Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (50 page)

The twin luxury high-rises of 860-870 United Nations Plaza, designed by Harrison & Abramovitz in 1966, seem to pay homage to the Secretariat by quoting its slab glass form. Here, too, in the heart of UNville, at 845 United Nations Plaza (otherwise known as First Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets), the developer Donald J. Trump chose to erect in 2001 what he claimed to be the tallest residential tower in the world, the seventy-two-story Trump World Tower. It was steadfastly fought by goo-goo associations and by its well-heeled neighbors, such as Walter Cronkite, whose views it threatened to obstruct, but went ahead and got built anyway; and the Mies-influenced glass box design, by New York architect Costas Kondylis, has since garnered the praise of several architectural critics. I neither love it nor hate it, but feel proud of the city for absorbing this once monstrous-seeming intrusion with the merest shrug.

I remember one summer evening going to a fancy book party in this neighborhood, thrown by a wealthy magnate for a writer friend of mine. The penthouse suite, located in an expensive but architecturally undistinguished
luxury tower, was furnished in that impersonal, Ritz-Carlton Hotel style amid which multimillionaires, to my shock and disappointment, are often content to live; then again, the owner lived elsewhere and only used the place to house his art collection and host his parties, and it had spectacular views overlooking the East River. I wandered over to the windows as twilight was coming on, and stared out at the ruins of the old Smallpox Hospital, which lies at the southern end of Roosevelt Island, and which was once part of a suite of nineteenth-century institutions that included an almshouse, a prison, and a lunatic asylum, and tried to savor the social ironies for as long as I could, before diving into the chitchat.

The Smallpox Hospital (or what remains of it) is an 1856 Gothic Revival structure designed by James Renwick, the architect of Grace Church and St. Patrick's Cathedral. Gray and crenellated, benign in daylight, it is a haunted, spectral sight after dark. How many times have I been mesmerized, on the FDR Drive at night, by its gap-toothed, jack-o'-lantern façade, lit up seemingly from within, like an X-ray, or like a black-and-white negative. Preservationists on Roosevelt Island, realizing it would take millions of dollars to restore the building, wisely decided to let it crumble before our eyes—every society needs ruins to contemplate, just as every Hamlet needs a skull. They were more protective of their lunatic asylum, or, as it is sometimes gently called, the Octagon Building, putting a new roof on the mid-island structure to “stabilize it as a ruin.” (Is this a contradiction in terms?) The madhouse, erected in 1839, which once crammed together 1,700 patients, is not as impressive from the outside as the Smallpox Hospital, but recent photographs of its interior, by Stanley Greenberg, suggest a giddy, Piranesian architecture.

An unsigned article in
America Illustrated,
1883, described the institution in the language of its day: “In the Lunatic Asylum the patients are mainly from the poorer classes, and are particularly women. Mania afflicts more than four-fifths of them, the disease of the remaining fifth being dementia, general paralysis or idiocy…. The building has no rooms stronger than the usual sleeping apartments of a hotel, and the only attempt at security is in the cast-iron sashes of the windows; and these may be easily broken. The building is well-adapted for the more harmless forms of insanity, but is too insecure for cases where there are dangerous propensities;
while to convicts who feign mental derangement in the hope of escape, the greatest facilities to that end are afforded.”

THIS WHOLE EDGE OF THE EAST SIDE, just north of the United Nations, used to be a ghetto filled with tenements. You can read about it in Sholem Asch's 1946 novel
East River.
Asch (1880-1957) was born in Poland and immigrated to this country, where he became a best-selling American author who wrote in Yiddish (hard to picture this happening now) and had his books translated into English, most notably a trilogy on the life of Christ,
The Nazarene, The Apostle,
and
Mary,
which attempted to reconcile Judaism and Christianity. My parents used to own his books. Anyway, his one New York novel was called
East River,
and was set in the half-Irish, half-Jewish waterfront tenement neighborhood around First Avenue and East 48th Street, in the early decades of the twentieth century. The novel is one of those ghetto sagas about two brothers: one, Irving, eager for money and power, who grows up to be a ruthless garment manufacturer, exploiting the workers; the other, the scholarly, polio-afflicted Nathan, who becomes a socialist organizer, confronting the bosses. Both are in love, naturally, with an Irish
shiksa
named Mary. The novel's style glops together naturalism and melodrama in a conscientious, repetitive prose that is both dated and remarkably consonant with today's potboilers. Yet its incidental detail gives a sharp picture of the way people lived along the city's waterfront around 1920, as in this description of a stifling New York summer, before air-conditioning, when everyone crowded onto the fire escapes:

Most of all they sought relief in the cool winds that came once in a while over the East River. But direct approach was blocked to them. The streets ended in “dead ends” hemmed in by fences erected by the owners of the feed storehouses and stables. In a couple of places, however, there was an old unused dock, the planks water-soaked and rotted. From these docks one could hear the splashing of children swimming close to the shore, driven to find relief from the overpowering heat, disregarding the perils of the holes and falling timbers of the dock.

Other entrances to the waterfront were provided by the stables on the
river shore. By climbing over fences and scrambling over the stable roofs it was possible to get down to the water's edge. But 48th Street had two yards that opened on the river, and of these the people of the adjoining blocks were properly jealous.

The two yards were private; one, controlled by Tammany, issued tickets to those loyal to the local political machine.

The yard was full of people; men, women, and children in the neighborhood. They had brought with them mattresses, blankets, pillows, cans of cold tea or beer or ice water, ready to spend half the night there, until the tenement rooms got cool enough to return to.

From such passages, we can see how long public access to this stretch of waterfront has been coveted, and how long it has been selectively controlled. Near the end of the novel, part of which is set in the 1940s, gentrification comes to the neighborhood, and, while it means improvement for some, it also makes the river even more inaccessible for others.

“They've blocked off the river!” Moshe Wolf said in astonishment. “The road to the river is blocked.”

“Yes, Pa. They're going to build a big apartment house there. The river will belong to the people who live in the house now.”

“And I thought the river was free, that it belonged to everybody.”

“The river is still free, Pa. It's only the entrance to it that's blocked.”

Actually, the river did not “belong” to the people who moved into the big apartment houses, either, except in a visual sense. They could look at it as spectacle, like a permanent video installation installed in their picture windows, but they had even less opportunity to enjoy its immediate smell and touch than did the ghetto-dwellers who had previously sweltered on these blocks.

For a decade or so, the old ghetto and the new, deluxe apartment houses coexisted dissonantly by the East River's edge. This strange, albeit temporary, commingling of classes and neighborhood types served as the main dramatic situation for
Dead End,
the 1937 film directed by William Wyler.
As he demonstrated in other movies from that period (
Dodsworth, These Three, The Heiress, The Little Foxes
), Wyler was a stickler for long takes linking characters to their environments, and he used the noted deep-focus cameraman, Gregg Toland, to make the most of these fore-ground/background spatial relationships—in this case, highlighting the economic clashes within a single shot.

As a descending crane shot takes us from the crowned row of luxury towers, looking very much like Sutton Place, to the more stubby, rundown houses below, its opening crawl, written by Lillian Hellman, declares: “Every street in New York ends in a river. For many years the dirty banks of the East River were lined with the tenements of the poor. Then the rich, discovering that the river traffic was picturesque, moved their houses eastward. And now the terraces of the great apartment houses look down into the windows of the tenement poor.” In another movie of that period, the screwball comedy
My Man Godfrey,
high and low intermix again, as socialite Carole Lombard retrieves hobo William Powell from a tramp village situated on the East River and Sutton Place. Little does she know that he is actually a millionaire's son, disillusioned with wealth! At the movie's end, he turns the tramps' ash heap into a swanky nightclub called The Dump.

AT THE QUEENSBOROUGH
-59
TH STREET BRIDGE, the lofty, Guastavino-tiled spaces inside the anchorage have been redeveloped as Bridgemarket, a complex that consists of a Conran's design store, a Food Emporium supermarket, and a chichi, loud restaurant with river views, called Guastavino. To my mind it is an uninspired use of a magnificent space, not unique enough to serve as a true “destination.” Its exact replica could be found on waterfronts all around the globe. Still, at least it is inhabited, after decades of inactivity. Henri Langlois, the great, cetacean-shaped founder of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, once planned to establish a New York branch in these very same vaulted spaces, and how wonderful that would have been. But he could not raise the necessary funds, and anyway, I must stop thinking of these lost opportunities….

Climbing the staircase to the little park, with its dog run and Alice Aycock sculpture, left over from FDR Drive highway ramps, I stare across
the East River at Queens and Roosevelt Island. I have to admit I find this industrial view across the East River from Manhattan, with its factories and chimneys and Con Edison's “Big Allis” smokestacks, much more stimulating and comforting than the part of the Manhattan shoreline I am surrounded by, which is nothing but highway, hospitals, and deluxe apartment buildings. “The other bank of the river, because it is the other bank, is never the bank we are standing on: that is the intimate reason for all my suffering,” wrote the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. I don't know that I can trace my suffering to the same root cause; in fact, I have no particular desire to exchange places in order to stand on the shore of Long Island City looking back at Manhattan. But I know what he means.

Contrary to Saul Bellow's pungent line in
Humboldt's Gift,
“His face was dead gray, East River gray,” the East River usually looks green to me, very rarely gray, except on those clouded, foggy days when it mirrors the sky. Today, with the sun half in, half out, the East River is a somber green with black flecks, choppy, swelling, mucoid, not a Martha Stewart shade, more squid-inky, like broccoli rabe in oil.

In the beautiful final stanza of a poem called “The River That Is East” (the title a quotation from Hart Crane), Galway Kinnell writes:

What is this river but the one

Which drags the things we love,

Processions of debris like floating lamps,

Toward the radiance in which they go out?

No, it is the River that is East, known once

From a high window in Brooklyn, in agony—river

On which a door locked to the water floats,

A window sash paned with brown water, a whiskey crate,

Barrel staves, sun spokes, feathers of the birds,

A breadcrust, a rat, spittle, butts, and peels,

The immaculate stream, heavy, and swinging home again.

The East River has its fans; some have championed it, like Kinnell, in this backhanded way, as the repository of all our flotsam and jetsam. “Another reason [why the East River is more interesting than the Hudson River], perhaps,” wrote a journalist named Jesse Lynch Williams in
Scribner's Magazine,
October 1899, “is that the East River is not a river at all, but an arm of the ocean which makes Long Island, and true to its nature in spite of man's error it holds the charm of the sea.” Still, the East River has never had the positive identity, the constituency, or the foundation support possessed by the Hudson. Is it because it is only 15½ miles in length, or because it has such a history of being polluted, or because it is a tidal strait, not a true river? A tidal strait changes its direction completely with each tidal flow. There are two high tides and two low tides daily; this gives the East River a pulse, a rhythm. But its distinctive tidal pattern also leaves the river dirty. “The tidal excursion (the maximum distance a particle would travel during either flooding or ebbing tides) is about 70 percent of the length of the river itself, which explains why the East River is never completely flushed of contaminants by the tides,” writes Malcolm J. Bowman, a marine scientist.

Bowman points out that the oscillating tidal flow of the East River also contributes to the worsening hypoxia problems of Long Island Sound, into which it empties. Hypoxia is a condition of oxygen deficiency resulting from overfertilization by nitrogen, and it can seriously harm the functioning ecosystem, even lead to fish kills. Ironically, part of these nitrogen deposits come from effluents released by sewage treatment plants along the East River, built to improve water quality in the harbor.

Bowman advocates a visionary solution called the East River Tidal Barrage, which would entail constructing a set of tide gates on piers that span the river. He explains the plan this way: “During ebbing tides, Long Island Sound water would flow into New York Harbor (as it does now, except that with gates the water would now be much cleaner) and out into the New York Bight. During rising tide in New York Harbor, flow through the East River would be blocked.” The drawbacks of the scheme, besides its cost, are that it would obviously impede river navigation and that it would interfere with the marine habitat. “Lots of fish and other aquatic life-forms don't care about the pollution,” noted marine biologist Mike Ludwig, “but they use the East River to get to Long Island Sound. Striped bass in particular use the river as a corridor to the habitat of Long Island Sound.” Even if there were agreement among scientists for the Tidal Barrage plan, the funds would be lacking. So, for the moment at least, the East River will remain gateless.