Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (61 page)

Pupello envisions his own Swindler's Cove, the boat club plot, and the adjacent Sherman's Creek lot (which was cleaned up after the West Nile scare) as all one unit: he has even offered to negotiate for the city with the boat club, when the time comes, so that a continuous waterfront edge can be created for recreational use.

We enter the third plot of land, into which washes Sherman's Creek. It's not nearly as polished, as worked, as Swindler's Cove, and it's covered with phragmites. (This tall swamp grass, another invasive species, thrives in ecologically distressed areas all over the world.)

“Can't we start cutting this stuff down?” whines Pupello.

“Sure,” says Amy. Her role is the calm one.

“How do we get rid of it?” he demands. “If you cut 'em down, they'll just come back twice as strong, won't they?”

“The theory is that you need to dig a trench and have the saltwater infiltrate.”

He laughs. “Okay, let's do it!”

Looking at the ragged landscape in front of me, I muse that it's hard to know how much to alter, how much to keep.

“Yeah, well, there's a charm in decay,” Pupello allows.

Across the street from P.S. 5 and Sherman's Creek is a public housing project, the Dyckman Houses. “Were people in the projects consulted or brought into the planning process for the park?” I ask, as we get into the car.

“Yeah, sure…a little,” says Pupello, uncomfortably. How little is little? I don't press him. They'll benefit from the park, in any case.

As we drive north up Tenth Avenue, we pass a lively Hispanic supermarket with stalls in front, a Con Edison substation, a Manhattan Bible Church. All these separate establishments, which mean nothing to me except as visual filler, Pupello understands in a deeper, more political way. And he keeps up a running commentary: “Con Ed has lots of parcels of land up here that they don't know what to do with. Manhattan Bible Church owns a lot. See that road?” He points to an alleyway, strewn with garbage, which runs along the side of the 207th Street overpass. “We agreed to take care of the roads on both sides of that bridge. The guy next door who owns the scrap-metal plant put up a fence, which he shouldn't have, because it's a public thoroughfare, and now we can't get to it. We offered to buy out his business, but he was asking too much. It's remnants of the old industrial waterfront. My God, the chickens are back!” Pupello mutters this last to himself, and I see black, scrawny fowl pecking away on the road. You could view it as a colorful village folkway transported to the city, or as a bad omen that chaos has returned. From his facial expression, I suspect he is tending toward the latter.

Now he picks up his head and notices something across the street. This time he is furious as he drives into the offending area. Along the river's edge, on the northern side of the 207th Street overpass, is a large fenced-in lot, where some sort of carnival or pop concert has taken place. There's a big sign in front that says SUMMER FAIR. EVERY WEEKEND TO THE END OF JUNE, followed by a list of Latin bands. Inside, another sign says FUTURE HOME OF USED CAR LOT. The lot is festooned with overflowing
black trash bags, left from the weekend's events. But that isn't what bothers him.

“Those bastards! They fenced off the city street and paved it over! They're gonna be in big trouble. I'm writing a letter.”

He is hopping mad, fuming as he struts, hands on hips. Amy is taking photographs. “Did you get one with the ‘No Trespassing’ sign?” he asks. She nods. Now he catches the eye of a bearded longhair in a Grateful Dead T-shirt, standing by a motorcycle, in front of a factory building with the sign nyc transit authority 9th ave unit shop. The man looks like an aging Hell's Angels biker, but is in fact the manager of the mass transit repair shop. He seems to know Pupello, and is agreeing with him, nodding his head.

“See what they did?” demands Pupello.

“Not only that,” says the Deadhead. “They put asphalt over landfill, without any further support, which you ain't supposed to, and they put a Ferris wheel on top of
that.
The whole thing could have crashed with kids getting hurt. Then they brought in these king-sized trucks that could have easily put a hole in the pavement.”

“Bette brought the mayor here one time, to show Giuliani.”

“I remember. I got a real Bette Midler fan working for me. We have a signal we use for whenever she comes around, so he could hear it even if he's in the can—run out and see her.”

Now everything is Bette, Bette, Bette. Bette, and the asshole who owns the future used-car lot across the way. I'm staring at the elevated train tracks that run right by the factory, and at the factory sign's acronym: MABSTOA. I know it has something to do with mass transit workers, but it makes me think of “mastodon.” The manager, whose name is Lou Centi, invites us into his shop.

He explains that the shop is mostly given over to bus repairs: AC compressors, electric motors, stuff like that. But there are also workers from the other union, rapid transit, who service subway train parts. It's what they call a “commingle” shop. He is obviously very proud of the place, which seems to be humming along, the crew made up of skilled workmen in their forties or fifties, even older, gray-haired veterans. Centi volunteers the information that some have been working at the job between twenty-six and forty-three years. Even after they retire, they keep working.
Why not? There are only eighteen workmen in the place, so it's not too large, everyone can help each other out. For years they couldn't get the bosses to spring for a cleaning person, but now they even have that, “though she's four months pregnant and can't do the heavy stuff,” says Centi. “The big problem is it's not air-conditioned, and the worst thing for AC compressors is to get water in them. So the repairmen are sweating and their sweat is dripping into the AC compressors. It gets real hot in here in summer. You got these big electrical fans with vents. It wouldn't be hard to install an air-conditioning system on the roof, but they don't wanna, 'csause they're planning on opening up a big shop on Zerega Avenue in the Bronx.

“They're always talking about Zerega Avenue, Zerega Avenue,” says Centi, resentfully and histrionically, as if we too, Amy, Pupello, and I, go around spicing our conversation with references to Zerega. We are all in such a rage to get to Zerega Avenue. “But it's gonna be so big that the departments will be too far away from each other. There'll be no cooperation, no communication, and in the meantime no one will be working hard. Here, everybody works hard because I make 'em. They know if they come work for me, they gotta put in a full day. My father was a tough little Italian guy, ran a private bus company, and he didn't stand for no laziness. I remember once I had a hundred-and-four fever, I phoned him and said, ‘Dad, I got a hundred-and-four.’ ‘So?’ ‘I don't feel well.’ ‘Yeah? So?’ ‘I don't know, Dad.’ ‘The thing about a bus is,’ my dad says, ‘it needs a driver to pick up the passengers. You can rest between runs.’ That's the way he taught me. That's the way I am with my guys. The work gets done here. This would be a real shame, to close this down.” I hear doo-wop music in the background, either a radio or—could this be? Are the workers really harmonizing as they sit at their stations hammering and testing parts? I see in Centi's eyes that, all things considered, this repair shop is utopia. It doesn't get any better than this. It's not too big, not too small, you've got a good, experienced crew of hard-working guys. Sure, it could be air-conditioned, but aside from that, it's the Platonic model of mass transit repair shops. And now they're going to shut it down. Just because of Zerega Avenue.

“What's going to happen to this place?” I ask.

“The rapid will take it over,” he explains, meaning the subway system.
“But I'm not going to Zerega. I'm not staying here, either, when the rapid moves in.”

“So what will you do?” asks Amy.

“I'll go back to Dispatch. My skills are always in demand.” So saith Lou Centi, the bearded Grateful Dead fan/shop supervisor, having delivered himself of his aria of lament. Pupello quizzes him about how he disposes of his toxic wastes, but everything seems kosher.

As we leave, I contemplate this working remnant of the old industrial waterfront. Can't we keep utopia humming a little while longer? Must we all move to Zerega?

A STONE
'
S THROW AWAY from the MABSTOA factory, one of the most important archaeological finds about New York City's Native American past was made. In January 1895, an engineer and archaeological hobbyist named William L. Calver was walking along the Harlem River looking for artifacts. At Ninth Avenue and 209th Street, where workmen were digging up the area to put in new streets and subway lines, “Calver spotted bones in the dirt the workmen had dug up and, with his cane, began poking around a shell pocket in the embankment looking for the bones' source,” wrote the authors of
Unearthing Gotham,
Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall. “What he uncovered was the burial of a fully articulated dog. Shortly thereafter he found a second dog burial, covered like the first with oyster shells and pottery sherds. Calver was elated with his discoveries…. Soon after Calver discovered these dog burials, he and [his fellow hobbyist Reginald] Bolton began exploring an adjoining area where construction crews were exposing what we now know to be a Late Woodland settlement. Over the next few years, Bolton and Calver excavated a number of human burials (both primary and secondary), many large storage and trash pits, midden material, hearths, and a total of eleven dog burials, each curled up, as Bolton described it, ‘nose to tail.’ ” Cantwell and Wall speculate that dogs may have had a special, reverential significance for these Late Woodland peoples, though they do not rule out Bolton's suggestion that “the Indian dog shared the meal, but sometimes he was the meal itself.”

What to make of this whole ragtag neighborhood, a jumble of Native American artifacts, Latino food markets, car lots and factories and revival missions along the Harlem River waterfront, on the northeast tip of the island? I love it; it's so funky and unselfconscious. Still, I have to admit I cannot get to the river easily; street after street terminates in fenced-in railroad yards and semiabandoned electric plants. At the very least, it cries out for an overall waterfront access plan.

The New York Restoration Project commissioned such a preliminary report from the Project for Public Spaces in 1998. Among its sensible observations were that Highbridge Park needed a new vision—one with enough public attractions to compensate for the difficult hillside site that keeps people away. Pupello himself had the crazy idea of operating a bungee-jumping concession off the bluff. Ultimately, people would have to have a reason to descend that steep hill: most notably, to get to the river. The major obstacle to waterfront access at present is the Harlem River Drive. The report recommended that the highway be reclassified, or demoted, to a “Park Drive,” which would also mean a reduction, north of the George Washington Bridge entrance ramp, from four lanes to two lanes, with regular signalized crossings introduced for pedestrians. It also suggested that Tenth Avenue be tamed by “traffic calming” procedures, and that the present hardscrabble/broken-bottle shore path be outfitted with a fully designed esplanade, complete with benches, toilets, trees, lampposts, and so on.

None of these proposals is especially radical. They are commonsense approaches to a more balanced waterfront, which could accommodate walkers and bicyclists as well as cars. All are waiting in the wings indefinitely for the proper combination of political leadership and economic upturn. In that respect, they are typical of the superabundance of good policy and design ideas for improving the Manhattan waterfront, which have been appearing in official studies, professional journals, and unpublished reports, and which currently sit in drawers and files collecting dust. Meanwhile, Highbridge Park and its environs remain an enticing urban puzzle.

29 THE DILEMMA OF WATERFRONT DEVELOPMENT

W
E CAN EXPECT THE WATERFRONT TO REMAIN FOR DECADES AN UNRESOLVED ZONE, IN WHICH POLISHED SECTIONS AND DECREPIT SHARDS OF THE OLD industrial port coexist in an unsettling or perversely pleasing disharmony. What used to be said of New York—“it would be a great city if they ever finished it”—can now be said of its waterfront. It is the nature of dynamic cities to remain incomplete, in flux, torn down and rebuilt; that is one aspect of their ability to grow. And perhaps it is for the best that waterfront development takes so long to transpire, because it keeps open at least the possibility of a more incremental, mixed-use, historically sensitive approach to the river's edge. Still, a part of me wishes they would wave a
magic wand and let me see, once and for all, this brave new waterfront we are promised. I want to be disappointed all in one gulp.

What to do with the New York waterfront? The art of waterfront design is not a secret; there already exists a body of highly evolved thinking that represents the collective wisdom of architects, landscape designers, and city planners on that subject. And yet the empty harbor presents a most recalcitrant challenge.