Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (28 page)

And now I've come to the magical center: I enter it through a modest break between cars and grass. What it is, this magnetically pulsing zone, is essentially a parking lot. In addition to the cars parked everywhere, a stream of vehicles waits to filter in from the north, while a small group of early leavetakers tries to edge its way out. Along the rim of this parking lot, portable stoves and food tables have been stationed to cook and vend roast chicken, pigs' feet,
ropa vieja
, empanadas, potatoes, cabbage, pork chops, salted cod, rice and beans, and just about everything greasy or fattening that sends “crave” signals to the brain. The overall, enticing smell
of fried onions holds within its envelope many individual, piquant aromas. The servers stack the paper plates high with helpings; it's assumed you will want a taste of everything. People eat standing up, or crammed behind steering wheels. Appetite, not comfort, calls the shots.

NO ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES PERMITTED IN THIS AREA, a sign by the staircase had warned. Too bad, I'd thought, it must be hard to strike a down-home party spirit without liquor. Not to worry; as soon as you enter the zone you see vans with cases of beer stacked inside, adding an outlaw quality to the festivities. I look around quickly, wondering, where are the cops? In the distance is the familiar NYPD blue and white car, and thereafter, all through the night, I notice patrol pairs on foot, and police cars cruising around. But the sense you get is that they're being tactful, nonin-trusive—more there to keep the peace, should a fight break out, than to enforce the liquor laws.

I can't get over the paradox that a makeshift parking lot—especially if you find parking lots as ugly as I do—should have the power to attract and hold these many enchanted people. But as I begin to make my way around the rectangle, I realize that it's not just a parking lot, it's also become a
plaza mayor
, in the classical Latin American sense, a square around which the communal energies gather, and from any point of which you can watch the townspeople's comings and goings. The Upper Manhattan Hispanic community has taken this flat, nondescript area of Riverside Park, originally intended for pastoral retreat, which happens to be near the exit ramp of the West Side Highway, and “liberated” it, with their genius for city-making, bringing the congested vitality of the street to the Olmstedian woods.

Second, it's not the physical surroundings that matter here, but the aural surround. Every thirty feet a different salsa tune is blaring; yet the effect is not cacophonous, but rather like variant melodic streams all feeding the same sonic lake. Maybe because so many salsa tunes have that same steady mambo rhythm, neither slow ballad nor up-tempo but ongoing, insistent, hip-grinding, they mesh. What had sounded from a distance like a single powerful sound system is revealed close up to be decentralized: some cars sport ghetto blasters, some have raised hoods filled with speaker drums—the entire vehicle turned into an amplifier, only secondarily a means of transport.

I watched a very handsome young couple doing a merengue, with that insinuating, gliding mastery of good Latin dancers everywhere. At first they seemed as close as you could get to having sex in public, so synchronized were their pelvic movements. But at one point the man tried to brush his hand against the woman's breasts, and was reproached with a prim smile, establishing the boundaries of affectionate display. They were in their own world, focused intently, as though under a pink, spotlighted cone of glamour, rather than in a shabby parking lot. Were they passionately in love, I wondered, or would-be ballroom dancers competing for an imaginary gold medal?

Around the zone, stout, middle-aged couples danced, enjoying themselves, relaxed, with less at stake. What caught my eye again and again, however, were the
princesas
in their pride of beauty, slender yet full-figured, with long black hair, who moved confidently though the salsa party with a young woman's pleasure in her supreme moment of arrival. You had to respect the self-assurance of the mating spectacle, each gender carrying out its role to the fullest.

Making my way out of the parking zone, toward the river, I passed two Hispanic men who looked like graduate students, engrossed in learned conversation, and again it was borne in on me that this was a community event, not just something for the sexy and beautiful who provoked my envious fantasies.

The 151st Street handball courts acted as a sort of northern barrier to the salsa party, somewhat as Richard Serra's
Tilted Arc
had functioned puritanically downtown. I wanted to make my way out of the park, without having to backtrack to the Riverbank Park staircase. But it wasn't easy to find an exit from Riverside Park across the highway. I realized one of the reasons that cars play such a dominant part in the salsa party is the lack of pedestrian access to this part of the park. Which came first, limited pedestrian access or working-class Latino car culture?

At 155th Street, I locate a pedestrian overpass. You still have to cross two highway lanes to get to it, but that only requires patience, not foolhardy courage. I walk up the stairs and find myself in a creepy tunnel, dark, deserted, filling me with trepidation at this late hour. Fortunately, no one with evil intent lurks in the shadows: beyond the tunnel, just ahead, are a few teenage couples making out in the cool night air. To my left looms the
stately, white-columned American Academy of Arts and Sciences, whose annual function I once or twice attended, and the Museum of Hispanic Culture, with its distinguished names carved into the pediment, next to which is Boricua College. Strange to come upon this sober campus of cultural institutions after a night of populist carousal! I am on Broadway again, and wave to an oncoming taxi to take me home.

IF YOU WERE TO STAY in the park and keep walking northward, through a dirt path surrounded by high weeds, you would come to one of the loveliest, most harmonious, and yet least-known spots on the Manhattan waterfront. I am speaking of the river's edge along Fort Washington Park. The Hudson River looks magnificent here. There is a particular, covelike indentation in the Hudson, with an oak tree in the foreground, the sun beating off the water, and the proud Little Red Lighthouse in the distance, dwarfed by the George Washington Bridge, which is one of the most stirring sights I know. Here the natural undulations of the shoreline swell and curve with great beauty; a green meadow slants down to algaed rocks, which invite you to clamber and bend down to touch the water; there are occasional picnic benches, tennis courts, a paved gravel road. In recent years this riverside stretch of Fort Washington Park has received pampering attention. To the east, on the other side of the train tracks and highway, the slopes of Fort Washington Park remain debris-laden and badly tended, as are most of the parks beside poor, minority neighborhoods; but this particular spot leads a charmed life.

One of the reasons it remains so secret is that it is not easy to get to. Descending from the streets above, a city-within-a-city of pain and its therapeutic remedies, where Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital holds sway, I tried my usual bullheaded method of proceeding down the vine-scrabbled hill until the Henry Hudson Highway cut me off, then made a mad dash for it. Actually, the highway bifurcates within the park, so that you have to risk your life twice to get to the water's edge. I got halfway across the first highway when a police car screeched beside me and a highway patrolman with the sternest expression said to me, Did I know I had just broken a law? I was aghast with astonishment; Claude Rains in
Casablanca
could not have been more “shocked.” He let me off, after telling me about the legal way to
get across: a pedestrian bridge somewhere above and to the left. There are, in fact, two—and only two—footbridges that cross the highways and bring you down to the riverside, between all of Fort Washington Park and Fort Tryon Park, the equivalent of fifty city blocks (two or three miles): one, near the mouth of 168th Street and Riverside Drive, difficult to find amid the entangled highway ramps, and the other, a few blocks north of the George Washington Bridge, around 182nd Street and Riverside Drive. My own preference is to take the stairs at the northern end of the waste treatment plant down to the park, and hew to the shoreline.

In any case, if you are lucky or persistent enough to find yourself on that enchanted stretch of riverfront park, walking north, you will come to the Little Red Lighthouse, which dates from 1880. In their 1942 children's classic,
The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge
, Hildegarde H. Swift and Lynd Ward told us: “Once upon a time a little lighthouse was built on a sharp point of the shore by the Hudson River. It was round and fat and red. It was fat and red and jolly. And it was VERY, VERY PROUD.” With its beacon of light and, on foggy nights, its bell, it warned the boats on the river against crashing into the shore, until the strange new bridge was built, which “made the little red lighthouse feel very very small.” Eventually they sort it out, each has its role to play, the giant and the midget. In truth, once the George Washington Bridge was opened in 1932, the Coast Guard closed the lighthouse. It was put up for auction, but schoolchildren wrote letters of protest, and it was turned over to the Parks Department. Thenceforth it fell on hard times, its concrete base cracked, its doors welded shut, until finally it was restored. Today it wears a gleaming coat of red, and its interior (re-equipped with a genuine Fresnel lens, operating on a timer) has been made available for school field trips.

The bridge itself dominates not only the lighthouse but the whole northern Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was built by the great engineer O. H. Ammann with the assistance of architect Cass Gilbert, and has an austere profile—nothing fussy about it. Le Corbusier himself was moved to write, after he visited these shores, in
When the Cathedrals Were White
(1947):

The George Washington Bridge over the Hudson is the most beautiful bridge in the world. Made of cables and steel beams, it gleams in the sky
like a reversed arch. It is blessed. It is the only seat of grace in this disordered city. It is painted an aluminum color and, between water and sky, you see nothing but the bent cord supported by two steel towers. When your car moves up the ramp the two towers rise so high that it brings you happiness; their structure is so pure, so resolute, so regular that here, finally, steel architecture seems to laugh. The car reaches an unexpectedly wide apron; the second tower is very far away; innumerable vertical cables, gleaming against the sky, are suspended from the magisterial curve which swings down and then up. The rose-colored towers of New York appear, a vision whose harshness is mitigated by distance.

Magnificent as this appreciation sounds, it is the enthusiasm of a traveler, and a doctrinaire one at that. I can't imagine locals on either end of the span, in Fort Lee, New Jersey, or Washington Heights, Manhattan, gushing this way, nor have I ever sensed its steel architecture laugh. Not even a giggle. A lower traffic level was added in 1962, which mars the perfect simplicity of the child's sailboat design; I always try to edit it out visually to imagine the shivery purity that so captivated Le Corbusier.

A year after
When the Cathedrals Were White
was published, a very different sort of tribute to Ammann's span appeared. It was right here, near the base of the George Washington Bridge and the Little Red Lighthouse, that John Garfield found Thomas Gomez's gang-murdered body, tossed on the rocks, at the end of Abraham Polonsky's 1948 noir masterpiece,
Force of Evil.
This film, after claustrophobically shuttling between bookie joints and nightclubs, “opens up,” as they say, catches a gulp of air in the larger, more unimpeded vistas of urban riverside, as Garfield's character, holding the corpse of his older brother in the gray dawn, vows to give up his dirty, corrupted life.

If you wish to proceed north past the George Washington Bridge, you can take a path that leads you steeply uphill and away from the water, until it joins with the Cloisters at the summit-top of Fort Tryon Park. Should you want to cleave to the water, however, you will have to scramble along some tide-wetted, pointed rocks for about a mile. I did this one time, edging past two officers of the law placed there after 9/11 to guard the bridge against sabotage, who were sleeping in their car (one of the less heralded uses of the waterfront is that it supplies a hideout for napping policemen),
and ventured forth along the rocky coast—the only natural stretch left on Manhattan's shoreline, by the way, being neither riprap nor bulkhead—all the way to the Dyckman Street marina in Inwood. It was arduous going, as I progressed boulder by boulder, partly upright, partly on my hands and knees and ass; but it had become a point of pride to travel as far as possible alongside the river.

Whenever I chanced to look up, pausing from the decision as to where I could least perilously place my next shoe, I saw an inspiring, postcard view of the Hudson, with the sun blinking its flanks. I could have been on some rocky coast of Nova Scotia, for all its remoteness to human life; and yet this was still Manhattan! The only sign of civilization I came across was a homeless person's shack wedged into the rock face, tarpapered and trimly square; the occupant was absent and, peering inside, I saw a sleeping pallet below a picture of Jesus. Otherwise this stretch of rocky shore must be the least-trafficked segment in the New York parks system. For more habitable sights, it is advisable to take the hilly path at the base of the bridge, leave the park entirely, and venture into the neighborhood on the cliffs above, Washington Heights.

13 WASHINGTON HEIGHTS AND INWOOD