Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (40 page)

There you find the 1883 Fulton Market Building, where all manner of goods that came in off the boat or from the neighboring district (fruits, vegetables, meats, rags, paper) were once sold at indoor stalls. There the Rouse Corporation “preserved” the structure's exterior while dividing up the honeycomb-stalled interior into a few large retail boxes. The first stores leased were more local and oriented toward the maritime trades, based on the model of Mystic Seaport, Connecticut. But as these folded, they were replaced by national chains. In fact, nothing seems to succeed here for long. Currently the Gap shares the building with Bridgewater, a private club. Shades of Chelsea Piers, where once-active public spaces overlooking the waterfront have given way to private catering halls. A shame; if only they had tried harder to retain the crowded market-stall atmosphere, they could have created a genuine magnet.

But when you look west up Fulton Street just beyond the restored Seaport, to the gigantic steel-and-glass financial-service skyscrapers rimming it, you realize that it barely mattered whether the stores placed in the Fulton Market made it or not; their true importance was in providing a quaint, sanitized backdrop for the new towers.

Barbara remembers when the river-end of Fulton Street, which is cobblestoned, had an ordinary asphalt surface; the workmen had to dig up the asphalt and lay down fresh cobblestones to get the proper Ye Olde Seaport effect, and when they ran out of cobblestones, they stole some from the adjoining streets. The irony is that many of the streets surrounding the Seaport Museum are truly, convincingly old; along narrow, cobbled alleys, grimy brick walkups with Dutch gables and boarded-up windows are still allowed to present a tenement face to the world. She shows me a part she especially likes, on Front Street, where the jerry-built, pitch-patched backs of the fish market buildings look irresistibly picturesque; probably they were once sailors' boardinghouses. After the Fulton Fish Market is relocated to the Bronx, Barbara thinks, these ancient abandoned wrecks that have seen more than their share of crime and murder will be renovated and
sold as townhouses for over a million apiece. “It'll be like Georgetown,” she says.

A community of serious artists once lived in the Seaport neighborhood: Agnes Martin, Mark di Suvero, Clyfford Still and Ellsworth Kelly, Red Grooms and Christo all occupied semi-illegal lofts in these abandoned warehouses. The fish market also drew a plethora of drifters (“smokeys,” they were called) and alley cats, says Barbara. She points to a parking lot in front of the Fulton Market Building and says that it used to be a dry dock for boat repairs. Another parking lot on Peck Slip once contained some fine old buildings, but they burned in a fire. All empty spaces previously filled by market functions or habitations are now, automatically, it would seem, given over to parking. In addition, much of the area underneath the highway viaduct, just south of the Seaport, is turned over to tourist buses, whose engines are kept running in idle most of the time.

On a winter day in March, temperature in the low thirties, we have an adventure. Barbara has told me about some fascinating rooms
inside
the Brooklyn Bridge, which she was permitted to photograph during a recent period of maintenance work, when a supporting beam needed replacement. I've long known about the vaults on the Brooklyn anchorage side, and even attended gallery exhibits there, but these interior spaces on the Manhattan anchorage side are news to me. I insist on her showing me them. As we approach the chain-link fence that cordons off the bridge from the street, she notices that a metal door in the bridge's stone façade is off its hinges, a good sign; it means that, theoretically at least, we can get inside the bridge if we can manage to scale the fence.

After some discussion about who is going to lead the way, and much looking nervously about, she climbs over first, tearing her jacket in the process. I start to hoist myself up, though I am having second thoughts about this, worried about tearing my own jacket, when some beat-up guy with front teeth missing, who has been watching us and smiling at our efforts, says, “There's an easier way. Just go down to the end, the second fence gate, you can pull it apart easy and slip in.” I climb down and make my way to the gate he has described, Barbara meanwhile crossing the lot from her end to meet me. Sure enough, it's simple to wedge my body inside there.

The concrete lot between the fence and the bridge is home to mounds
of abandoned tires, black garbage bags, and smelly debris. The chain-link fence has reserved space signs hanging on it, left over from a period when the lot was leased for parking. It's amazing that such a trashed-out area should adjoin one of our most beloved national monuments. I mean, can you imagine such a dumping ground allowed to fester near the Eiffel Tower or Mount Fuji? That's New York for you. We pass a black homeless man warming himself by a wastebasket with a fire lit at the bottom. By looking away, he gives us to understand that he is not a threat.

Barbara moves the metal door aside, reassuring me that it will be all right, and slides in on her back, through a hole about three feet by three feet. Somehow I too manage to squeeze in on my back, and find myself in a pitch-black chamber. “Give yourself a minute or two for your eyes to adjust to the dark,” she says. “Usually I take a flashlight with me, but I didn't know we'd be doing this today.” She grabs my hand and leads the way, cautioning me to move slowly. The floor feels like a combination of wood and earth. I am beginning to make out dim shapes, pieces of discarded wrought iron on the floor, and, up ahead, a staircase. “This used to be a factory,” she says. We inch toward the staircase, which has an elegant iron bannister, very old, rusty and dirty. I notice a lightbulb dangling from the ceiling and wonder if the power is still connected. Maybe the city is still paying the electric bill from its last maintenance job. The bannister has a gap of about a foot somewhere up ahead. Barbara tells me to shift my weight to the other side when we reach that hiatus. One of the steps is very tippy, but I feel reasonably secure, moving slowly, testing every footfall. We reach the second floor, which seems much more like a factory studio. Little half-moons, holes in the brick façade, give us all the daylight we need. I see a toilet bowl ripped out and on its side. The ceiling has a series of arches in it. A small shaft of light triangulates a corner of a wall, revealing a verdigris pattern of decay. The walls are brick—I am tempted to say “exposed brick,” as if this were a decor decision, though the only decorative principle operating here is total abandonment. It is fantastically beautiful—a combination of the architecture's original nobility and the serendipitous outcropping effects achieved by ruins—and sad. To think of the derelict state this national treasure has been allowed to fall into! I had always thought the Brooklyn Bridge was well maintained.

On the third floor there is much more light, because on either end of
the floor an entire arched window has been punched out, and nothing but sky left in its place. I walk over and look down at the cars struggling up the ramp onto the Brooklyn-bound side, a road I have taken hundreds of times myself. Now I am above them, looking down at them/me. Still farther above me, on the structure's roof, hundreds of cars pass unseen. From inside the bridge I can hear little, it's fairly quiet. What's most amazing on this third floor is the vaulted wooden ceiling, which looks like the keel of a canoe. Barbara tells me that different materials were used on each side: brick and wood in the Manhattan anchorage, and stone on the Brooklyn end. Incongruously, a basketball hoop sits atop a wooden pole in the middle of the room.

It seems, according to Barbara's research, that John Roebling, the first designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, had planned the largest vaulted spaces as a market hall, which, in his words, would “sooner or later supersede the old Fulton Market.” He had also envisioned some of the fortress-thick tunnels and vaults being used to store bonds or currency—exploiting the bridge's proximity to Wall Street. But when the banks showed no interest, the lofts were adopted for light industry and warehousing. A Department of Bridges report, 1898, lists a rent roll of twenty-eight tenants for these spaces, with purposes such as cold storage, machinery, radiators, leather, printing, wine, lamps, stables, grocers' supplies, filtering, iron, junk, cooperage, and ship chandlery. The last business to be listed, the Hide and Skin Trucking Corporation, moved out of the anchorage by the beginning of the 1970s. If these rooms were ever cleaned up, they would make idyllic artists' lofts. Barbara says she would love to have a studio here, as would every Downtown artist she knows. I am thinking they would also make wonderful screening rooms. With a mixture of regret and relief, we crawl back out into the early evening.

YOU GET AN INKLING of life alongside the Brooklyn Bridge when it was first built from this passage in
Darkness and Daylight
(1893) by Mrs. Helen Campbell, one of those sun-and-shadow guidebooks that revealed the secret squalors of New York: “Under the great Bridge stands a tenement house so shadowed by the vast structure that, save at midday, natural light barely penetrates it…. The women who cannot afford the gas or oil that
must burn if they work in the daytime sleep while day lasts; and when night comes, and the searching rays of the electric light penetrates every corner of their shadowy rooms, turn to the toil by which their bread is won. Heavy-eyed women toil at the washboard or run the sewing-machine, and when sunrise has come and the East River and the beautiful harbor are aflame with color, the light for these buildings is extinguished….”

My late friend Rudy Burckhardt, the Swiss-born photographer and experimental filmmaker, made a twenty-minute film,
Under the Brooklyn Bridge
(1947), a city symphony that captures indelibly, as in a time capsule, what the industrial area around the bridge looked like immediately after the Second World War. I have watched it dozens of times and still ache to possess its elusive beauty by heart. In the first scene, the ornamental details of an already-hoary warehouse-and-factory architecture—the massive arches, the stone-carved heads, the beam-anchoring stars implanted in brick façades—are placed against the larger, fabulous, gossamer-granite, spectral structure of the bridge itself. The second scene shows the demolition of a substantial building facing the bridge: workmen hammer at the stone, tie rope to both ends of a wall and pull it apart, cart bricks away in wheelbarrows, dump debris down a chute into a waiting truck, drive tractors through rubble mounds, while a supervisor stands by, chewing gum. Time-lapse photography shows the sturdy warehouse coming down floor after floor, like a chocolate layer cake consumed by tiers. In scene three, the men are on their lunch break, eating packed sandwiches on a building deck or crowding into a workers' café. Their faces are suspicious, appetite-driven, sharing a craggy obduracy with the materials they demolish. A lifetime of physical labor has left them hardened but calm. The waiters and countermen who serve them look equally battered. In the distance, through the window glass, looms the Brooklyn Bridge, a favorite Burckhardt touch. Episode four is an urban arcadia of a half-dozen boys swimming in the East River. These neighborhood kids look Italian or Puerto Rican: they make their way past grass, weeds, and rotting pilings, improvise a plank as a diving board, and leap in, some buck naked, their penises wagging like bell clappers, others in underpants; one crossing himself before the dive, another sunning on a rock afterward. Theirs is a private boy's world of audacity and laughter, before the public's awareness of
PCBs. The East River was polluted back then, but evidently not enough to stop the young and intrepid. In the next scene, women workers, white and black, leave their factories and head for the subway. Together they walk with an unhurried ceremoniousness tinged with bone-fatigue under monumental, arched vaults and past empty lots. Some have on half-moon forties hats; all wear either blouses and skirts or dresses, and look pin-neat at the end of the workday. Burckhardt ends his film with a few long shots of the area, deserted now, to the haunted piano score of Robert Fitzdale and Arthur Gold, and one last glimpse of a tugboat cutting under the mighty span at night.

20 THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE

C
ONFRONTING THE WORLD
'
S MOST RECOGNIZABLE, REPRODUCED MONUMENTS
—
THE EIFFEL TOWER, THE PYRAMIDS, THE ACROPOLIS, THE COLOSSEUM, THE Brooklyn Bridge—the mind tends to go numb. So much devotion has been lavished on these by-now primal shapes, they seem hard-wired into our imaginations, iconically omnipresent and therefore refractory to awe. Still, we long to feel the same shiver our ancestors did; and sometimes we have what approximates a religious experience in their proximity, either because of or despite the programming we've received. The rest of the time we must scrape away apathy and make a conscious effort to rekindle our wonderment, by exploring the historical ground against which they first stood out as miraculous.

Of all the world's grand monuments, the oddest, I would think, is the Brooklyn Bridge, because it is so purely functional. This paradox was articulated by America's first important architectural critic, Montgomery Schuyler, when he wrote in 1883, the year it opened: “It so happens that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge.”