Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (51 page)

SINCE ANY ATTEMPT to walk or bicycle northward along the East River waterfront runs into frustrating barriers, I decided to explore that part of the shoreline from the water—more precisely, the Circle Line, which circumnavigates Manhattan. I caught that venerable ark at its pier on West 42nd Street, meeting up with my friend Wilbur Woods, who is the city government's waterfront expert. For the last few decades he has spearheaded the study of the underused waterfront, preparing maps, surveys, and position papers for various mayors and planning commissions. Wilbur, or Bill, as he prefers to be called, is a tall, rangy, baldheaded architect turned planner, whose soft-spoken, reserved manner gives way in conversation to a grinning appreciation for the lunatic machinations of New York development.

As the Circle Line heads south along the Hudson to the island's tip, then turns and begins puttering north up the East River, Bill explains to me the “deal” behind various waterfront parcels. For the most part we successfully tune out the Circle Line announcer's commentary with our own conversation, though, from the bits I listen to, the guide sounds fairly well informed—not as obnoxious as I had feared. One young couple is smooching through the entire boat ride, their lips and limbs locked without pause to take in the shoreline. The other passengers—whether tourists or locals, I have no idea—seem glad for the river breeze, on this sweltering, muggy late afternoon between rainstorms.

Bill Woods's singleminded passion is to provide New Yorkers in all five boroughs with public access to their waterfront, by filling in the patchwork of promenades, vest-pocket parks, and bikeways to make one uninterrupted greenbelt of open space. “If I could just get them to give us a strip of fifty to a hundred feet …” he will exclaim, whenever we pass a site blocked from access. At present there are twenty-two gaps in the continuous linear esplanade around Manhattan, he informed me. The largest is probably the one that extends from the United Nations through East 47th Street, all the way up to East 60th Street, where the FDR Drive has been built so close to the river's edge as to make any future esplanade iffy. Around Sutton Place, a private riverfront garden, best seen from the water, has been
allowed to deck the highway for three blocks, like a green blanket thrown over the back of a horse: a favor to some extremely well-heeled residents.

Another example of the privileges of the well connected occurs in the East Sixties and Seventies, where several hospitals have been permitted in the last forty years to build so close to the waterfront as to seize the land that had originally been devoted to a public esplanade. “We really let the hospitals get away with murder,” Bill comments, “letting them close off the land like that.”

“Why
did
you?” I ask him, and then amend the question, knowing he was probably not the one responsible. “I mean, why did the city allow it?”

“That whole lineup—Cornell Medical Center, New York Presbyterian, Rockefeller University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering—is a powerhouse. It's one of the richest and most influential health-care complexes in the country. The people on their boards have clout; one phone call is sometimes all it takes.”

When we get to the East Eighties, where that beautiful overhanging esplanade, built under Robert Moses' direction, decks over the highway at Carl Schurz Park and alongside the apartment buildings just south of the park on Gracie Terrace, so that you can gaze out at the river without ever seeing cars, I ask Bill something I have been dying to know: Why couldn't such an elegant solution have been carried all the way down the East River? Why did it have to stop around East 78th Street? I am thinking it must have been a combination of stupidity, snobbery, shortsightedness, and so on, when Bill sets me straight. He points to the cliffs along the Carl Schurz Park esplanade: “The land rose up there, so you
could
put a deck over the highway without much trouble. Also, the apartment buildings on Gracie Terrace were new, which meant they could be built from the start with their foundations raised high. Farther south, the older fashionable apartment buildings had already been built with their foundations set low, and if you were to deck the highway there, you'd be cutting off the lower floors from light and running the traffic outside those people's windows, which they never would have agreed to.” That explains everything. Geography rules.

MY FIRST SIGNIFICANT EXPERIENCES with the Carl Schurz Park esplanade occurred in the early 1970s, when I moved into a studio apartment on East 81st Street and York Avenue, on the Upper East Side. Newly divorced, back from a year's self-exile in California, I was trying to adjust to single life in New York, and where better to start again than in that frivolous poodle of a neighborhood? French bakeries on nearly every block, glassed-in windows of bistros that offered Sunday brunches of eggs Benedict and sangria, a young crowd, the men in blazers and turtlenecks, the women with Cacharel shirts and decorator scarves—an epicurean avant-garde who took their weekend relaxations very seriously. The neighborhood had the reputation at the time of being a kind of dude ranch for stewardesses, masseuses, or financial trainees who roomed together. Though I never spoke to my neighbors, at least I was in no danger of meeting too many bookworms like myself, and could cultivate my solitude to my heart's content.

My favorite walk was down by the river, near the mayor's house, Gracie Mansion. Along the curved, wrought-iron fence of the Carl Schurz Park esplanade, European fathers with long overcoats bent over their children solicitously, amateur photographers took amateur photographs, tennis couples in spanking white uniforms looked court-bound, a woman sat in lotus position with her face arched toward the sun, a Sunday
Times
next to her on the stone parapet.

From the promenade I would look out to Queens, to a factory across the water with a scarlet neon sign that kept blinking,
Pearl Wick Hampers… Bathroom Hampers…Pearl Wick Hampers… Bathroom Hampers.
It was like a secret code meant to tell me something, or a Zen koan never to be cracked. Downriver were the three Con Edison smokestacks, a comforting triptych painted white, red, and gray, with their spires narrowing to flat, pudgy tops. Antique industrial totems, they stood in the blue-gray light surrounded by storm clouds that had earlier unleashed rains, or were now about to. Across the East River to their left was the old Steinway piano factory, with its grimy black façade and Parisian green cupola. Sometimes a tugboat would start out from the basin a few blocks north, thoughtfully smoking its pipe; would round the bend, pulling three barges capped with dirt like funeral mounds strapped end to end; and then there was nothing else to do but follow it for as long as it passed. Its white
spume started the dark green waves slapping against the bulkhead; and, leaning over, one could see pads of black tar jimmied loose and floating along. It was a real city river, like Broadway, cutting a channel between concrete shores.

I never really clicked with that neighborhood, never got used to its chalky luxury apartment tower with fountains and doormen, and left it after three years; but the one part I regretted giving up was Carl Schurz Park, with its serene promenade.

GRACIE MANSION, the official residence of New York City's mayors, is set in a heavily wooded, particularly lush area of Carl Schurz Park. Much as I would like to tell about the time the mayor asked me there for drinks and some advice, the truth is that the public may tour the house every Wednesday, which is how I managed to get inside. As you walk up the steps of the two-story yellow clapboard building with its white porch, surrounded by shady trees and lawn, it almost seems like a country house in Connecticut or upstate New York. No surprise, then, that it was built in the 1770s as a rural retreat by the businessman Jacob Walton, who longed to escape Brooklyn's harried pace. General George Washington commandeered the house in the early stages of the Revolutionary War, thinking to use its strategic overlook by the river, just below tricky Hell Gate, to fire on British ships. But the British navy had less trouble maneuvering its vessels through the treacherous channel than expected, and reversed the strategy by firing on the house and leveling it.

After the war ended, Walton sold the property for about $5,000 to Archibald Gracie, a parvenu shipping magnate, who built the present house for entertaining local country squires in the grand manner. It was Gracie who established the Federal-period bones of the house: the munificent entry hall with its circular staircase, and the parlor and library directly off the hall; the dining room, with its French wallpaper covering of bewigged figures, 1830, titled “The Gardens of Paris”; the porch that beckons at the edge of every room to come outside and enjoy the air. (The decor is a combination of history and conjecture: sideboards and lighting fixtures that once belonged to the house, furniture left to the city by the owners' descendants, and antiques loaned by cultural institutions to the
Gracie Mansion Conservancy.) But Gracie suffered the same jinx of financial reversal that seems to have afflicted all of the house's early owners; and in time he needed to sell it to the merchant Joseph Foulke, whose heirs had to sell it to the builder, Noah Wheaton … until it passed into the hands of the city, some say in remission for unpaid property taxes. (I love the idea of Gracie Mansion as another
in rem
property that fell into the city's real estate portfolio, like those torched tenements in the South Bronx more recently.) The city assigned it to the Parks Department, who had no idea what to do with it, and for a while used it as a glorified restroom for Carl Schurz Park. It fell into neglect. Then it became the home of the Museum of the City of New-York, from 1923 to 1932; but, needing more space, that institution moved to its present quarters on upper Fifth Avenue, and soon the old house began to deteriorate badly. At this point it was saved by none other than Robert Moses, then commissioner of parks, who had the inspiration of turning it into a permanent mayor's residence. He persuaded his boss, Fiorello La Guardia, to be its first official occupant. La Guardia was very reluctant to relocate to this Colonial mansion, which was hardly his style; but he grew to love living there, and did his famous reading-the-funnies broadcast from its porch.

During the administration of Robert Wagner Jr., the mayor's wife, Susan, found her family too pinched for space by Gracie Mansion's official hospitality uses, and argued that a new wing should be attached to the old house, specifically for parties and other state functions. In 1966 the new wing opened: an architecturally banal extension, with oversized rooms done in slavish imitation of the old Federal-era quarters, but it did have an assembly hall that could seat 150 at dinner, or stand 300 in a cocktail party. It also had an expanded, professionally equipped kitchen, a gift shop with a few meager vitrines of exhibit space, and a sitting room that the elderly volunteer docent who took us around liked to call “Susan's Room,” because it held a large portrait of Wagner's somber-looking blond wife, who unfortunately died before the new wing was finished.

When Ed Koch became mayor, it was decided that the old wing had gotten tattered and needed to be restored. Koch hired some interior decorators, who painted the old wood-planked entry hall floor in a faux-marble manner. The tour of Gracie Mansion gives you much more information about French Directoire vs. Federal-style mirrors than it does
about the different municipal personalities.
*
Aside from the portrait of Mrs. Wagner, Ed Koch's interior decorator touches, and a few Lindsay children who etched their names on a window, almost no traces remain of the individual mayors who lived there, which is curious for a building whose whole significance derives from their tenure.

Let us sound, then, ourselves the roll call of those mayors who have inhabited the mansion: Fiorello La Guardia, William O'Dwyer, Vincent Impelleteri, Robert Wagner Jr., John V. Lindsay, Abraham Beame, Edward Koch, David Dinkins, and Rudolph Giuliani. (The present millionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has broken with tradition and remained in his comfortable apartment, though he uses Gracie Mansion for official functions.) I can recite the list with my eyes closed. Some people divide their adult lives vocationally, by the successive jobs they've held, or romantically, by the reign of this lover or that spouse; I distinguish my historical eras by New York mayors. The Man in the White House has always seemed too remote and executive to excite my imagination, whereas the occupant of Gracie Mansion is closer, more like a harassed high school principal or a family relative who might turn up at any function.

It would seem that New York mayoral politicians intentionally style themselves as recognizable family members or neighborhood figures who speak the local patois—so successfully, I might add, that they condemn themselves to the lower rungs of electoral ambition. No New York mayor has ever gone on to become United States President, or even Vice President. More characteristically, they expand their reach through decades of ward politics, with its oscillations of reform and flimflam, to attain a maximum capacity for governance as potentate of the five boroughs.

Of course, larger external forces may reduce them to figureheads. In 1975 New York was embroiled in a fiscal crisis of such magnitude that the city's finances had to be put into receivership, and Mayor Abraham Beame, the little accountant with raccoon eyes beyond dark-frame glasses, was humiliated and his authority eroded by a watchdog agency, the
Municipal Assistance Corporation. The fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s left a dividing line on the cranium of New Yorkers, somewhat the way Vietnam had on the national psyche. Before, the city enjoyed a conviction of centrality, invincibility, expansion; afterward, self-doubt, contraction, twinges of mortality. Never again would that belief in New York's inexorable advantage, stemming from the days of the Erie Canal, be recap-tured—for better or worse.

*
No mention was made of the Giulianis' acrimonious domestic situation, as husband Rudy, who had taken a mistress, and wife Donna, who refused to quit Gracie Mansion, became so estranged they stopped speaking to each other, while continuing to live under the same roof.