Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (30 page)

AT FORT TRYON PARK, which can be entered around 190th Street, I pass the familiar herbal garden and the medieval tower of the Cloisters, all the generous bequest of the Rockefeller family to the city of New York. Not only did the Rockefeller family bequeath the land and the buildings,
they bought up the Palisades across the Hudson, on the New Jersey side, so that visitors to the Cloisters would have a wooded vista to contemplate, protected from future development. Say what you may about the Rockefellers' cupidity, none of today's billionaires would even think to give this or any other city so magnificent an enhancement.

Descending from the Cloisters, I see Inwood stretched out below. Its comfortably lower-middle-class mix of three-story retail along Dyckman Street and Broadway, and six-story walkup apartment houses along the cross-avenues, has not changed much since the sixties, at least from this angle; its chic-resistant personality rejects gentrification.

I remember how Carol and I used to walk down to the river along Dyckman Street, at dusk on a summer's night, past a carpet-cleaning factory, and how scandalously intimate with the Hudson we were able to get, close enough to trail our hands in the swift-moving water. Yes, this is where we always entered, through the fence at the edge of Inwood Park, right next to the marina (which has undergone improvements since I lived here). You can walk along a narrow dirt path above the black rocks leading to the water—or over the rocks themselves—but I prefer the path. To the west is the river, broad and consolatory, and the Palisades cliffs, fortunately untouched, or just barely, by condo construction at this northern point, so that it must be almost the same vista the Lenapes and Wiechquaesgecks saw. To the east, as you walk along the dirt path, are the fenced-in ballfields of Inwood Park. I am walking along at five o'clock, the setting winter sun licking the trees golden, and I am absolutely elated. Why so happy, I begin to wonder, when I have been walking along the waterfront all day? Is it that this stretch feels particularly wild, as though I were actually in the country (leaving aside the ballfields)? Is it the magical hour of day? I am the only walker here, which frightens and exhilarates me a bit, though just as I think that thought, a jogger whizzes by me, an elderly, bespectacled man with stringy calves. He is older than I by a decade, and yet in better shape. Well, never mind; walking is good exercise, too. I am happy, happy, happy. Farther downtown, so many obstructions, fences, and roads kept me from the river. Only here, on the northern tip of the island, with highways nowhere in sight, do I feel in direct contact with the river, I smell it, I lustily breathe it in.

After walking about two miles along the Inwood Park shoreline in this
contented state, ahead of me I suddenly see a fence blocking my way. The dirt path is drawing to an end. I call out to the elderly jogger, who is circling back in my direction, “How do you get out of here?” He yells back, “You don't!” then, looking annoyed that he will have to break stride and play Good Samaritan, comes to a halt. “You either have to go all the way back to Dyckman Street, or halfway back to that footbridge”—he points to a green structure with steep stairs—” or I guess you could try squeezing under the fence and proceeding that way.” I am for going forward, no turning back! All day I have been moving north, north, north, and am not going to be deterred at this point from savoring the uppermost curve of the island.

I thank him and approach the chain-link fence, which is twisted out of shape in one corner of the base, suggesting others have ducked under here before. I crawl on all fours through the tangled vines, then stand up, banging my head against the fencepost. Just then a train hurtles by, so close as to give me a fright. Ohmigod, I must be on the Metro North train tracks. Posted signs say, PRIVATE PROPERTY AMTRAK KEEP OUT
!
Gladly would I, but I am trapped in a cage: beyond the tracks stands a chain-link fence too high to scale.

I have no choice but to follow the tracks. I walk along the gravel by their side, reasoning that another train will not be coming anytime soon. I now start crossing a narrow rail-bridge over a body of water—the Spuyten Duyvil, I believe. In other words, I am leaving Manhattan! I have left Manhattan Island, I will never caress the giant's rounded shoulder. It is getting darker, and also colder. I need to put my gloves on, but the wind is so vigorous that I'm afraid if I let go of the railing even for a second I will fall into the river. I look down below, past the meshed metal path I am standing on (is it even designed for walking?), to see if I am getting dizzy. Just keep moving forward.

Finally I make it to the end of the bridge; I am at the edge of the Bronx, which used to be part of Manhattan before the dynamiting of Hellgate channeled the Harlem River through. Just beyond is Riverdale. Some beat-up train tracks lie ahead, not a human being in sight. I feel like a hobo, walking the tracks. If I keep veering east, I will get to those apartment buildings looming up ahead. The underbrush is too thick; I can't find a path along this abandoned, funky set of train tracks. I'll have to walk
right down the middle of them! They're probably no longer in operation. Sure enough, they dribble off into the grass. I push through dense shrubbery and find myself looking up at substantial apartment houses in the distance. The problem is that I am separated from them by a new set of train tracks, and these are much more serious-looking.

As I get closer to the outside track, I read with alarm: 1700 VOLTS, DANGEROUS, DO NOT TOUCH EVER, or words to that effect. I wonder what 1,700 volts would do to me. Across the tracks, waiting for me, is a glass-enclosed train station: SPUYTEN DUYVIL, says the station sign. Now I have to calm myself and mentally picture stepping casually yet carefully over the third rail, under no circumstances tripping or grabbing the rail for support. The fact that I am notoriously clumsy enters into the imaging process. Well, I may be clumsy in general, but I will not be clumsy this time. No: I will step with a high arc over the rail, going nowhere near it, as soon as I feel calm enough. And so I do. Then I step high over the second and the first rails, not taking any chances touching them, although they are not marked with warnings. Looking up, I notice an old woman in a babushka who has been watching me all this while, behind the Plexiglas, with a scared expression. Is she frightened of me, or for me? Do I remind her of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, or some crazy mugger who lives beside the tracks and is going to attack her? At the moment I'm no menace to anyone but myself: not sure how to pull myself up onto the platform, it is too high to belly-flop onto, but I'd better do it before the train comes. Luckily, I find a metal ladder at the end of the platform, I climb it and ascend the steps of the station and cross over, past Babushka Lady, into civilization.

I scramble up and then down Marble Hill, legs now shaking with exhaustion, and find myself on Broadway, by the elevated Number 2 line. A Manhattan-bound bus happens to be standing there, with a sign that promises 168 street. I board it, and look around in the pitch-black Bronx night at dingy stores with neon lights lining the street. As we are crossing the bridge into Manhattan, the tiny Filipino nurse sitting next to me says, “Mister—Jesus loves you. Mister—the Lord Jesus Christ loves you.”

“Okay. I get the picture.”

Determined to go back and explore the rounded shoulder of upper Manhattan, I return eight months later, this time accompanied by a labor historian I know, Steve Fraser, who lives in an apartment with spectacular views overlooking Inwood Park. We enter the park at Isham Place near 211th Street. A broad, open green slopes gently down to the water. The prettiest part of Manhattan, it seems at that moment. A large pond is awash with ducks on a warm June day. At the artificial lake's edge sits a white art-deco-style park building, now used as an Urban Ecology Center. Steve tells me that after World War II there were plans to redirect the Harlem River into the park and establish a public marina there, but the city ran out of funds, or rethought the scheme, so now you have just a little canal filtering water into a pond. At one of the pond's indentations, the city is trying to establish a little beach, the beginnings of a wetland mitigation project. So far, all you can see over in that corner are some rocks, dirt piles, and shade trees: it gives a scruffier sort of edge than elsewhere on the geometrically engirdled pond.

Across the river, on the Bronx side, is a cliff with a giant
C
on it, my alma mater's imperial mark, which both embarrasses and pleases me, the sky-blue edged in white repainted each year by fraternity boys suspended on ropes, to signify Columbia's territorial claims in the area, through its operation of team athletic facilities: Bakers Field football stadium, a tennis club, and a rowing boathouse. Steve, seeing me stare at the orgulous
C,
shrugs, as if to say, “What are you gonna do?” He is more interested in the Inwood Little League field, founded in 1950, in which his son hit several home runs, and which he assures me has “perfect” ballpark dimensions for that playing level.

Steve is justly proud of Inwood Park, which he says is very safe, especially in summer, when there are always plenty of residents from the community using it. In September, Native American tribes gather in the park for an annual shad festival, either bringing the fish in to cook or catching them at the shore. Here, too, a plaque informs us, is where the settlers supposedly bought Manhattan from the Indians. That it was an important site for local tribes is well established: archaeologists have found middens, mounds of shellfish shells, left by Native Americans in Inwood Park, and these historical sites are now protected, more or less, from souvenir hunters by chain-link fences.

We start ascending into the woods. Inwood Park is much wilder than, say, Fort Tryon Park; it has no Cloisters or rose gardens. It has, in fact, the only native forest left in the city. There are still great tulip trees and oaks, Manhattan's oldest and largest wild trees, mixed in with bitternut hickory, flowering dogwood, and black cherry. The hilly, wooded terrain is much like you might encounter in the country, which makes this landscape a complete anomaly for Manhattan. Perhaps less has been made of it than seems proper because it so serenely resembles a familiar landscape—elsewhere.

“Instant air conditioning,” says Steve, beaming, “even in summer during heat waves, it's cool here.” He points out the caves where homeless people used to live during the Great Depression, and perhaps more recently. The park was also a big hangout for teenage drugs and drinking in the 1970s, according to the poet Jim Carroll's
Basketball Diaries.
Irish teenagers especially would hang out in the woods and play basketball in the courts by the water: they looked strong and athletic till their mid-twenties, after which their bodies would sag, deteriorating from booze.

“I used to bring my dog, Baron, over here for hours each day,” says Steve. “That dog would get into fights with squirrels, raccoons, even rats—he was a real hunting dog. When he died, my wife said, ‘That's it, now no more dogs in the house!’ ”

Still ascending, we pass a shed for tollbooths over the Henry Hudson Bridge. Swerving back into the forest, we could swear we were on a country road. The farther away you get from the highway and the river, the quieter it becomes. Steve starts looking for the ruins of the School and Home for Wayward Girls. It used to exist high up in Inwood Park, sometime in the late nineteenth century. Finally we happen upon it: a stone wall, waist-high, and various granite foundation blocks. Steve is excitedly telling me the background of the institution, who is thought to have started it, what the philanthropic ideology at the time was, when I notice, atop one of the low stone walls, an unpleasant surprise: the word kike has been formed out of twigs. I feel suddenly unwanted in this Eden. And I feel sorry for Steve, also Jewish, whose pride in his neighborhood park has been deflated. We say something banal about how deep and enduring anti-Semitism remains as a world force, but it also strikes us as just
bloody strange that such an archaic derogatory locution would crop up today.
*
In Philippe Soupault's
Last Nights of Paris,
the narrator says that he walks all night through the city in hopes of encountering a corpse. I walk and walk, it seems at that moment, in order to encounter a sign that will tell me to get lost.

*
On the other hand, I later learned that “Kike” is sometimes used by Dominicans (who also proliferate in the Inwood area) as a nickname for “Enrique,” in which case it would be perfectly innocent. We will never know.

14 INTRODUCTION: ON THE AESTHETICS OF URBAN WALKING AND WRITING