Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (11 page)

Asked about her background, she says she kicked around various careers, and then went to graduate school “later than most” and got a degree in marine biology. After her oceanographic accident, she was living in TriBeCa near Pier 26 and began to “do a few things there” around 1986, when it was still a parking garage with no electricity, run by the Department of Transportation. She asked the DOT if she could use one shed, then another. Nobody put up a fuss because the buildings were empty and standing idle.

Since then, the River Project has grown into an ambitious, well-used facility, overseeing scientific experiments about water quality, plant and fish life (so far, it has caught forty-six species) in the harbor, training interns to do research projects, conducting school tours of the Estuarium's exhibits, and acting as an advocacy group to improve the riparian environment.

At the core of Cathy's enthusiasm is the fact that New York Harbor is an estuary, where fresh water and ocean water commingle to bring about, in her words, “the highest diversity of plants, fish, and birds in a region which also happens to have the highest diversity of people.” While she will speak mystically about “what it, Nature, wants to be,” she also seems very much an urbanite. She relishes the irony that the harbor has been designated a “marine sanctuary,” along with several other spots along the Hudson, and that the others are all pristine, though this place is “maximally stressed, the opposite of pure.” Protecting and restoring the natural environment in this most populous, artificial, and stressed habitat appeals to her character as a New Yorker.

“There are three things you need for a healthy estuary,” she tells me. “One, a mixture of two kinds of water; two, a wetland edge; three, a nutrient track. We no longer have a wetland edge. There used to be a wetland with rocky shoals, grass—all the right stuff for a spawning and feeding ground. Now you've got these competing uses: commerce, waste disposal,
transportation, recreation, and fishing. You can re-create freshwater wetlands easily—like ponds. They do it all the time. But trying to bring back saltwater wetlands is very costly and usually doesn't take, in the long run. Even when it starts to take, the other problem is that protecting the wetlands won't keep the developers from building right behind the wetlands, so that when the water rises, the fish are driven back to the part that's built, and they die in great numbers.”

One of her trainees interrupts to ask her advice. Cathy Drew strikes me as an inspired teacher rather than a polished administrator. Her approach is casual, as in: Let's just do the experiment rather than wait for the fancy equipment to come in. This trainee is trying to determine the movement of fecal matter in the harbor between two piers, by tracking some oranges as they bob around in the water. You can't get any more low-tech than that. Another intern, a dark-skinned Pakistani girl about fifteen, has been doing a feasibility study about establishing a beach somewhere below 14th Street, on the Hudson. The girl is keeping track of water quality, by testing the fecal matter to see on which days it would be safe to swim, and on which not. The risks occur with rain, when excess runoff pours directly into the river, bringing with it all the debris and excrement from the streets. For days after a hard rain, the rivers around New York Harbor are too polluted to make swimming advisable; hence, locating a sandy beach on Manhattan's shore remains a problematic, if alluring, idea.

“Aren't there devices for handling that runoff?” I ask Cathy.

“Yes. You can put filters in the rocks to capture some of it. You can put filter drains in the streets. But the main way is to have holding tanks inserted in the highways. When Route 9A [the replacement for the West Side Highway] was first on the drawing board, there were provisions for holding tanks, but they fell out of the plans somewhere, most likely for budgetary reasons,” she says. “You could
lobby
for holding tanks, I guess.” The old activist spirit surges back.

Cathy shows me an art piece, commissioned by the River Project, by the sculptor George Trakas, which consists of two steel staircases leading down from the pier to the water, with landing and seating areas. She wants people to “get to the river,” not to be afraid of it. Mix it up with the river: a connection that's worked for her. She trusts it, why don't they? Originally she wanted to have the staircases lead right down to the water, nothing
else, but the city regulatory agencies made her install two fences
—“two!”—
as warnings that you were approaching the edge. “These people don't travel outside of New York, they don't realize that in cities all over the world you can get to the water. The Hudson River Park Trust put lots of references to ‘get-downs’ in their literature, but then they didn't include any in their final plans.” So she made a get-down. And they made her put up the fences.

For all the good stuff the River Project does, its continuing existence on Pier 26 remains precarious. The Hudson River Park Trust, which has jurisdiction over the property, would prefer to put some income-producing facility on it: a slicker, theme-park-style estuarium, say, run by a university or a prestige institution like the San Diego Aquarium, which would become a magnet for tourist families, at eight dollars a head. The conflict between the River Project's scruffy, improvisatory manner, all oaktag and Scotch tape, and the Hudson River Park Trust's corporate, buttoned-down style, is alluded to, with barely concealed sarcasm, in a River Project leaflet: “Now there is the opportunity to understand … them [the returning fish populations] before the Park redevelopment eliminates these naturalizing areas on rotting piers in favor of new pavements and managed landscapes.”

It's the old story of the grassroots local organization that attaches itself like a barnacle to neglected public land and performs a service no one else will, only to be endangered when the whole area becomes desirable. For the moment, the River Project and the Hudson River Park Trust are playing a cat-and-mouse game with each other, which could go on for years.

6 THE SOHO/GREENWICH VILLAGE CORRIDOR

And our landscape came to be as it is today:

Partially out of focus, some of it too near, the middle distance

A haven of serenity and unreachable.…

—JOHN ASHBERY,
“A Wave”

I
AM WALKING ALONG THE NEW HUDSON RIVER PARK. S OMEONE RUNS BY ME. I HAVE TO SAY THERE
'
S NOTHING SO UNPLEASANT AS THAT SLIGHT BREEZE BEHIND YOUR EAR OF A BIKER or runner overtaking you: you have no warning, and then you flinch, and feel like a fool for being so terrified. It's assumed, incorrectly, that bikeway or running tracks are also congenial to walkers; in fact, we are class enemies.

Hudson River Park has so far proven a godsend to bicyclists, joggers, and dog-trotters. It may not, I think, have the same appeal to recreational walkers like myself who, staring into the face of oncoming headlights, can never relax, never escape the sense of a jangling, if not scary, experience. Advancing in the face of oncoming traffic is never a pleasant experience, as it is hard to turn off your fear reflex. For the bicyclist, already vehicled, the car seems to be a friendly cousin, while for those morning runners high on pheromones, energy is eternal delight—they can match their speed with and even surpass the sluggish New York traffic; but for the walker, the sensation is something like the retreat from Dunkirk: trying to flee a battle while the enemy artillery keeps rolling in.

Hudson River Park, that outdoor temple of physical culture, has been designed as essentially a transit corridor; perhaps because the land available for a park is so thin, there was no other choice than a transit corridor. Watching the weekend joggers, Rollerbladers, and bicyclists exercising in the waterfront park around SoHo and Greenwich Village, however, I am increasingly bored and uneasy, until I realize why I am more drawn to the center of the island. It's that in the streets you see New Yorkers in their most purposeful, urgent aspect, their presentation of self is dramatic or at least emphatic, they are navigating from one compelling situation to another—between work, say, and going to the doctor or picking up the kids—and if their faces hold the burden of being overwhelmed with all they have to do in the next twenty-four hours, you also sense their pride, or at least workaday stoicism, which is the
genus loci
of this particular city. Whereas at leisure they could be anywhere—Spokane, North Carolina, Sydney. On a Sunday in the park, their placid, self-contented faces are emptied of content, save perhaps the strain of jogging one more half-mile, to burn off another centimeter of fat. And their costumes—shorts, T-shirts, sweatpants, sneakers—have no local or regional characteristics, they are the global uniforms of the body-snatched, those who have allowed their limbs to be turned over to machines for happiness. In contrast, compare the fashion-savvy suit or dress choices of office workers striding past Bryant Park at 9:00 A
.
M. on any given weekday: here you see something quintessentially New York. While everyone was worrying about the entry of the chain stores into Manhattan, fearing that the city would lose its local retail flavor to suburban shopping malls, the conformist forces of
globalization sneaked in the back way through leisure. It is not consumerism per se that disturbs me—New York was always a mecca of shopping and fashion—but seeing the local populace come to rest and pirouette on skates in anonymous skivvies. At play, or at least this contemporary, puritanical cardiovascular exercise we call play, people look their most blandly bourgeois. Maybe it's just that I'm watching, for the most part, middle-class white people, the dominant demographic in Hudson River Park. Uptown, Hispanics and African-Americans capering on roller skates to a loud ghetto blaster in Central Park are much more entertaining. They know how to party in any public space, the point being to show off one's moves, not burn off one's calories.

Maybe Hudson River Park will be wonderful when it's finished. You can't tell yet. Still, it seems to me, as I'm walking along, that what should be on the waterfront is something fun, like—movie theaters. How great to be able to reach the river and see a large marquee featuring one, but at most three (okay, four) titles a day—anything more multiplex feels fragmented. I can imagine coming out of an Eric Rohmer film and wandering over by the water's edge, along the promenade, and smoking a cigarette (if only I smoked cigarettes), while I watch a lumbering tug, red-hulled with a striped stack. Or maybe all those cheap Times Square moviehouses that once showed kung fu, horror, or porn could be resurrected along the waterfront. What I miss is something outrageous that would honor the waterfront's raffish history: like a big Jones Beach–type amphitheater for
Song of Norway
revivals; or a pagoda-shaped gambling house festooned with neon, near Chinatown and Canal Street (first floor, mah-jongg, second floor, cockfighting), or a floating casino supper club, run by Brooklyn gangsters, with reflections of little carmine lanterns bobbing in the water.

BY ALL RIGHTS, the waterfront should be the city's carnival release, the diastole to the workaholic's systole; but we've lost the habit, and now we're creakily, arthritically trying to regain it. That it
was
once a habit may be inferred from the opening pages of
Moby-Dick:

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward.
What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.… Strange! Nothing will content them but theextremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in.

Melville's 1851 vision of a waterfront-besotted populace certainly jibes with Whitman's poems of the same decade; this must have been the very apex of the seaport's bursting youth. Yet, just a few years earlier, in 1843, the popular writer and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis—New York's first self-conscious
flâneur—
expressed a somewhat different view: “If quiet be the object, the nearer the water the less jostled the walk on Sunday. You would think, to cross the city anywhere from river to river, that there was a general hydrophobia—the entire population crowding to the high ridge of Broadway, and hardly a soul to be seen on either the East River or the Hudson.”

So, which is correct? Melville's assertion that New Yorkers flock like lemmings to the river, or Willis's, that the crowds prefer the thick of Broadway, avoiding the waterfront like hydrophobic rats? Both, perhaps. I can only say that, walking the waterfront and finding myself often the sole human being on foot, I would not rule out the hydrophobic hypothesis as the deeper, more basic trait. In Manhattan you often forget you live on an island, much less one abutting a mighty ocean. You go about your business, deep in preoccupation. New York's granitic environment promotes living in your head, a cerebral, landlocked state just this side of paranoia, but perfect for an information capital.