Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (23 page)

But he had not fully reckoned with one of the orneriest, most combat-ready communities on earth, the Upper West Side, which expressed its legitimate unhappiness with the development's proposed density, with the thousands of air-polluting cars it would bring into the area, and with the additional stress it would place on the West 72nd Street subway station, already operating at or over capacity. An acrimonious stalemate and a blizzard of lawsuits followed, after which certain people of goodwill came forward and attempted to broker a deal. Among them was Richard Kahan, one of the most experienced and enlightened veterans of New York city planning. A small, soft-spoken, baldheaded man with a penchant for natty dark suits and a disarming smile, Kahan is not without ego himself, and had once started running for governor, before the reality of his utter lack of name-recognition or populist charisma sank in. But he understood government and real estate: he had been among the original Ratensky's Raiders (see the chapter on Westway); had helped push Battery Park City out of its sand trap as chairman of the Battery Park City Authority; had
been instrumental in the rehabilitation of thousands of tenement units in the Bronx; and was now attempting to salvage the West Side Rail Yards debacle. The compromise he and other intermediaries worked out was that the developer (Trump) would scale back the project's density by more than half, would relinquish the world's tallest building and the world's largest television studio, would forget the shopping mall, and would settle for a dozen or so upscale residential towers, placed along a southern extension of Riverside Drive, to be called Riverside South, though later the name was changed to—Trump Place.

As Kahan recounted this episode to me, one of the novelties in the negotiating process was to have enlisted the watchdog civic groups, such as the Municipal Art Society, normally Trump's antagonist, to work with the developer on a satisfactory compromise. The collaboration might risk tarnishing the civic groups' reputations for integrity and autonomy, but the chance was worth taking, as Kahan saw it: not only would the project be scaled back considerably, and its buildings made to adhere to a sensitive urban design in the tradition of Central Park West, but the community would receive a splendid new public park, paid for and maintained entirely by Trump, and envisioned as a continuation of its distinguished neighbor to the north, Riverside Park.

The key to this amenity was moving the West Side Highway from its current elevated path and burying it under a deck, so that you could enter the park directly from Trump Place and walk down sloping banks to the river, without ever seeing an expressway. Kahan and several others went to Washington to lobby for this change, and the federal government agreed to pay for tearing down the highway and rerouting it underground. Everything looked wonderful, a great twenty-three-acre, car-less riverfront park was within sight, when the project hit a roadblock: Assemblyman (later Congressman) Jerrold Nadler. This politician had a reputation as a fighting urban progressive, championing all manner of good things, such as burying the Gowanus Expressway in a tunnel, constructing a cross-harbor rail tunnel between Brooklyn and New Jersey, and returning freight trains to the region. One of the reasons he opposed burying the highway at that site, in fact, was that it would end the dream of resurrecting rail freight in the New York Central yards. (Not that such a
possibility was even remotely in the offing.) The second reason, more personal, was that Jerry Nadler hated Donald Trump. If Trump was for it, he would have to be agin' it.

Nadler felt sure that Trump would never be able to rent his expensive apartments as long as a highway ran right outside their windows. Were the highway buried, it would profit Trump's sales efforts immensely; but if the elevated highway stayed in place, thought Nadler, Trump would get discouraged and give up the project. Kahan tried to convince Nadler that Trump was going ahead with construction, regardless of the highway's destiny; but Nadler was sure Trump would eventually cave in, and held to that conviction even after the first, the second, the third tower started to rise…. The shrewd developer, for his part, had guessed correctly that the New York real estate market was strong enough to attract plenty of buyers and renters to the new towers. Trump behaved with a surprising amount of restraint throughout this conflict, though he did rise to the bait once and call Nadler a fat slob, which was noted the next day in the tabloids. The rotund assemblyman took offense. This is how history in New York City is made. In the end, the West Side Highway stayed put, the park's potential was undermined, and the interests of the community were thwarted by their repre-sentative's spite. It was Westway all over again: the federal government had expressed its willingness to pay for the removal of a highway along the waterfront, but the progressive reformers defeated the plan, because it would line the pockets of capitalists they detested.

What of Trump Place itself? You see it as you drive along the West Side Highway: looming, unavoidable, mediocre. Trump had enlisted Philip Johnson, largely because, to the developer, “Philip Johnson” had the most famous, resonant name of living architects, useful for marketing the apartment blocks. Of course, Philip Johnson is hardly the exciting architect he once was, but the marketing strategy worked. Then, too, the banal character of the towers done so far by Johnson and Costas Kondylis seems entirely in keeping with Trump's other buildings; he
likes
these suave, deluxe nullities, never exactly awful, but never enthralling: this restrained vulgarity is the Trump trademark.

The urban design guidelines, which sought to emulate the residential buildings of Central Park West, made for decent street layouts, while reducing the chance for more-original architecture. The
New York Times
architectural critic, Herbert Muschamp, who never tires of denouncing the sins of Contextualism, had these validly acerbic thoughts about the results: “Glass, in any case, is far more ‘contextual’ than masonry for waterfront locations: its reflective surface mirrors that of water; it yields a more radiant light. Context, moreover, is a matter of time as well of place. At Trump Place, ahistorical mutants masquerade as historical landmarks.” In the end, the ensemble is no worse than the buildings just south of it—indeed, a fraction better. (The blocks behind Lincoln Center, going toward the river, are immensely dispiriting. Here the nightmare was enacted: mundane residential towers taking up whole blocks, without a speck of urbanism, no life at the sidewalk level, no invitation for nonresident pedestrians walking past, just privilege and dullness. I have been inside these apartment buildings: the construction is shoddy, the walls thin, niceties of detail nonexistent; you enter a barren box and are drawn immediately, and
only
, to the view.)

As for the resulting park, Riverside South, it is better than nothing. If you stand on the river's edge and look inland across the park, toward Trump Place, the elevated columns of the West Side Highway interrupt any bucolic sense you might have, chop up the space with industrial grime, and intrude their shadows over one whole stripe. You feel like Orpheus gazing through the mouth of hell toward a lost Eurydice. The one good thing about the highway being raised high at this stretch is that, if you turn your back to it, you can almost edit it out of your consciousness, or pretend the rushing sounds are surf—more so, anyway, than if the highway were barreling alongside you.

The park was designed by the dashing landscape architect Thomas Balsley, in an unobtrusive if underwhelming manner. Balsley's idea has been to move you from bulkhead to natural shoreline to pier to cove, and back to bulkhead. The old, disintegrating piers, victimized by fire and shipworms, are fun to look at. There is the “spaghetti carbonara” Pier D, a pile of blackened wire struck by lightning (or arson). There is the caved-in, sagging 64th Street Pier, looking like a rollercoaster that gravity has done a number on. Together they form a fascinating sequence, a narrative of decay and rot. I do not expect them to remain as they are for long, so appetizingly dysfunctional and dangerous to climb upon.

Balsley has designed the park's stellar new attraction, an 800-foot-long silver pier with scalloped edge. The pier's snaking profile suggests a natural
shoreline. It zigzags like a lightning bolt that juts into the harbor. Sunday fishermen are out in good weather, angling for snapper or casting their crab traps into the brine; others sit on benches, taking in dramatic views. At walkway's end, you have the giddy sense of being on the water, yet remaining dry. To accommodate environmental agencies' concerns, the pier has been elevated several steps above its original height so that more sunlight can filter down to the fish.

Balsley's new pier sits next to the 1911 transfer bridge, which has been placed on the Historical Register, meaning that neither Trump nor anyone else is permitted to demolish it. In fact, he is responsible for
maintaining
it, and has already spent a quarter of a million dollars just to stabilize the structure. To restore it legitimately to its former glory, with all the bells and whistles appealing to railroad and waterfront buffs, would take an additional $3 million, but you would have a stunning monument to the city's industrial history.

Another plan being bruited about is to turn the West 69th Street float bridge into a landing for small, high-speed ferries. Though some critics of the plan wonder how passengers would connect with further transportation, once they deboarded (imagine having to walk up through the park two blocks to hail a taxi!), it would be grand to see the transfer bridge given a new lease on life.

THIS TRANSFER BRIDGE WAS, incidentally, the abode of one J.R., a homeless man who squatted there in the early 1990s. In a photograph from that period, taken by Margaret Morton, it was emblazoned in graffiti with the name “Tooney.” Those hardy enough to ascend the gantry to the cabin aloft were met with a hand-lettered sign that read: stay the fuck out of my house!!!!! (Morton has done two remarkable books,
Fragile Dwelling
and
The Tunnel
, which document with words and pictures the individual men and women who give a human face to that abstraction “the homeless.”) J.R., an ex-convict and onetime bounty hunter, was forced to move out of his transfer bridge outpost by the bitter winter of January 1994, into one of twenty-seven concrete vaults under some West Side Rail Yard tracks. (These particular tracks had originally been built for milk trains, which delivered much of the city's milk, cream, condensed milk, and pot
cheese between the hours of 11:30 P
.
M. and 3:30 A
.
M.) Each concrete vault was eventually occupied by a homeless person or couple, some of whom went to great lengths to personalize and decorate them.

When it took over the New York Central Rail Yards, Trump's development corporation wasted no time seeing to it that the homeless people nesting there were removed. Without warning, bulldozers crushed the makeshift homes and filled the cubicles with dirt and debris taken from the Trump Place excavation project. Earlier, fifty or so homeless people living in the tunnel to the north, which ran almost the entire length of Riverside Park, from West 72nd Street to 123rd Street, were also evicted.
*
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a population of homeless had stumbled upon the underground crypt and found it to their liking. But the Trump construction staff did not want vagrants around its staging area, and put pressure on Amtrak officials to have them removed, along with the Rail Yard squatters. Margaret Morton wrote: “When city police razed the Rail Yard encampment on February 26, 1997, they demolished the last shantytown in Manhattan. Since then, the numbers of homeless poor have not diminished, but they have become less visible. Fearful of police, the dispossessed journey the streets alone, urban nomads forever on the move: riding subways throughout the night; sleeping on dark, silent streets; hiding in the shadows of construction sites; tucking themselves into decaying structure along the waterfront; disappearing before dawn.”

THE WATERFRONT IS A NATURAL REFUGE for the homeless. It is out of the way, less policed, and those who wish to “sleep rough” without being hassled eventually make their way to the city's edges. As the New York Coalition for the Homeless director, Mary Brosnahan Sullivan, told me, “They've already marginalized themselves internally, so why not geographically? They seek out the waterfront because they want to be left alone.”

*
Technically, the Riverside Park structure should be called an “overbuild” rather than a tunnel, because it was erected on top of preexisting tracks, rather than dug in the ground: Robert Moses had it constructed as a sensible way of keeping trains away from park-goers, and protecting the air from the train's befouling coal emissions.

The first homeless population on New York's waterfront to receive attention were vagrant children: the so-called “dock rats,” who lived in and around the wharves along the East River. There were estimated to be at least 15,000 unreclaimed children roaming the streets of New York in the late nineteenth century. They lived by their wits, often pilfering from ships' cargoes. “Anywhere along the docks are facilities for petty thieving, and, guard as the policemen may, the swarms of small street rovers can circumvent them. A load of wood left on the dock diminishes under his very eyes. The sticks are passed from one to another, the child nearest the pile being busy apparently in playing marbles. If any move of suspicion is made toward them, they are off like a swarm of cockroaches, and with about as much sense of responsibility,” wrote Mrs. Helen Campbell in the 1893 guidebook
Darkness and Daylight; or, Lights and Shadows of New York Life.
Another dodge was for the dock rat “to dive under a wharf and fasten one end of a wire rope to one of the rafters. Then he'd sneak along on board a lead-loaded schooner and fasten the end he'd carried with him to whatever came handy.” He would drop the pilfered object—maybe a metal bar or a ship's chronometer—with the weighted rope attached to it into the water, and fish it out at his convenience. Fences and junk shops along the waterfront were only too happy to purchase the stolen goods.