliff Motor Boat Club and, to have something to do, he looks after the club's winter-storage barges and its headquarters barge, the old
G.M. Still.
His friends call him Henny. Walking on River Road, Mr. Gaul and I came to an automobile that had broken down. It was alongside the curb, and two men in greasy overalls were working on it. One had the hood up, and was bent over the engine. The other was underneath the automobile, flat on his back. As we were passing by, the man underneath thrust his head out, to say something to the man working on the engine. As he did so, he caught sight of Mr. Gaul. “Hello, Henny,” he said.

Mr. Gaul was startled. He paused and turned and peered down at the man's face, and then said, “Oh, hello, Bill.” “That was Bill Ingold,” he said as we resumed our walk. “He runs the Edgewater Garage.”

I was curious about the name; Mr. Gaul had referred to several names as old Edgewater names, and I asked him if Ingold was another one of them.

“Ingold?” he said. “Well, I should hope to think it is. It isn't one of the old Dutch names, but it's old enough, and Bill's got some of the old Dutch blood in him anyhow, through his mother's people. Knickerbocker Dutch. Not that he'd ever mention it. That's the way it is in Edgewater. There's a number of people over here who have old, old families back behind them—much older, I dare say, than the families back behind a high percentage of the people in the
Social Register
in New York—but you'd never find it out from them. Bill's mother was a Bishop, and
her
mother was a Carlock. The old Dutch blood came down to him through the Carlocks. The Carlocks were big people over here once, but they had a preponderance of daughters and the name died out. They owned land, and one branch of them ran a boatyard. The boatyard was torn down years and years ago, but I can tell you where it stood. Did you ever notice an ancient old clapboard building on the upper part of River Road with a saloon in it named Sulyma's Bar & Grill? Well, in the old days that building was a hotel named the Buena Vista Hotel, only we called it Walsch's, after the family that ran it. And just before you got to Walsch's, on the right, in between River Road and the river, was Carlock's Boatyard. Bill Ingold's father was also named Bill—William, that is, William F. He was in the Edgewater Fire Department. In fact, he was Fire Chief. He was a highly respected man, and I'll tell you a little story to illustrate that. There used to be an old gentleman in Edgewater named Frederick W. Winterburn. Mr. Winterburn was rich. He had inherited money, and he had married money, and he had made money. His wife was a Vreeland, and she was related to the Dyckmans
and
the Westervelts. Among other things, he owned practically the whole of Shadyside, and he lived down there. He lived in a big house overlooking the river, and he had a rose garden in front and an orchard in back. On warm summer nights, walking along River Road, you could smell the roses in his garden. And you could smell the peaches in his orchard, all soft and ripe and still warm from the sun and a little breeze blowing across them. And you could smell the grapes hanging on a fence between the garden and the orchard. They were fox grapes, and they had a musky smell. I'd give anything to smell those grapes again. The garden had marble statues in it. Statues of women. Naked woman. Naked marble women. Goddesses, I guess you'd call them. In the moonlight, they looked real. It's all gone now, and there's a factory there. One piece of Mr. Winterburn's property surrounded the Edgewater Cemetery. His parents were buried in this cemetery, and his wife's people all the way back to the seventeenth century were buried in there, and he knew he was going to be buried in there, and he took a personal interest in it. In 1909 or 1910 or thereabouts—it might've been a few years earlier or a few years later—Mr. Winterburn was beginning to have a feeling that time was running out on him, he wouldn't be here much longer, although to tell you the truth he lived quite a few years more, and one day he asked five men to come to his house. All of them were from old Edgewater families and had people buried in the cemetery, and one of them was Bill Ingold's father, Fire Chief Ingold. ‘Sit down, boys,' Mr. Winterburn said, ‘I want to talk to you. Boys,' he said, ‘my family owns much more space in the cemetery than it'll ever need or make use of, and I'm going to set aside a section of it for a poor plot. Any bona fide resident of Edgewater who dies a pauper can be buried in this plot, free of charge. And suicides that are turned away by other cemeteries can be buried in there, provided they're residents. And nonresidents that drown in the river and wash up on the Edgewater riverfront and don't have any identification on them, the way it sometimes happens, it doesn't make any difference if it looks accidental or looks as if they threw themselves in, they can be buried in there. Furthermore, I'm going to set up a trust fund, and I'm going to fix it so the principal can't ever be touched, whereas the interest can be used in perpetuity to keep up the cemetery. And I want you boys to form a cemetery association and elect a president and a secretary and a treasurer, and the duties of these officers shall be to keep an eye on the cemetery and visit it every now and then and make a tour of inspection through it and hire a caretaker and see that he keeps the weeds cut and the leaves raked and whenever the occasion arises rule on who can be buried in the poor plot and who can't be.' So they put it to a vote, and Fire Chief Ingold was elected president without any discussion whatsoever. It was taken for granted. That's how respected he was. And after he died, Bill was elected president, and he's held the office ever since. Did I mention Bill's mother was a Bishop? Well, she was. The Bishops were…”

Some of the people in Edgewater commute to jobs in New York City, and some work in the river towns south of Edgewater, which are, in order, going south, North Bergen, Guttenberg, West New York, Weehawken, Hoboken, and Jersey City, but the majority work in the factories in Shadyside. A score or so of men are spoken of around town as rivermen. This word has a special shade of meaning in Edgewater: a riverman not only works on the river or kills a lot of time on it or near it, he is also emotionally attached to it—he can't stay away from it. Charles Allison is an example. Mr. Allison lives in Edgewater and works in North Bergen. He is a partner in the Baldwin & Allison Dry Dock Co., a firm that operates a drydock and calks and repairs barges and drives piles and builds docks and does marine surveying and supplies pumps for salvage work, but that is only one of the reasons he is looked upon as a riverman. The main reason is that the river has a hold on him. Most days he is on or around it from early in the morning until sunset. Nevertheless, he often goes down to it at night and walks beside it. Even on Sundays and holidays, he often goes down to it. The offices of the drydock company are in a superstructure built on the deck of an old railroad barge that is permanently docked at a pier in North Bergen, and Mr. Allison has had big wide windows put in three of the walls of his private office, so that he can sit at his desk and see up, down, and across the river. Every spring, he takes a leave of absence from the drydock, and spends from six weeks to two months living aboard a shad barge on the river and fishing two rows of shad nets with a crew of hired fishermen.

Some men work full time on the river—on ferries, tugs, or barges—and are not considered rivermen; they are simply men who work on the river. Other men work only a part of the year on the river and make only a part of their living there but are considered rivermen. Mr. Ingold, the garage proprietor, is one of these. His garage is on River Road, facing the river. It is a typical small, drafty, one-story garage, except that hanging on its walls, in among the fan belts and the brake linings and the dented chromium hubcaps and the calendars with naked girls on them, are anchors and oars and hanks of netting and dozens of rusty old eelpots. Also, standing in a shallow box of sand in the middle of the floor is a stove of a kind that would be recognizable only to people who are familiar with harbor shipping; it is shaped like an oil drum and burns coke and is a kind that is used in barges and lighters to keep perishable freight from freezing. Mr. Ingold took it out of an old Erie Railroad fruit-and-vegetable barge. In the winter, a group of elderly Edgewater men, most of whom are retired, sit around it and gossip and argue; in the summer, they move their chairs up front to the door, where they can look out on the river and the Manhattan skyline. Mr. Ingold owns two shad barges and several shad boats, and keeps them at a landing a short walk up the river from the garage. Off and on during the winter, he and another riverman, Eustus R. Smith, stretch shad nets across the floor of the garage and put them in shape. They rig new nets, and mend and splice old ones. They are helped occasionally by Mr. Ingold's son, Willy, and by Mr. Smith's son, Charlie. In the spring, Mr. Ingold leaves the garage in the hands of two mechanics, and he and his son and Mr. Smith and his son go out on the river and become shadfishermen for a couple of months. In the late fall and early winter, when the eels in the river are at their best and bring the highest prices, Mr. Ingold and Willy set eelpots. They set sixty, and their favorite grounds are up around Spuyten Duyvil, where the Harlem River runs into the Hudson. Some nights during the eel season, after knocking off work in the garage, Mr. Ingold gets in an outboard and goes up to Spuyten Duyvil and attends to the pots, drawing them up hand over hand from the bottom and taking out the trapped eels and putting in fresh bait, and some nights Willy goes up. On dark nights, they wear miner's caps that have head lamps on them. Mr. Ingold has been dividing his time between the garage and the river for thirty-five years. Invariably, at the end of the shad season he is so tired he has to hole up in bed for a few days, and he always resolves to stay put in the garage from then on—no man can serve two masters—but when the eel season comes around he always finds himself back on the river again.