Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (42 page)

In his 1924
Port of New York,
Paul Rosenfeld gathered a collection of his essays on fourteen American moderns, who included Arthur Dove, John Marin, William Carlos Williams, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Marsden Hartley. He analyzed what he called “the drama of cultural awakening” in America of the 1920s, using the Port of New York as a central organizing image. No longer was it necessary for bohemians and artists to go abroad, Rosenfeld argued. “For what we once could feel only by quitting New York—the fundamental oneness we have with the place and the people in it—that is sensible to us today in the very jostling, abstracted streets of the city. We know it here, our relationship with this place in which we live. The buildings cannot deprive us of it. For they and we have suddenly commenced growing together.” If the buildings were entwining roots into the artists' souls, how much more so their beloved Bridge, the mother of local modernism, which spanned this selfsame, essential Port of New York?

SUCH FERVENT, MYTHIFYING WORSHIP could not continue at the same heat. It was too much to put on any bridge, even the most awesomely endearing. The literary tributes fell away, though Roebling's wonder continued to be the most photographed bridge in the world.

Crossing it today, you are made aware of the tense play of light and shadow in the Brooklyn Bridge's form: the granite arches that loom like minarets beckoning the traveler to prayer; the haunting shadow of the bridge on water; the serpentine plunge of the span's railing, like a roller-coaster descending into the high-rise city. Then there is the relationship between the bridge and the metropolis: on one side, flamboyant, vertical Manhattan; on the other, a more horizontal, spread-out Brooklyn.

I remember admiring the terrifying acrobatic cool of ironworkers, these sky-walkers who function, as the saying goes, without a net, when they repaired the bridge some years back. (The nets that were strung up, incidentally, were installed to protect the vehicles and pedestrians, not the repair workers.) How calm they looked in their hardhats as they perched over the river, one misstep away from catastrophe, drinking their coffee through ski masks necessitated by the bitter cold.

“When the perfected East River bridge shall permanently and uninterruptedly connect the two cities,” predicted a reporter for the
Brooklyn Eagle,
Thomas Kinsella, with some regret, “the daily thousands who cross it will consider it a sort of natural and inevitable phenomenon, such as the rising and setting of the sun, and they will unconsciously overlook the preliminary difficulties surmounted before the structure spanned the stream, and will perhaps undervalue the indomitable courage, the absolute faith, the consummate genius which assured the engineer's triumph.” Seeing those ironworkers restoring the bridge returned me to the original romance of its making. “How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!” demanded Hart Crane. But apparently mere toil did—and does, in a mutual dependency between nature and humanity, stone and sweat, that is as ancient to monuments as it is noble.

21 UNDER THE BRIDGES

A
LONG THE RIVERSIDE, BETWEEN THE BROOKLYN AND MANHATTAN BRIDGES, RUNS A PLEASANT ESPLANADE
(
DESIGNED BY CARR, LYNCH AND SANDELL, 1997), which is the first section of the East River Bikeway and Esplanade. A plaque informs us that one day it will extend from Pier A in the Battery up to East 63rd Street, where it will join with the esplanade that runs all the way to 125th Street. This first stage, with its square gray paving stones, curved metal benches, separated pedestrian and bike lanes, and attractive fences, not too high, overlooking the seawall, exists underneath the FDR Drive, sunless and noisy with the thud of cars going over metal plates and asbestos seams.

On the Labor Day weekend when I check out the esplanade, it is mostly being used by Asian-Americans who have walked over from nearby Chinatown: a pregnant woman in a pink gingham dress strolling with her friend, a serious, bespectacled young couple holding hands as they roller-skate, an elderly man fishing, a grumpy, middle-aged pair having an irritable discussion on a bench (no point in my eavesdropping, I can't understand a word of Cantonese). A few amateur photographers are snapping the glorious Brooklyn views: a river sunset, the Watchtower buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the River Café, the Empire Stores. A plane flies by with a streamer attached: andrea i love you will you marry me lenny. No one near me jumps up and down, so we have to assume Andrea is elsewhere.

A teenage girl, Indian, beckons to a smaller black girl, walking from the opposite direction with her pals: “Hello! How you doing, birthday girl?” She runs up to hug her, while a boy (most likely the celebrated one's brother) mutters, “It's tomorrow.”

The Manhattan Bridge, it would appear from this angle underneath, has been newly painted a dark forest green. I approve. It looks almost as good now as the Brooklyn Bridge. I pass a homeless man reclining on a bench under several heavy woolen blankets, though it's seventy degrees outside. As I come up alongside him, I see wide-open eyes staring straight out of a handsome, intensely wary, black male face.

Across the street is the Soviet-style concrete edifice, long unoccupied (though rented out for film shoots), that used to contain the editorial offices and printing presses of the
New York Post.
I delivered press releases and liquor bottles there, one summer between my first and second years of college, when I worked as a mailboy and messenger for a Midtown public relations company. On lucky days I would get sent out of the mailroom, bearing gifts to the city desk editors at the
Post,
the
Journal-American,
and the
World Telegram and Sun
(for some reason I was never sent to the more respectable papers, such as the
Times
or the
Herald Tribune:
either they had a stricter policy about accepting bribes, or else someone higher up was dispatched for those deliveries). I would walk along South Street reading a thick paperback edition of
The Brothers Karamazov,
hoping to impress the receptionists behind the receiving window, as I wordlessly handed over my envelope or bottle of Scotch.

A BLOCK OR SO NORTH of the Brooklyn Bridge, just behind the old New York Post Building, between Catherine and Market Streets, squats Knickerbocker Village. This unassuming enclave of bare brick apartment towers, privately managed, which might easily be mistaken for one of the nearby government projects, made history as the first major housing development even partially supported by public funds. Though currently in scale with everything around it, it seemed huge when it opened in 1934, “a blockbuster,” according to the
AIA Guide to New York City,
which added that “it maintains its reasonably well-kept lower-middle-class air today.” The other historical significance of Knickerbocker Village is that it stands on the same site as the notorious Lung Block, which it obliterated.

Whenever we are tempted to bemoan the monotony of these brick high-rise compounds that dominate the riverbanks of the Lower East Side, we might stop for a moment and think about all the Lung Blocks that used to populate the site.

Ernest Poole, the journalist and novelist of
The Harbor
whom I discussed earlier, wrote journalistic exposés about the Lung Block, which had the highest tuberculosis incidence of any street in the city. Poole was part of a circle of idealistic young reformers (including Isaac N. Phelps-Stokes, who later wrote the monumental study
The Iconography of Manhattan Island
) trying to raise a moral outcry about housing conditions in the Lower East Side. In
The Bridge,
his 1940 memoirs, he describes how he went down to the Lower East Side in 1902:

The Lung Block, as I named it then, was far down on the East Side near the river. In early years, when that quarter was a center of fashion in our town, many of the buildings had been great handsome private homes, but long ago they had been turned into grimy rookeries, the spacious rooms divided into little cell-like chambers, many only stifling closets with no outer light or air. I can still smell the odors there. In what had been large yards behind, cheap rear tenements had been built, leaving between front and rear buildings only deep dank filthy courts. Nearly four thousand people lived on the block and, in rooms, halls, on stairways, in courts and out on fire escapes, were scattered some four hundred babies. Homes and peo
ple, good and bad, had only thin partitions between them. A thousand families struggled on, while many sank and polluted the others. The Lung Block had eight thriving barrooms and five houses of ill fame. And with drunkenness, foul air, darkness and filth to feed upon, the living germs of the Great White Plague [tuberculosis], coughed up and spat on floors and walls, had done a thriving business for years.

Poole vividly described a young, tubercular Jew, near death, crying out for more air. The paradoxical proximity of the Lung Block to the expansive, world-connecting river was also noted:

There was a huge Danish woman too, on the Lung Block, who became my friend. Sailors came and stayed with her, “deep-water” sailors, by which I mean that they shipped on voyages around the Horn to Singapore and Shanghai and other fascinating ports. As gifts or loans when they sailed away, they had left a lively marmoset, a scarlet parrot, heathen idols, painted shells and other things that pulled my thoughts out of the stinking rooms near by and sent them careering far off over the Seven Seas. I sometimes felt the Wanderlust and, in those lovely days of spring, wandered along the East River piers where lay the last of the ships with sails, listening for “chanteys” of their crews as they heaved on the ropes and slowly, slowly the big ships moved out on the river, bound by the sea. But from such whiffs of the ocean world back I would dive into the Lung Block, all the more bitter that human beings should be choked to death in such foul holes, when there was so much fresh air and health and sunlight so close by.

Poole went to work, writing up the horrors in strong muckraking fashion. A radical friend, scoffing at the notion that the pen was mightier than the sword, told him, “What the Lung Block needs is the ax.” (Later, Robert Moses would similarly remark that “when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.”) Undaunted, Poole shouldered on: “My report was featured in the press. Reporters came to write up the block. I took them around, with photographers. Hearings were held up at Albany. I gave my testimony there. So we raised hell with the politicians, and at twenty-three I thought that our campaign would
succeed. I was wrong. For the landlords on the Lung Block had many influential friends. So came delays, delays, delays, until in the papers the story grew cold. It took thirty-two years to bring the ax. It came at last, under the New Deal. The rotten old block was razed to the ground and in its place you may see today the airy sunny apartment houses of Knickerbocker Village.”

Fred C. French, the same developer who had built Tudor City a few years earlier (1925-31), put together Knickerbocker Village, which, completed in 1933, housed 4,000 persons on five acres in twelve-story blocks around inner courts. During the Depression, the federal government had made available a small pot of funds for private developers nationwide to clear slums and construct housing developments in their stead, based on a set of guidelines regarding building standards and occupational density. French had to travel to Washington more than fifty times, hat in hand, to get an $8-million loan from the federal government's Reconstruction Finance Corporation for the housing development. The sticking point was the government's objection that the complex had a density at least double that recommended by federal guidelines, but which the developer argued was needed for a satisfactory investment. In the end, the government agreed. French, who was both public-spirited and profit-minded,
*
helped offset the costs for buying the land and developing Knickerbocker Village in two ways: first, by raising the density of land use through taller apartment towers; and, second, by replacing low-income tenants with middle-income households. (This same strategy would be followed later by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which tore down another chunk of the Lower East Side along the river to build Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village.)

There is certainly an argument to be made for the state helping middle-class, white-collar workers in urban areas defray housing costs. Less valid was the argument employed that by subsidizing new housing
for the middle class, you would then free up thousands of units for rental by low-income tenants. The trickle-down theory, applied to housing, proved as faulty as elsewhere, since rents in the vacated apartments were still beyond the reach of the poor. The effect of slum clearance on its inhabitants was thus to push them into new slums, as Anthony Jackson showed in his study of Manhattan low-cost housing,
A Place Called Home.
“When 386, mostly Italian, families had been forced to leave the old ‘Lung Block’ … to make way for Knickerbocker Village, four-fifths of them moved into other nearby tenements. At Stuyvesant Town, a survey showed that roughly three-quarters of the 3,000 displaced families would move into other slums.”