Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (24 page)

These child waterfront thieves became a favorite journalistic subject throughout the nineteenth century, along with their nemesis, the harbor police. An unsigned article in
Harper's Magazine
, October 1872, reported:

The thoroughly untamed and wild-animal character of the “dock rats” is frequently evinced by a singular tendency which they exhibit for making themselves dens or nests of their own under the very piers themselves, and amidst the stench of the oozing tides and sewerage. Here they will patch together odds and ends of plank and driftwood, and even set up some sort of contrivance for warmth and cookery, if they can so arrange that the fumes of their coke and charcoal shall not too speedily betray them. Their nests are great places for the reception of plunder when the junk-shops are too closely watched, and every few weeks the harbor police make thorough searches for them, boating and wading, to the great detriment of tempers and uniforms, and at the cost of severe fatigue and personal disgust.

Children's aid societies were formed to set up lodging-houses and provide support for these unsupervised waifs, but there were too many to be accommodated. Others did not want to be; they preferred the lawless freedom of the docks. “Whence this army of homeless children? is a question often asked,” Jacob Riis posited in his 1890 crusading classic,
How the Other Half Lives.
“The answer is supplied by the procession of mothers that go out and in at Police Headquarters the year round, inquiring for missing boys, often not until they have been gone for weeks and months, and then sometimes rather as a matter of decent form than from any real interest in the lad's fate. The stereotyped promise of the clerks who fail to find his name on the books among the arrests, that ‘he will come back when he gets hungry,’ does not always come true. More likely he went away because he was hungry.”

The West Side waterfront has long had a history of adult homelessness, dating at least from the 1850s, when the railroad first entered there and found squatters occupying the mud flats along the Hudson River. In the Panic of 1893, brought on when the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad declared bankruptcy, a serious economic depression ensued that closed the Gilded Age and threw many Americans out of work for nearly a decade. Meanwhile, an estimated 60,000 men rode the rails, looking for work. “By the early 1900s both the homeless community and the railroad had expanded: a tarpaper shantytown with 125 occupants lined the four tracks of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad where it stretched six miles along an area known as Riverside Park,” wrote Margaret Morton. Hoovervilles were a common sight along the West Side Rail Yards and Riverside Park during the Great Depression. In the 1980s and 1990s, a squeeze on affordable housing, combined with a loss of manufacturing and entry-level jobs, again saw the homeless take up positions along these rocks, coves, and underpasses.

The picture that emerges from Margaret Morton's interviews with the waterfront homeless is of a proud, resourceful, self-reliant group, almost all of whom disdain street begging or the social welfare system, preferring instead to scrounge for food from supermarkets, schools, and other institutions that throw out their day's extras, and to support themselves by collecting cans for deposits, washing cars, helping supers with recycling piles, or holding down odd jobs off the books. They pick up discarded furnishings
that might improve their makeshift quarters, and hook up wiring to the lampposts for TVs and record players. They use the playground restrooms and hydrants for water. Contrary to the caricature of laziness, they tend to be active all day and much of the night, as a necessary condition for survival. Most have had awful experiences with homeless shelters, and prefer the outdoors or the tunnel system, partly because shelters are dangerous, violent, unhealthy (fear of tuberculosis is not unfounded), and restrictive regarding freedom of property and choosing one's company.

The tendency to demonize the homeless as shiftless or crazy can inspire an equally dubious countertendency to sentimentalize them as heroic, salt-of-the-earth rebels or philosophical
clochards.
The reality would seem to be somewhere in between: perhaps a third suffer from mental illness, a third more from alcoholism and substance abuse. There are indeed normal, sober homeless people who are simply down on their luck, but forced to adapt to economic hard times by living on the street; others become homeless after an injury has temporarily cost them their livelihood; still others have had their immigration papers stolen (or, illegal in the first place, make up this story of stolen papers); some have been traumatized by the death of a child, divorce, or combat stress.

The paradox is that the homeless are labeled as pathologically “disaffiliated” from society, but when they try to form a society of their own, they are dispersed; they are characterized as “rootless,” yet when they embrace domestic values by building fragile dwellings, their chambers are bulldozed. Recently, starting under ex-mayor Giuliani's reign, they have been forced into the much more dangerous, asocial, nomadic situation of sleeping alone, and then having to take up their cardboard boxes or blankets each morning and move elsewhere. If they gather in groups of three or more, some offended citizen is apt to call the “quality of life” hotline, and the police are sent to break it up.

Often, in walking the waterfront, I have seen traces of homeless encampments, or come upon a group around a fire burning in a barrel. During the warm-weather months, the population turns younger; there are “summer punks” who sleep in the parks. On the waterfront, the homeless bunk down under a bridge or inside the anchorage, beneath a highway ramp, along the seawall, in riverside parks, around abandoned piers and railroad transfer gantries, and tucked into weedy brownfields.

11 RIVERSIDE PARK AND MANHATTANVILLE

R
IVERSIDE PARK HAS LONG BEEN THE JEWEL IN THE WATERFRONT CROWN, THE BEST RECREATIONAL FACILITY ON THE EDGE OF MANHATTAN ISLAND. CENTRAL Park is for the world, the tourists, the outer boroughs; Riverside Park is a neighborhood amenity, not a guidebook “destination.” It is the garden reserve for Faubourg Upper West Side, and as such enjoys a cozy mirror-relationship with its comfortably well-off, Parisian-style residential surroundings.

One block east of the park runs West End Avenue, a respectable quarter of stout apartment buildings that epitomizes the virtues of the middle class. The appreciation that Christopher Morley, learned scribbler and belletrist, wrote of the street in 1932, still holds true today: “West End Avenue
is incomparably the most agreeable and convenient of large residential streets, second only to Riverside Drive…. When it goes residential at 70th Street, [it] does so in solid fashion, without freak or fantasy. For thirty-five blocks it has probably the most uniform skyline of any avenue in New York. It indulges little in terraces or penthouses; just even bulks of masonry. What other street can show me a run of thirty-five blocks without a shop-window?”

Those who own co-ops in the spacious, prewar apartment buildings on West End Avenue or Riverside Drive, and are lucky enough to have a view of the park and the river as well, will tell you they could not live anywhere else in New York City, they
need
the park for their sanity. And you register the note of bourgeois complacency and feel a bit put off by it, if you are an outsider, when you walk the park itself. It is heaven; but is it
your
heaven?

Once or twice it was, in fact, my heaven, though I used it roughly and unconsciously, too young to appreciate urban sublimity. When I went to Columbia as an undergraduate, my head full of dark paradoxes, I would sometimes buy a meatball hero and take it to the park and chew it on a bench overlooking the river, or stride through the brown leaves in autumn. Years after that, in my bachelor phase, I would bring dates to the 79th Street marina in summer, with the fireflies twinkling around us. While none of these cycles
took
, and I never fully bonded with Riverside Park, in the way of those who had made the commitment to live in one of those big, oppressively nice, prewar apartments and work and die in the park's vicinity, still I came to feel an ongoing private connection to the place.

IN
1873
THE CITY COMMISSIONED Frederick Law Olmsted, the chief designer of Central Park, to build a park on a narrow strip of shoreline alongside the already-functioning Hudson River Railroad. Olmsted made use of the steep bluffs and rocky outcroppings left by prehistoric glaciers to create a rustic hillside landscape, through which passed one of his patented parkways. Neglected, its features effaced, by the 1920s Riverside Park had become “a wasteland,” wrote Robert Caro in
The Power Broker:
“The ‘park’ was nothing but a vast low-lying mass of dirt and mud. Running through its length was the four-track bed of the New York Central, which lay in a
right-of-way that had been turned over to the railroad by the city half a century before. Unpainted, rusting, jagged wire fences along the tracks barred the city from the waterfront; in the whole six miles, there were exactly three bridges on which the tracks could be crossed, and they led only to private boating clubs.” In one of his greatest, most populist acts, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses seized the opportunity, during the construction of the West Side Highway and the Henry Hudson Parkway in the 1930s, to double the park's size and improve, if considerably tame, its design: the railroad tracks were covered over, granite walls and concrete paths were introduced, ballfields, a playground, and tennis courts added, and a complex, three-level traffic circle, jet fountain, and grand staircase were put in at West 79th Street, overlooking the 79th Street Boat Basin.

With its allées and terraces, woods, marina, and open, sloping lawns, Riverside Park is a neighborhood treasure that continues to be used, casually and effectively, by a variety of different groups at different times of day. (I am talking here of the southern end of Riverside Park, which begins at West 72nd Street and ends at 125th Street; the lesser-known upper end, which picks up at 135th Street and continues all the way up north to 152nd Street, serving poorer neighborhoods, is more ragtag, starved for landscaping services and left in disrepair.)

Today I walk down to the water at West 72nd Street, skirting a homeless man with matted hair who sits up on the grass next to his shopping cart, looking dazed. At the river's edge, a film crew is taking a lunch break, munching sandwiches on the benches. As usual, whenever I stumble on a film being shot, nothing is happening, and I am too impatient to wait for the action to start.

I pass a Hispanic fisherman in green jogging outfit, around forty-five, thin mustache, lowering a rod into the water. “Any luck?” is on the tip of my tongue, but I don't say it, fearing to sound boorish.
Any luck?
I repeat to myself. What a glorious day! At the marina, three mothers are showing their preschoolers some ducks in the water. They're laughing among themselves, with that solidarity of moms looking after kids. Suddenly I feel bereft. I want to tell them I also have a small child. I start thinking about Lily, and the waterfront recedes.

There's a jogging woman running up the curved, sweeping fieldstone staircase, holding on to the reins of two dogs, not one, while pushing a
baby stroller. She's determined to get her exercise. She looks like a woman named Sarah I know, which puts me in mind of Sara Teasdale, who haunts the park. Sara Teasdale wrote an Edwardian make-out poem, in 1915, called “Summer Night, Riverside.” It begins:

In the wild soft summer darkness

How many and many a night we two together

Sat in the park and watched the Hudson

Wearing her lights like golden spangles

Glinting on black satin.

The rail along the curving pathway

Was low in a happy place to let us cross,

And down the hill a tree that dripped with bloom

Sheltered us,

While your kisses and the flowers,

Falling, falling,

Tangled my hair.

The frail white stars moved slowly over the sky.

And so on. Teasdale no longer enjoys much critical cachet, but I am a sucker for her romantic-poetess style, all that sorrow and astronomy, curiously localized to New York settings. She lived around Riverside Park for years, unhappily if sedately married, before moving down to Greenwich Village, to be more “with it,” and eventually, realizing she had fallen permanently out of fashion (which had shifted to literary experimentation), to kill herself, taking pills in a rented Village flat.

Riverside Park has the effect of slowing down the senses and making you more conscious of the seasons. I also associate Riverside Park with Paul Goodman, the novelist/social critic/lay psychoanalyst/poet/planner, etc., who played guru to several of my Columbia classmates during the early sixties, both because of his youth-flattering book,
Growing Up Absurd
, and his Socratic charisma. My classmate Richard Tristman (now dead, alas) spoke excitedly to me on a Riverside Park bench about Goodman's all-purpose brilliance, and dangled the possibility that he might someday take me around to the great man's apartment, which was
nearby. It seemed improbable, like meeting Goethe, and in fact it never happened. Goodman, à propos, wrote that loveliest of Upper West Side waterfront poems, “The Lordly Hudson,” which goes: