Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (26 page)

After independence, the Hollow Way became incorporated as Manhattanville. A notice in the 1806
Spectator
advertised that “Manhattan Ville is now forming in the Ninth Ward of this city, on the Bloomingdale road, in front of Haerlem Cove…. The corporation have opened a road, or avenue …from the North [Hudson] to the East-river…. The proprietors of the soil are now laying out the streets, which are to be wide and open, to the Hudson river, where vessels of 300 tons may lie in safety.” Manhattanville became a populous village, one of two uptown, the other one being Harlem. A settlement of Quakers lived there. Bloomingdale Road, a meandering thoroughfare that would later become upper Broadway, wandered through it.

The Shiefellens, a wealthy family who had an estate slightly north, in Hamilton Heights, donated the land for Manhattanville's St. Mary's
Church, which was attended by Alexander Hamilton's widow. (Hamilton himself did not have much time to enjoy the Grange before his fatal duel with Aaron Burr.)
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St. Mary's is an Episcopal church, and was the first in the city to offer free pews. Eric has brought me there, knowing I will find it interesting. The rectory, wood-slatted, painted yellow and white, dates from 1851. The present St. Mary's Church, dating from 1900, was designed by Carrère & Hastings (famous for the great Fifth Avenue branch of the New York Public Library) and T. E. Blake, and is one of the prettiest churches in New York. Its scale manages just the right balance between awe-inspiring and intimate. Its ribbed roof and stained glass put one in mind of a country church.

The nineteenth-century village that was Manhattanville had a pigment factory, D. F. Tiemann's Dye Works, a worsted mill, and piers for port and ferry functions. The Tiemann family was important in local and downtown civic affairs; one of them even unseated Fernando Wood as mayor, briefly. From the start, Eric tells me, a third of the population was black, either free laborers or slaves. Manhattanville was eventually home to Germans, Irish, and Jews, and a smattering of other ethnic groups. The area remained fairly rural until the subway was built. There were big dairies near the water, including the white terra-cotta building on 125th Street, built in 1906, that once housed Sheffield Farms and now is a Columbia University chemical engineering laboratory. Meatpacking plants, slaughterhouses, and coal storage firms also sprang up near the water, and the railroads that ran through Riverside Park serviced those businesses.

When the newly elected President Lincoln was traveling on his way to New York and Washington, his train stopped at the Manhattanville depot and he greeted the (mostly silent) citizens. After his assassination, his funeral train again stopped at Manhattanville, the first station north of Midtown New York, en route to Albany.

Manhattanville being a valley (and one of the few places in Manhattan
where topography still matters), it became necessary to construct two extraordinary structures traversing the dip, both running parallel to each other in a north-south direction, that have come to dominate the neighborhood and provide much of its iconographic identity: the elevated section of the IRT subway lines, and the Riverside Drive viaduct. Both have an Erector Set monumentality, and create eerie, suggestive spaces underneath, which are frequently photographed or used as exotic locations for movies. Both were originally designed for travelers to look out at the city and river below—the Riverside Drive viaduct even had wooden slats to peep through, and elegant viewing balconies, though these have been largely blocked off or filled in, perhaps to evade the cost of maintaining them.

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To show what a small world upper Manhattan was then, Burr married the former wife of Stephen Jumel, Elizabeth, to whom Jumel had already gifted the Morris mansion, which had served as George Washington's headquarters! She was apparently a stunning beauty, an adventuress and an ex-prostitute, who went on to divorce Burr and die the richest woman in America.

The Riverside Drive viaduct opened in 1901 and was written up in
Scientific American
as a feat of engineering. Some aesthetes criticized its engineer, F. Stewart Williamson, for using steel pillars instead of a more dignified material, like marble or granite (he defended himself by explaining that stone would have required much fatter bases, which would have cut into the adjoining property lines). Today these viaducts have the chic of industrial architecture in its unselfconscious engineering glory. Eric sees them as part of America's love affair with Paris: the lampposts suggest to him those along the Seine, while the visual corridor leading south to Grant's Tomb is reminiscent of the Alexander III Bridge approaching the Invalides.

These viaducts cry out to be more celebrated than they are, with seasonal fiestas in the streets underneath, illuminated by special night lighting. Now the undersides mostly serve as parking lots for schoolbuses. Underneath the Riverside Drive viaduct, at 125th Street and 12th Avenue, you can still see the last vestiges of a trolley turnaround: some tracks and a manhole that reads Third Avenue Company. It was this same Third Avenue Company whom Elizabeth Jennings, an early-day Rosa Parks, successfully sued for putting her off a trolley downtown because she was black.

In the distance, looking east toward 131st Street, may be glimpsed the top of the handsome, castellated Studebaker Building, once part of an uptown Automobile Showroom Row, now occupied by Madame Alexander's Doll Factory, the largest employer in Harlem, making collectible handcrafted dolls. The Warren Nash Building, across the street, is rumored to have been part of the Manhattan Project that led to the A-bomb.

The area is surrounded by educational institutions, which, Eric feels, could do more for Manhattanville. There is of course Columbia (never forget that the university bought the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum to reestablish its campus uptown). Manhattan College started here; it has since located to Riverdale, but its buildings and grounds are incorporated into the southern campus of nearby City College. Teachers College was directly responsible for the public housing in the area, having conducted a house-to-house survey in the 1940s, which ascertained that the Manhattanville tenements were unsanitary and unhealthy. Robert Moses went on to raze them and build the General Grant Houses, Manhattanville Houses, and Morningside Gardens, each for a different economic group.

I am drawn to a Hopperesque row of low-lying brick and carved sandstone buildings just east of “Marginal Street” and the river, which continue to house remnants of the once-booming meatpacking, slaughterhouse, and fish-packaging industries of Manhattanville; you can tell from the powerful smell as you pass them on a hot summer day, wow. They have mostly been acquired by Fairway Supermarket, which runs a phenomenally successful gourmet produce business in the area, catering to Westchester or New Jersey customers who stop off at the Manhattanville waterfront and stock up on endives and Brie and smoked salmon, then drive away. Fairway grows under the viaduct like a giant toadstool, and has a constant need for storage and parking space (it has already usurped waterfront right-of-way for parking); and these ramshackle meatpacking blocks stand a good chance of being knocked down for parking lots. A shame, because they give such a clear idea of the historical streetscape that once prevailed here. Eric hopes the little meatpacking buildings remain, but he's afraid of making too big a deal about preserving them, because that might invite an “accidental” fire or other preemptive strike, before they can receive landmark protection.

Servicing the meat and fish packers is the West Market Diner, with its Budweiser sign and stainless-steel façade: it used to be a train car, or two dining cars stuck together. Inside, you find the classic greasy-spoon decor, stainless steel and Formica and black ridged signs with white letters announcing the bill of fare. The place has been in business at least since the 1940s. The owner is a retirement-age Greek who started working here in 1963, having just come to this country. When I ask him his name, he
turns me aside playfully with “Call me Bill,” in a thick Greek accent. “What do you want to know? Ask me anything.”

“Has it changed a lot?” I ask.

“It used to be like Times Square around here.” There our conversation ends. I can't be bothered to question him further about the past while decoding his accent, so I finish my grilled cheese and my Pepsi in silence. Besides, what is there to ask? He washed up on our American shores thirty-eight years ago, and this is as far as he got. Joseph Mitchell would have squeezed at least twenty pages' worth out of him.

We leave the diner and wander down again to the river's edge, from 125th Street to 132nd Street, where Henry Hudson put down anchor, and where the New Jersey ferries landed,
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and where the dye works and dairies loaded their goods. It seems to offer an incredible missed opportunity for a lively public space on the porch step of Harlem. Not that no one's thought of it: the community board has long dreamed elaborate plans, focusing attention on this site. The Cotton Club, a white stucco structure looking very L.A., with neon lettering (it has more in common with Coppola's 1970 cinematic fantasy,
The Cotton Club
, than with the original Harlem nightspot of that name), accumulates dust at the base of 125th Street. It was
supposed to spark a whole club scene, an entertainment-district revival of Manhattanville. Now it's mainly used for group celebrations, such as Sunday after-church get-togethers. No headliners perform there.

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To learn more about this service, which started in 1866, one must consult the research of two ferry buffs, Raymond J. Baxter and Arthur G. Adams, in their ragingly learned
Railroad Ferries of the Hudson
(Fordham University Press, 1999): “In modern times, the principal line to upper Manhattan was the Edgewater ferry to 125th Street, sometimes known as the Public Service Ferry. This line was started in 1894. In 1900, it was acquired by the then newly organized New Jersey & Hudson River Railway & Ferry Co., which operated an extensive network of electric railways in New Jersey. The line had good connections with the Broadway IRT subway near its Manhattan terminal. Also, Day Line and Night Line steamers stopped at an immediately adjacent pier, and the Iron Steamboat Co. had a pier at 129th Street and operated service downbay and to Coney Island until 1932, making this a popular excursion route. There was also a crosstown trolley car on 125th Street, connecting with the New York Central and New Haven Railroad Stations.

“In 1911, the ferry and electric railways were taken over by the Public Service Railways, a division of Public Service Electric & Gas Company, which also operated a ferry line from Bayonne, New Jersey, to Staten Island. In 1938, the last trolley rolled out of Edgewater Terminal, over the switchback route up the cliffs, and Public Service put on buses in substitution. Public Service soon lost interest in the ferry and began running most of its buses directly across the George Washington Bridge, or through the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, to Manhattan.”

“A lot of what would help revitalize the area is the awareness that it
is
an area,” says Eric. In the 1920s, the vesting of Central Harlem with glamour and panache led to the eclipse of Manhattanville as a separate entity. In effect, Manhattanville became absorbed in the public's mind into Harlem. And so it remains.

12 SEWAGE TREATMENT PLANT AND SALSA PARTY

T
HE RIVERBANK STATE PARK SITS ON A
28.5-
ACRE SITE ON TOP OF THE NORTH RIVER SEWAGE TREATMENT PLANT. IT RUNS BETWEEN WEST
137
TH AND WEST
145
TH Streets, high above Riverside Park, and is a glorious contribution to New York's public space, one of the very best amenities added to the city in a long time. Drivers heading north along the West Side Highway (as I persist in calling it) have no idea what a splendid recreational complex they are missing, because their angle of vision is too low to see it as they ride by. But those who take the trouble to enter the park by foot, from
one of the staircases on the northern end of Manhattanville or from the pedestrian bridges that cross over the highway from Harlem, will discover an entrancing collection of ballfields, tracks, an indoor swimming pool, a covered ice-skating/Rollerblade rink, an athletics building for basketball, volleyball, and gymnastics, a multipurpose cultural center, a restaurant, an amphitheater, even a carousel, all clearly and intelligently distributed.

On weekends, in anything approaching good weather, kids swarm the park to use the athletic facilities; arts-and-crafts tables are set out for small children; couples stroll the grounds or occupy benches by the esplanade overlooking the Hudson River. Operated by the state, not the city, the park has more money to spend on upkeep and staff, and looks tidy and well maintained. The buildings and pavilions, with their bold red and green accents, tan bricks, and cool fiberglass pyramid roofs, have a light, friendly, beachhouse look, perking up the open spaces of the playing fields without in any way dominating them. Richard Dattner & Partners designed Riverbank State Park in a manner characteristic of the firm's work: warm, unimposing, vaguely tropical. Dattner was the fourth architect hired on to the job, and he saw it through a tempestuous fifteen-year process (1978-93) of planning and construction.