Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (58 page)

I stepped onto the Parks Department speedboat with Waldman and Kerlinger; the two outdoorsmen knew each other, and were happy to swap fishing stories, while I fiddled with my life jacket and glimpsed the Hudson River, New Jersey, and the bay flashing by at noon. It was exhilarating to be on the water on a warm spring day in a fast boat that rocked and bucked each time a nearby craft's wake hit us. Say what you will about the need for shoreline views to contemplate the rivers: the glory of New York Harbor is being out on it. We turned up the East River and streamed past U Thant (formerly Belmont) Island, a sprig of rock barely longer than a king-sized sofa, parked in the water in front of the United Nations. It held a wire-sculpture peace arch, intended as a tribute to U Thant, the late UN secretary general, and a tree with a dozen birds nesting.

Our boat, which was manned by two Parks Department employees, headed north alongside Roosevelt Island. I had never seen Roosevelt Island's eastern shore. The balconies of the mixed-income housing complexes made an attractive impression. These days I feel much more warmly disposed to Roosevelt Island, as a modest but effective “New Town in Town” achievement.

Past the Triborough Bridge, our boat headed along the Bronx side of the East River, and, just west of Rikers Island, reached our first destination, North Brother Island. As there was no longer a functioning pier to tie up at, the boat drew as close as possible to the rocky beach, and we jumped out and waded the last ten or twenty feet. From the boat I had hurled my sneakers, with the socks bunched inside, onto the beach, which was a mistake because the socks fell out and landed in the water. I then remembered my earlier, sensible vow to pack a second pair of socks for the trip, and wondered what had distracted me from it.

Not knowing how to prepare for such an excursion, I had ended up bringing very little. John Waldman had remarked that I certainly traveled light; he had expected I'd come with cameras, food, provisions. He himself brought two saddlebags; but since the trip was supposed to last no longer than three or four hours, I felt justified in my restraint.

Along the beach were a rusted iron gantry and the twisted remains of a wooden pier. Planks of lumber and shards of pottery and glass were strewn about the sand, Robinson Crusoe–like. I wondered if the pottery and glass indicated past landfill, as these materials were commonly used for that purpose.

We split up into two groups for the bird count, Paul Kerlinger, John, and I going inland, straight into the bush, and the other three hugging the shore. Kerlinger was a rangy, scraggly-mustached, weatherbeaten, independent type in his fifties, wearing khaki shirt, blue jeans, and wading boots, and a cap that read smith & wesson (though later he explained he hated guns, just wore it so that the birds would shit on the logo). He told me to watch out for poison ivy, which seemed to be the island's favorite invasive species. I decided to put on my socks, wet or no, to protect my ankles from contact.

North Brother is a twenty-acre island: standing on the shore, you can't see it all in one gulp, but you can easily see Rikers Island and the Bronx, under whose jurisdiction it falls. Queens, oddly enough, administers South Brother Island, about a third of a mile to the east. The Dutch called the two Brother Islands the Gezellen (companions).

South Brother Island once belonged to the brewer Jacob Ruppert, who also owned the New York Yankees. Ruppert built a fancy summer house on the island, and I was told by one of our group that he would invite Lou Gehrig and other prominent Yankees to parties there, sending taxi boats to fetch them; but since the house burned to the ground in 1904, the part about Lou Gehrig is clearly impossible, as Gehrig was not born until 1903—unless, that is, Ruppert had presciently invited the one-year-old Gehrig to his parties, knowing that he would someday figure importantly in the Yankee scheme of things. Anyhow, South Brother Island is now completely overgrown, “reclaimed by nature,” as they say, with no sign of human intervention upon it.

By contrast, North Brother Island, also overgrown with heavy vegetation,
still contains many abandoned institutional buildings. First, the Sisters of Charity ran a tuberculosis hospital there; it closed when the city took over the island and built Riverside Hospital in 1885 for the treatment of communicable diseases. Riverside had 332 beds, and its best-known resident was Typhoid Mary (Mary Mallon), an Irish immigrant who, as a food handler, was responsible for starting several typhoid epidemics.

Typhoid Mary's story is a fascinating one. At its crux is the anomaly that typhoid can be transmitted by healthy carriers, who show no sign of the disease themselves. Such was Mallon, who worked as a cook for a number of wealthy Park Avenue and Long Island families; when the epidemiologist Dr. George A. Soper tracked the spread of many 1906 typhoid cases to her, and explained his desire to take her blood, feces, and urine samples, she understandably denied her involvement, pointing to her evident health. Soper described her as about forty years of age, “five feet six inches tall, a blond with clear blue eyes, a healthy color and a somewhat determined mouth and jaw.” So determined was she, in fact, that she came at him with a carving fork. Eventually, with the assistance of several police officers, they were able to subdue her, and, having established beyond any doubt that her excreta tested positive for
Bacillus typhosus,
they sent her to North Brother Island, where she was permitted to live and cook for herself in a small bungalow. There she might have languished undetected, had it not been for William Randolph Hearst's newspapers, which picked up the story in 1909 and made her into a sensationalistic folk hero/ogre. The irony of her situation, that she was not ill but had to be incarcerated indefinitely in a hospital nonetheless, struck her as supremely unjust, and provoked the compassion of New York Health Commissioner Dr. Ernest J. Lederle, who freed her with the understanding that she would change her employment. At this point the erstwhile immigrant victim Mallon begins to tax our sympathies, by changing her name (not her employment) and working as a cook in several establishments, perhaps because it was the only trade she knew, perhaps because she cared not a fig about others and wanted to wreak her revenge on society—in any event, causing new typhoid outbreaks in New Jersey and Massachusetts, before exercising extreme chutzpah by taking a job at New York's Sloane Hospital for Women, beneath “the very noses of New York health authorities under the alias Mary Brown,” wrote Alan M. Kraut, in his book
Silent Travelers.
“The forty-eight-year-old woman was captured and remained in detention on North Brother's Island for the rest of her life. At first she had periodic rages described by one journalist as like ‘a moody, caged, jungle cat.’ However, with age came resignation and calm. She worked in a laboratory at the hospital and led a quiet life.” Suffering a stroke, she spent the last six years of her life as a paralytic in Riverside Hospital, and died on the island in 1938.

After the end of World War II, at the height of one of New York's periodic housing shortages, the city rented out the hospital and some Quonset huts to returning veterans. Later still, the hospital was used as a drug rehabilitation center (imagine how removed from the streets the junkies must have felt there), before closing in 1963.

We can see the brick hospital chimney from the shore. We pass by a supply shed whose roof has utterly caved in, panes broken, rotting lumber, black-on-black shadows, the sun a reluctant visitor: John and I look inside it and wonder why it's so beautiful, we can barely pull ourselves away from this gravity-composed shambles, this perfect Walker Evans photograph. With the beach nearby, it suggests an ideal location for the scene in a film noir where the robbers meet to divide up the loot and perhaps pull a double-cross.

Kerlinger stalks ahead, carrying a long pole with a rearview mirror attached at one end. Every time he sees what looks to be a potential nest, he thrusts the mirror up in its direction so that he can count the eggs or avian occupants. He calls out the results to John, whose job it is to write them down in his notebook. “Two e” means two eggs, “three y” means “three young,” and so on. Unless otherwise specified, all the numbers refer to the black-crowned night heron, the main species left on the island. (That is, except for gulls, which own the island and wheel constantly overhead with Hitchcockian menace, and which there is no pressing need to count.) Black-crowned night herons are wading birds that leave their nests at night and dive for fish. These wading birds come annually to breed among the island's heavy vegetation and to feed on the fish and mice in the vicinity. There may also be a few yellow-crowned night herons left, though we are not finding any. Many more bird species used to roost here, but the inhospitable tree cover pattern drove them away.

Much of the island is now covered in Norway maple, a tall, overbearing
tree that allows for little undercover growth. In ensemble, the Norway maples compose shady canopies that might be fine for campfires or satanic rituals, but that provide no protection for birds' nests. “If it were up to me,” says Kerlinger, “I'd bring in a chainsaw and cut these down and plant black cherry.” He throws off impromptu lessons in birding: the way you tell an active nest is that it has white shit underneath. Black-crowned night herons build their nests out of any flimsy material, snowy egrets use fatter twigs, and ibises prefer grass. Kerlinger cocks his head and hears an ibis cry, a sort of warble caught in the throat; I hear mostly a riveter from the mainland.

We find many nests, some in vine-tangled trees, others right on the ground, invariably with three speckled brown eggs. After they hatch, one may kill off the other two—“sibicide,” Kerlinger explains—not that they eat their siblings for food, but it increases their own chances of survival. The little herons with peach-fuzz heads that squawk at us as we pass look so cute, it's hard to imagine them natural-born killers.

We come across no animals—no squirrels or rats or raccoons—even though there must be a few, perhaps at night. But the place seems abandoned by mammals, period.

What makes the island eeriest, though, are the remnants of urban living that sprout up amid jungle profusion. A lamppost without its globe stands in waist-high catbrier, a fire hydrant sticks its snub nose out of bittersweet, a fence marks off the woods that had once been a tennis court; along a crude dirt road you suddenly notice it has a reinforced iron edge, like many older sidewalks.

Strangest of all are the large hospital buildings, still displaying their turn-of-the-century ornamental detail, their copper roofs and stone carvings and princely brick façades, though the panes are shattered and the window shutters all askew, and perpendicularity undermined at every turn, and ivy vines twined pythonlike around each orifice. The solid, handsome architecture of another day confronts us in all its defenselessness. “What does it say about me,” I ask John, “that I'm more moved by the buildings than the birds?”

The island itself seems an undiscovered treasure, a place for future generations to picnic and disport themselves with Watteau-like
fätes galantes.
How profligate is New York, or how far has the city still to go to reach its
maximum built-up condition, for it to have ignored such delectable nearby morsels of land? I am enchanted by this place.

Nevertheless, after an hour and a half I have had all the nest sightings and bird counting I can take. The novelty of a sunny afternoon spent on a deserted island within sight of the Empire State Building, which none of my friends has ever heard of, much less set foot on, has yielded to weariness and a desire for flight, now that rain clouds are scudding overhead. The temperature has suddenly dropped.

The two groups meet up at the beach and wait for our boats to return and pick us up and take us to our next destination, South Brother Island. Kerlinger assures us that it is a much smaller island and the counting won't take as long.

Bob from the Bronx, a Parks Department employee with the perennially embarrassed grin of a superior Nietzschean being trapped in an ingratiating bureaucrat role, offers slices of Italian bread from the loaf he has wisely brought along. I decline, thinking I will be home soon and can eat more interestingly than plain dry bread. John shares his potato chips and water with me. We are wondering what is keeping the boats.

When the Parks Department speedboat arrives, it manages to get stuck in mud, about twenty yards from the beach. The tide is very low, and the crew decides to wait until the tide rises sufficiently to lift the boat. A half hour passes, and John observes, “I don't think the tide's coming in, I think it's going the other way, out.” All agree with his pessimistic assessment. I wonder aloud why the second boat, which is hanging back across the water, closer to the Bronx, cannot come in and take us off this godforsaken place. No, that is not the protocol: for one thing, the second boat is even less equipped to approach the shore and not get stuck than the first; for another, it wouldn't dream of leaving its companion boat in immovable straits. Why, then, can't the second boat try to pry the first boat loose by means of a rope? I demand. Everyone agrees this is worth trying, and after about an hour the second boat heaves alongside the first and is trying to play catch with the rope. When several attempts to toss the rope from one boat to the other end in failure, we begin to suspect that we are in inept hands. These are not your crafty old salts, your artisans of the sea; these are landlubber civil servants, ex–limousine drivers out of their depth.

“Tie it to your stern!” John keeps calling out to the boat. “You'll get
more leverage that way!” Sotto voce, he tells me, “They're clueless.” Tied to stern or aft, the rope makes no difference, the boat refuses to budge. I suggest that several of us go into the water and push the boat as you would a stuck car (I seem to be full of proposals; as the least handy person on the expedition, I have no sense of shame about offering suggestions that will be shot down). This time I am told the river bottom is too mucky; like quicksand, it would swallow you up. As proof they offer the sight of the stuck boat's crew member trying to push off with a metal rod of some sort, and the rod sinking farther and farther into the bottom.