Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (43 page)

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French told some impressed Princeton students in 1934: “Our company, strangely enough, was the first business organization to recognize that profits could be earned negatively as well as positively in New York real estate—not only by constructing new buildings but by destroying, at the same time, whole areas of disgraceful and disgusting sores.” (Quoted in Max Page's
The Creative Destruction of Manhattan.
)

NOT EVERYONE SAW THE SLUMS on the Lower East Side as blight. Jimmy Durante, the entertainer, who grew up in the Lung Block ward, reminisced to Joseph Mitchell about a time “'when the East Side amounted to something.'… Sitting there in the dark theater, nursing his hangover, the big-nosed comedian began to talk about his childhood, the days when he used to run wild on Catherine Street, raising hell with the other kids, the days when he liked to go barefooted and they had to run him down and catch him every winter to put shoes on him….” Like most children who were reared in slums, he had a slightly different perspective from that of the housing reformers: “ ‘We kids used to have a good time,’ he said. ‘They tore down where my home was and where my pop had his [barber] shop. They tore it down to put up this high-class tenement house, this Knickerbocker Village. Most of the old-timers moved out long ago.’ ”

There was, it seems, in the insular poverty of the Lower East Side, a yeasty substance breeding ambition along with despair. You have only to read the charged memoirs of Anzia Yezierska's
Red Ribbon on a White Horse
or Mike Gold's
Jews Without Money,
both writers from the Lower East Side, to sense their pride in the ghetto they were so desperate to escape. The emotional glue that bound the tenement dwellers to the Old Country dissolved when the rickety buildings were demolished and replaced by anonymous, modern high-rises. As Alfred Kazin wrote about a similar urban renewal, “Despite my pleasure in all the space and light in
Brownsville …I miss her old, sly and withered face. I miss all those ratty little wooden tenements, born with the smell of damp in which there grew up so many school teachers, city accountants, rabbis, cancer specialists, functionaries of the revolution, and strong-arm men for Murder, Inc.”

Some of the nostalgia of Kazin and Durante for slum-bred ambitions seems in retrospect a disguised ethnic boasting. The ghetto may have proven a launching pad for Jews and Italians to reach the middle class by the second generation, but it did not have the same catapult effect for the Hispanics and African-Americans who took their place. The new, nonwhite poor were in no position to organize protests at the razing of tenements, nor were they necessarily as attached to them as previous groups had been.

Thus, Robert Moses had a point in scoffing at the notion that “since the slums have bred so many remarkable people, and even geniuses, there must be something very stimulating in being brought up in them.” But the more debatable point was Moses' leap from asserting that the “slum is still the chief cause of urban disease and decay” to contending that its “irredeemable rookeries” had to be eradicated. It takes a certain literalism to go from deploring the disease and crime in a poor neighborhood, to indicting the very buildings themselves as criminals. After all, the hovels that constituted the Lung Block had begun their existence in the early nineteenth century as respectable houses for well-off families; only later were they were subdivided and rented to the poor at unspeakable densities. Current medical science suggests that even the Lung Block buildings might have been spared—given a good disinfectant cleaning and spruced up, their rear tenements removed for better light and ventilation—and restored to salubrious respectability. But that is not how it appeared to most social reformers of the day (including those far more committed than Moses to helping the poor): they hated the suffering they witnessed in the tenements so much that they came to blame the very mortar, bricks, staircases, walls. Having invoked so often the metaphors of pathology (slums were described as “cancerous,” “pestilential,” “abscessed,” “a tumor,” “pus-filled,”), it seemed the most sensible course to call for their surgical removal.

AMONG THE LOWER
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MIDDLE
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CLASS STRIVERS attracted to Knickerbocker Village were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who moved into a three-room apartment in the spring of 1942. They paid $45.75 a month for their river-view, eleventh-floor accommodations, and made use of the project's nursery school and playground after they had children, and it was there, the bulk of evidence now suggests, that Julius conspired with Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, to spy for the Soviet Union.

Knickerbocker Village had one of the strongest and most insurgent tenant unions in the city, the Knickerbocker Village Tenants Association (KVTA). In 1947, when the landlord, French, tried to raise the rent 12 percent and evict tenants who exceeded income limits, the KVTA waged a campaign against him in the press and the courts, vowing a rent strike as well. I like to picture Julius going to these meetings and putting in his two cents' worth, though he probably regarded such local efforts as trivial, compared to stealing atomic secrets.

If you grew up in a Jewish ghetto in the 1950s, as I did, you could not escape the Rosenberg case. Newspaper photographs of Ethel in her mouton coat and upswept coif looked strikingly like my mother. In fact, every other woman in our neighborhood looked like Ethel: dark-eyed, pudgy, scared, self-righteous, and exalted with ideals of social justice. We felt personally imperiled by the Rosenbergs' persecution, removed as we were by less than a few degrees of separation. When my mother joined a fight to have a traffic light installed in front of our nursery school, many of her fellow protestors were Communists. She became friends with these Party members, up to a point, but then they bored her by turning every conversation into a political harangue. Never mind the millions of kulaks slain by Stalin, or the Moscow Show Trials; my mother didn't like Communists because they violated the rules of conversation. No one in my family, to my recollection, ever maintained the Rosenbergs' innocence; if anything, we assumed they were guilty, but thought they shouldn't be executed because the secrets they stole were probably small potatoes, and because capital punishment was wrong.

My Aunt Minna was a Communist: when my brother and I stayed one summer with her in California, she would get apoplectic as soon as anyone appeared on television who had named names. Lloyd Bridges in
Sea Hunt
? “He sang. Change the channel!” I thought of Communists as a
slightly cracked set of familiars, character actors left over from the Yiddish theater, admirably wanting to make the world a better place, but rigid in their refusal to consider opposing facts. Who knows whether I might have joined the Party had I grown up in the thirties instead of the fifties? By the time I started college, in 1960, JFK was off to the White House, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was advising him, and the Communist Party no longer counted, except as a joke. My mother told me, “If you're ever on unemployment insurance and they send you to interview for a job you don't want, just bring along a copy of
The Daily Worker.
”

In one of the best New York waterfront movies, Samuel Fuller's
Pickup on South Street
(1953), a number of key scenes were set a stone's throw away from the Rosenbergs' apartment, on a South Street pier. Coincidentally, it revolved around a plot by Communist spies to steal government secrets. “If you don't cooperate,” the FBI agent tells the cynical hero, “you'll be as guilty as those traitors who gave Stalin the A-bomb.” The hero, or antihero (played by Richard Widmark), is a pickpocket who hides out in an abandoned bait shack, perched on pilings in the East River, and reached only by a flimsy catwalk. The atmospheric night scenes prove again that the waterfront and film noir make an irresistible combination. Through the shack window we glimpse the Manhattan Bridge, and a dependably passing tugboat or barge (courtesy of rear projection, since the film was really shot, for the most part, in California).

The great supporting actress Thelma Ritter gave the film's most memorable performance as Moe, an aging necktie peddler and stool pigeon in a tired flower-pint dress, who is saving up for a fancy funeral. She tells the threatening Communist agent, Joey, in her weary Brooklyn accent, “Look, mister, I'm so tired, you'd be doing me a big favor, blowing my head off.” Moe and the Rosenbergs: both from the same New York working-class milieu, striving to reach the lower middle class; both doomed to a premature, unnatural death by the Cold War.

Apparently Julius and Ethel felt cramped in their small apartment in Knickerbocker Village, after their two children were born. I stare up at the nondescript brick towers, and wonder what they would have thought about the transformation of the Lower East Side in our day. They did not live to see the particular horror of 1960s “urban renewal,” with its wholesale destruction of neighborhoods deemed slums, and its displacement of
the working poor. Gentrification, which began later, in the 1980s, probably displaced as many poor tenants in the long run as did urban renewal, but it had a gentler effect on the streetscape—indeed, preserving what might otherwise have crumbled into dust. Those surviving parts of the Lower East Side's old tenement environment that survived have seen their housing stock slowly improved and renovated through gentrification for the past twenty years, while playing host to bohemian cultural activities and chic little boutiques: not so bad a fate for the old ghetto, all things considered.

THE ESPLANADE GIVES OUT, and becomes an inhospitable parking area and repair shed for city sanitation and fire department trucks. So I cross over to the inland side. One public housing complex after another: the Rutgers Houses, Laguardia Houses, Two Bridges, Vladeck Houses, Corlear's Hook Houses. The one architectural standout is Gouverneur Court, which used to be the old Gouverneur Hospital. It has those magnificent red brick rounded bays with black wrought-iron balconies that I've often admired in a car from the FDR Drive. Now I'm seeing it at street level and it's quite impressive. A plaque informs me it was built in 1898, and is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Its red sandstone has wonderful carved ornamental detail. Surprisingly, it was not turned into expensive condos, but preserved, under a deal brokered by then-mayor David Dinkins, for lower-income occupants (the management sign says AFFORDABLE HOUSING FOR NYC).

An affable, proprietary tenant in blue shorts, with incredibly thick glasses, who looks like he hangs out often in front, seeing my curiosity about the building, tells me, “It's all single-room apartments. Section 8.” Section 8 is a federal program that provides subsidies for impoverished, often elderly people, or people on disability.

“It's beautiful.”

“You should see the courtyard.”

“I'd like to,” I say. “Can you take me in for a moment?”

“Nah. You can't go into Gouverneur House without photo ID. They're very strict about it.”

Just then another tenant, a middle-aged woman in shorts and curlers, comes out of the building. “Hey, Denny, want some coffee?”

“Nah. I never had a taste for it. I get all my caffeine from Coca-Cola.”

“It's getting cold.”

“September, it's all over. You won't be able to wear shorts no more.”

“I went to the doctor, they say it's a heat rash. I was afraid it's diabetes. Everyone I know got diabetes.”

“You'll be okay.”

“You're a saint, Denny.” She waves at him, and walks away. He nods: Saint Denis. He continues to guard the steps, looking out across at the stern Vladeck Houses, angled all different ways. I head back toward the East River, to try to pick up a navigable walking trail along the waterfront.

THIS RAGTAG MILE of East River waterfront, from the Williamsburg Bridge just north of Corlears Hook to about 14th Street, where the Con Edison East River Station power plant now resides, once contained virtually all of the important New York shipyards. Their innovative craftsmanship was on such a high level that, during the transition from sailing ships to steamships, the East River yards led the country in shipbuilding activity, and their only rivals worldwide were the shipbuilders of Clydebank, near Glasgow. In the early 1850s, considered the golden age of American shipbuilding, the East River shipbuilders, mostly Yankees transplanted from Boston, turned out sturdy packet ships, clippers, yachts, steamships, and warships, using the finest white oak imported from Georgia and Florida, the best cedar, locust, and pine from the Chesapeake Bay. Often they would lay out a half-hull on the ground, and build the rest from that template. The yards had their own blacksmith shops and sailmaking establishments. The bulk of ship-repair operations were also situated in the East River Yards.

In
The Rise of New York Port,
Robert Greenhalgh Albion characterized the labor relationship that prevailed in the yards as “a survival of the old craft system, with masters, journeymen, and apprentices. Nearly every one of the prominent East River builders worked up through the various stages.” The working day was long, extending in summer from four-thirty
in the morning to seven-thirty at night, with breaks for lunch and dinner. The pay was only $1.25 a day, until a series of strikes drove it up to $1.75. “By the time of the clipper boom, when skilled shipwrights were at a premium,” wrote Albion, “wages sometimes ran as high as $2.50 a day, which was the main reason that the cost of construction was higher at New York.”

Though Manhattan's nineteenth-century harbor continues to be celebrated nostalgically, not a trace remains of its shipbuilding industry in the public's mind. Nor can I make out any shards of that great enterprise, as I trek alongside the FDR Drive.

TO GET A TRUE FEELING of New York's nineteenth-century industrial waterfront, in fact, you really have to go out to Brooklyn—specifically Red Hook. There's something soaring about the way the space opens out there, both to the sea and within the streets themselves, the way the 150-year-old warehouses extend all the way to the wharf, and there's no highway to cut you off or pinch you into a concrete walking strip. You breathe in an amazing silence there that, come to think of it, may not be at all like the hurlyburly nineteenth-century waterfront, but is conducive, at any rate, to the peaceful contemplation of history.