The Water Log

She Thinks My Tugboat's Sexy

2007-08-29T11:21:00.000-07:00

New York Press

August 29, 2007

For a day, harbor tugs push against each other, not super cargo carriers

“We generally take home one or two a year,” says the white-bearded owner of Reinauer Transportation Company, pointing at more than twenty burnished trophies lining a wooden shelf in his handsome office headquarters.
Like Bert Reinauer himself, the room conveys an aura of some consequence, owing in part to the mounted cups, whose slight dissimilarities suggest they were long in the gathering. The shelf is a bit high, so you’d have to stand on tiptoe to understand that the cups are not exactly as consequential as they appear. In fact, it’s all kind of a big game.
One day a year, the tugboat industry dresses up its hardworking vessels and parades them before judges, showing off fresh paint jobs, displaying horsepower in nose-to-nose pushing competitions and a one-mile sprint up the Hudson. Tug operators play rodeo cowboys, demonstrating their skill by roping a cleat from a moving vessel coming toward a dock.
And those are the earnest categories. Equally coveted are the trophies for best tugboat pet and best dressed crew, best crewmember tattoo (that can be legally displayed), and best mascot.
The event’s lightheartedness in no way means it is not taken seriously. Reinauer compares it to a tractor pull, and anyone who’s ever been through the middle of the country knows how the heartland loves its diesel. It would not be going overboard for a crewmember to get a tattoo specifically for the competition. “I don’t know for a fact" whether that has happened, says Reinaur, "but it wouldn’t surprise me. Some of the tattoos are really ornate and pretty unique.”
“For our industry, it’s the highlight of the year.”

The Sunday of Labor Day weekend was not always a maritime holiday.
In 1992, Jerry Roberts, who then worked at the Intrepid, decided to bring back the tugboat racing that had ended in the 60’s or 70’s when big companies started buying out family-owned tug operations, tugs started striking, and camaraderie in the business went downhill. He started calling around, and got a lot of maybes.
Companies were concerned with insurance issues, but mostly, about taking a loss by taking a day off. Cargo comes into the port every day of the year, so there are no industry-wide holidays.
“It’s difficult to pull a working vessel out of your fleet, and come in here and dedicate to a day’s events that are really non-revenue producing,” says Reinauer. “It just depends on how your schedule works out.”
Only a little bit daunted, Roberts kept plying the phones. “I really called everybody, sent out letters, and I got a bunch of them to say, ‘You know what? If we have a tugboat that day, with a standby crew, that doesn’t have a job that morning, we’ll send it. But no guarantees.’”
The night before the first race was tense.
“So that first year, I waited on the dock in the morning. We had already alerted the press, we already had some publicity. My reputation was kind of on the line because, you know, a bunch of people coming to watch a tugboat race, and if in fact no tugboats showed up, or only two tugboats showed up, I knew it would be the last year of the event.
“And I sat there watching. First one or two, and then more, and McAllister Towing Company sent five McAllister tugs. In combination with the other tugs that showed up, I think we probably had eight to ten tugs that year, which certainly was enough to have an event.”
Five years later, hundreds of tug-loving spectators were attending and tugboat companies were calling Roberts, instead of vice versa. “Because what it quickly evolved into was a great – forget the spectators for a minute – it became a great celebration within the tugboat community. And it was a chance for the tugboaters to bring their families on their tugs, deck them out with flags and stuff.”
On September 2nd, the 15th annual New York Tug Boat Race & Competition will begin at 10:30 a.m. at Pier 84 (at West 44th Street) with a parade of tugs, a fireboat spraying water and a Coast Guard Cutter.
Roberts is expecting between 10 and 20 tugs, but big as the event has gotten, the roster will never be set in advance. “They can’t tell two weeks out necessarily which tug will have gotten a job working at this pier or taking a barge to Boston or something,” says Roberts. “They’re not going to turn down a $20,000 job to race. But, they may have another tug. Or they may have a tug visiting from Galveston that they can throw into the race. So until the day of the race, you don’t know for sure.”
“Whoever can spare the tug power,” says Reinauer, “we’ll go out, rain or shine.”

The Last of the Friday Morning Drinkers

2007-08-29T11:16:00.001-07:00

New York Press

August 22, 2007

A seaport tradition lingers though the fish guts are gone

An unread Daily News lies folded in half on the bar. I slide into a seat, order a coffee from the bartender, pick up the paper and flip through it, but not with the same Yankee-loving, Lotto-playing gusto as the guys it’s really for.
When it opened in 2004 on Beekman Street, Fresh Salt entered into a tradition as old as the seaport itself.
In October of 2004, recalls Sara Williams, the bar’s co-owner, some guys came in one morning at 8 a.m. for coffee. Then they noticed that “I was standing in front of a lot of liquor.” They ended up asking sheepishly for margaritas. Thus was born the Friday morning happy hour, a celebration of the end of the fish market’s nocturnal workweek.
There was a time, affectionately recorded in a photo album behind the bar, when twenty guys would pack in, grappling hooks over shoulders, some already on their third vodka-soda as suits headed to work on nearby Wall Street.
That was almost two years ago now. When the 180-year-old Fulton Fish Market was booted from its waterfront site in the fall of 2005 and relocated to a new facility in the Bronx, Friday mornings at the seaport got a lot tamer. “We don’t do that anymore,” says Sara, of the extra-early happy hour. Now Fresh Salt opens at 10 a.m. every day of the week. “Not too long after they moved, we were like, alright, ten o’clock.”
Which is not to say that Friday mornings at Fresh Salt are suddenly sober. It turned out that the move to the Bronx was quite a buzz kill for the guys who liked to jumpstart their weekend with the unfailing combination of many drinks on no sleep. While the new $85 million, 400,000-square-foot indoor facility is spacious and climate controlled, Hunts Point lacks any sort of early morning drinking infrastructure. As one fish guy put it: “Where can I get a margarita at 8 a.m.?”
So while it goes without saying that the numbers of early morning drinkers at Fresh Salt are of course nothing like what they used to be, it is a testament to something – perhaps the strength of friendships forged over decades, or the lure of alcohol, or both – that there is still a core that makes the weekly pilgrimage from the heart of the Bronx to the lower tip of Manhattan every week, or just about.
“Vinny’s been coming, kinda,” says Sara. “Shadow, I haven’t seen in awhile. And Bobby usually gets here around eleven.”
It may be a sign of the beginning of the end that last Friday morning, not a single one of the regulars showed up. All the patrons at Fresh Salt had clearly been to bed the night before. All were utilizing the café, none the bar, and many were typing away industriously on laptops hooked up wirelessly.
But Sara’s not concerned. It’s summertime, she says, and the guys are probably spending their weekends away at the beach or somewhere.
On a rainy Friday morning a few months ago, the scene was similar – Sara running around accepting keg deliveries and setting out muffins – but the clientele, different:
“Where’s the Daily News?” asks Bobby Lobster, as Sara pours him a glass of red wine. “I forgot it,” Sara confesses, for the second time this morning. (Shadow had wanted it, too.) Like many things, this causes Bobby to groan good naturedly. Sarah offers to go out in the rain to pick it up, but she knows they don’t want her to go anywhere. It’s clear they all enjoy each other’s company.
Shadow throws Bobby Lobster – a lobster wholesaler – the Post. Bobby Lobster turns it toward Sarah and shows her “your boyfriend,” Yankee Johnny Damon. He’s heckling her, as Yankee fans tend to do to Red Sox aficionados: Sarah is from Boston originally.
Shadow, or Spider, or Michael (but no one really calls him by his Christian name) has been at the fish market since he was 20, which was about twenty years ago. He hoists fish from 10 p.m. to 9 a.m. Monday through Thursday, and on Sunday from 7 p.m. to 9 a.m. He looks wan after his 11-hour shift loading and unloading fish, half of which was spent outdoors in the rain. Mostly, though, he looks happy to be here, sipping his second Bud Light.
He’s still got the second leg of his commute home to Marine Park, Brooklyn in front of him, but he couldn’t care less. “Don’t have to be back at work ‘til Sunday,” Shadow smiles.
“Friday,” he says, sipping his second Bud Lite, “there is no bedtime.”

Floating Oldies

2007-08-29T11:11:00.000-07:00

New York Press

August 15, 2007

The birth of a very local holiday

“You can see the density of the towers here in the downtown financial district,” a woman’s well-rehearsed voice booms onto the decks of the Zephyr, Circle Line’s 143-foot touring yacht. “They would all develop around a tiny little street called Wall Street.”
“Too loud!” Sam Dao winces. Like 90 percent of the passengers aboard the Zephyr last Wednesday, Dao, 74, speaks too little English to be able to make out what this disembodied voice is conveying. He brings his hands up to his ears. “A little bit too loud!”
This hour-and-a-half long tour is clearly designed for American tourists, but today the sunburned father and son in Tevas make up a tiny minority. The Zephyr’s deck is crowded with almost 150 local seniors, almost all Chinese, decked out for the occasion in sunglasses and beach hats. That’s “seniors” as in old-timers, not students in their last year of school, although the energy level – the noisy chatter among cliques and the unceasing taking of photos of one another – might be expected from a group whose average age was closer to 18 than 70.
By the end of the day, a grand total of 1,200 old folks, most of them hailing from lower Manhattan, will have taken a version of this tour, on one of six outings on three different boats.
It’s not the Chinese New Year or anything. No one is celebrating their independence or even a birthday. This big to-do is the second annual Senior Sail, sponsored by Council Member Alan Gerson. Notwithstanding all the elbowing in line, it’s really just a PR event…
But what, after all, is a holiday? According to my dictionary, it’s “a day of festivity or recreation when no work is done.”
Granted, these folks are by and large retired, so a day of rest in and of itself is not much cause for celebration. But a free cruise with a couple hundred of your closest friends? In this community, that’s a holiday.
Sure, it’s unfortunate that no one can understand the narration. “Which one is which one?” asks Dao, waving his hand from one imposing skyscraper to another. He and his wife Hee Yann, 73, went on the first Senior Sail last year. They enjoyed themselves immensely, but didn’t learn anything.
Dao points north at the Empire State Building. “My wife and me, we know only that one. The name of this building,” his finger aims at a skyscraper with a clock in its tower, “can you tell me?” I shake my head. I haven’t been listening, either. Dao giggles a high-pitched giggle, covering his mouth with his hand.
And yeah, it was annoying that they had to wait around for an hour and a half in ninety-plus degree heat, on account of the flooded subways, for the Zephyr’s crew to assemble. “We waited so long!” says Roger Wong, a retired senior analyst for Shell Oil Company. “Originally the schedule is 12:00. Now it’s 1:30. First we wait outside, then inside Pier 17, looking around the store.”
Was it worth the wait? “Oh yes, indeed,” says Wong. “I guess so. Yes, indeed.”
The Zephyr’s first- and second-story decks crawl with hobbyist photographers who seem to think the Statue of Liberty is Kate Moss, and it’s standing-room only in the air-conditioned indoor seating area. The only vacant block of seats is in front of the shiny black bar. The bar stools are deserted; no one’s about to blight a free holiday with the purchase of an overpriced beer.
In their anticipation, the day trippers have thought of everything, from backpacks and fanny packs containing brown bag lunches and water bottles to colorful umbrellas to shield the sun. One man even has a rolling suitcase.
Finances can be hard on retirees, says Wong, who lives in Brooklyn with his wife. “But I manage okay because I watch every dollar.”
“A long time ago, I rode on Circle Line around Manhattan,” Wong recalls. “That was over 15 years ago. You know how much Circle Line cost round trip? It was over $15 before, I guess. No, it must have been $30, I guess. I don’t know. It’s a lot of money for a retired person. This is the good deal!”
“For free!” echoes Kee, a friend of Wong’s from the City Hall Senior Center, busily taking pictures of the group. “For free!”
There is one white-haired white man in denim shorts, part of a small group of non-Chinese seniors from the Montclair Senior Center, who has splurged on a glass of white wine. Thomas Bowden gazes out a porthole in the ship’s stern. “I’m looking,” he says. “I don’t really listen too much.”
Bowden lost his son on 9/11. The body has not been found. When we passed Ground Zero earlier, “it felt a little… I didn’t want to look at it,” he says. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been to the site.”
But Bowden’s memories today are mostly pleasant. “This reminds me of my Navy days,” he smiles. He was a seaman on a destroyer from 1960 to 1963 in Newport, Rhode Island. The blue ink on his arm reads “DD 943 / USS BLANDY.”
He, too, is in the holiday spirit, feeling spryer than his years. “I’m 66,” he tells me when I ask his age, then leans in confidentially: “which I can’t believe!”

Shvitzing it Out

2007-08-29T10:55:00.000-07:00

New York Press

August 8, 2007

Naked, sweaty transcendence at the Tenth Street Baths

“Inga!” shouts a naked woman, hoisting a bucket of cold water above her shoulder.
A full-bodied Russian woman lying prone on a wooden slab moves her head groggily in acknowledgement of her name. The bucket tilts.
Inga moans unabashedly as cold water hits her back and runs over her butt. As the water heats up to the temperature of the room, Inga’s moaning trails off. Her head returns to its original position, forehead pressed onto a wet beige towel. Without a word Inga goes back to what she was doing: sweating.
I absorb the scene from across the sauna through half-lidded eyes. We are in the Russian Sauna, familiarly referred to as The Fiery Pit of Hell, the hottest of the four rooms steaming underneath East 10th Street. This century-old cave is heated by an oven filled with 20,000 pounds of rock that have been cooked overnight. The rocks give off a radiant heat so intense that when I first walked in I involuntarily covered my face.
There is a warning on the door not to exceed half an hour, but I can’t touch that. Five minutes in, my synapses seem to be firing at half speed. My self-consciousness over looking like a newcomer here has been replaced by grogginess and a vague worry that I will pass out, desiccate and die. My head is heavy and I feel vaguely stoned.
It takes me a moment, therefore, to process what I’ve just seen. Imitating Inga’s friend, I make my way to the white pails overflowing with icy water flowing from two taps. I lift and tilt.
If you’ve ever jumped from a hot tub directly into snow, this sensation is a lot like that, except without the painful pins and needles. There is a moment of complete numbness that encompasses mind as well as body, as if your soul is hovering just above the place where you are standing, followed by an overwhelming sensation of relief in which all your muscles melt to the consistency of marshmallow toffee.
Just like that, I had happened upon a portal to emotional nothingness – that state you aim for when you’re tossing and turning at night trying to turn your brain off. And the release could be replicated, I quickly learned, just by moving from sauna to ice cold bath to steam room to shower, until you feel like a tortured Goldilocks who wants nothing more than to find the middle ground between too hot and too cold.
If $30 for a day pass seems like a lot to be spending on self-pampering, you can rest assured you’re not paying any extra for friendly service. It’s off-putting how the men behind the front desk gruffly leave it to you to figure out protocol, letting you guess at the purpose of the key they’ve handed you (it’s for your locker, and you can also charge food, drinks and massages to your key number), and where to disrobe (one old woman with scoliosis exited the locker room naked and grimaced when she came face to face with a man sweeping the floor).

Shuffling around in my blue robe and white plastic slippers marked with someone else’s initials, with my locker key hanging from a thick rubber band around my arm, I’d felt at first like a patient in a mental hospital who’d accidentally wandered away from her bloc.
But there’s nothing like group nudity to remove interpersonal barriers. I’d purposely come on Wednesday morning, because between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. the baths are open only to women. That means you get to be naked, an opportunity that doesn’t present itself nearly often enough in the adult workaday world. (It’s men-only on Sundays from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.).
In short order I found myself smearing mud, allegedly from the Dead Sea, on the back of a new friend with two nose rings and a long tattoo running down her hip. I accepted a container half-full of mango from a small Jewish lesbian sporting a faux-hawk. I got shushed by a stately woman in an African turban when my conversation with a belly-dancer who grew up in a town near mine got too animated.
I wondered to myself if she would have asked the Russian regulars to gossip in six-inch voices, but I was just as glad not to speak. It’s better to lie silent, like Inga, and make noise only when the cold water moves you.

Drowning for Dummies

2007-08-29T10:03:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
July 30, 2007

A surprisingly common way to go

If you spotted a dead body bobbing in the river in the last few weeks, join the club. Not one, not two, but three corpses were fished from the water between Sunday, July 15, and Thursday, July 19.
The first “floater” was pulled out of the Hudson at Pier 40, near West and West Houston streets. It belonged to Michael Dukes, a 30-year-old black male from Brooklyn whose family had reported him missing four days earlier. According to the medical examiner’s office, the cause of death was drowning. Police said he suffered no obvious signs of trauma.
The next day, the body of a 43-year-old Asian man, as yet unidentified, was spotted floating in the East River near the Manhattan Bridge. The medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.
Three days later, a third body surfaced down at the seaport, near Front and Wall streets. The fact that police could not determine the sex and approximate age of the victim likely means it was badly decomposed.
While three floaters in five days is an abnormal cluster, it doesn’t comprise some sort of freak phenomenon or Mafia retribution.
Between 2002 and 2004, an average of 129 New Yorkers were hospitalized each year and 109 died as a result of drowning or near-drowning, according to an advisory from the State Health Commissioner.
Although the drowning rate in New York State is actually less than half the national rate, you’re still more likely to drown here than to burn to death in an apartment fire or get popped in gang-related crossfire (unless, of course, you’re in a gang, and then the odds go way up), according to the National Center for Disease Control.
Some intuit that the river is dangerous. Take Angela Swift, the 44-year-old triathletes who, before swimming the 0.9 mile leg across the Hudson, talked with a sports psychologist because, she told the Times, “I’m petrified of this swim… I can do 60 laps in the pool, no problem. But here, I really feel like I’m going to drown.”
But more often, people underestimate the power of the current. Like Dennis Kim, a 22-year-old poet who drowned in 2004 when he jumped into the Hudson after he dropped his backpack, swam 30 yards to retrieve it and was swept away from the Christopher Street pier.
In light of all this, I acknowledge that my behavior a few weeks ago might have been a bit reckless.
A middle-aged woman who had read a Water Log about my first swim in the East River e-mailed me early this month. After living a few blocks from the East River for 25 years, she had decided it was time to go in, and she wanted a companion.
I was all in. I met her at her apartment, where I changed into my bathing suit and a pair of her swim shoes. We had two glasses of white wine apiece (I did not then know that in a study of accidental drowning by the State Department of Health, 44 percent of victims over the age of 15 had alcohol in their blood.) and we each filled a plastic cup – a “traveler” – for the road. I waved dismissively at the waterskiing rope and life preservers she had set aside, but we did each take a neon Styrofoam plastic noodle.
It was just after high tide when we climbed over the railing at 20th Street onto the tiny strip of beach that was not submerged by the East River’s high tide. The temperature was in the 90s and the water felt like an ice bath. We drifted along on our noodles, pleasantly buzzed, gazing upriver at the heliport and downriver at the Williamsburg Bridge, occasionally waving at the small crowd of curious joggers and fishermen.
All of a sudden, the spectators were the size of ants and the bridge was looming majestic. I started kicking my way back upriver. My new friend started kicking too, and coughing. When I’d made it back to our starting point, I looked back to see that she had made no progress at all. If she was headed anywhere it was further downriver.
I stopped swimming and let the tide carry me back to her, and reiterated (casually, as if it were an afterthought) that we probably shouldn’t let ourselves get too far from the beach. It took me a minute to realize that she had heard me the first time, and was trying her best to fight the current – and failing. Maybe if I had been sober, and/or better informed, alarm bells would have gone off.
But as it turned out, it wasn’t until after I had towed my coughing friend back upriver on the end of my Styrofoam noodle – a semi-arduous 15-minute endeavor – and we stood dripping wet on our little beach while I polished off my traveler and she smoked one cigarette after another, that it struck me that she’d been rattled. And I probably should have been, too, because that’s exactly how unidentifiable bodies end up circling the piers.
We have tentative plans to swim again. Maybe next time we’ll bring those life jackets.

A Man in Miniature

2007-08-29T09:55:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

July 23, 2007

The accidental making of a model shipwright

Dan Pariser has no end of options, but he’ll probably end up bringing the HMS Bounty to the South Street Seaport Museum’s 15th annual New York Ship & Boat Model Festival on August 4th and 5th.
Displayed in a glass case in the bedroom, Bounty holds the place of honor in Pariser’s apartment – and in his heart. “I have a fascination with Bounty,” he admits. “I remember building a plastic model of Bounty with my father. And the story – do you know it? – it’s tragic, and ironic.”
We sit and gaze at the wooden replica, accurate down to the varying thickness of the rigging lines, as Pariser tells the strange and terrible saga of Captain Bligh. After Bligh was set to sea by mutinous sailors in “that little boat” – Pariser points to the miniaturized 28-foot launch lashed to Bounty’s deck – he performed one of history’s great sailing feats by navigating the vessel 3000 miles to Australia, only to be court marshaled for losing control of his ship.
Pariser knows exactly how the flock of tourists will react to the model.
“They’ll say, ‘Is that a pirate ship?’
And I’ll say, ‘Nooooo, it’s the Bounty.’
And they’ll say, ‘Boy, you must have to have a lot of patience!’
And I’ll tell them, ‘I use nothing but instant glue and fast-drying paint. What I have is perseverance. It doesn’t take very long to build any one part, but there are thousands of parts.’”
Whatever it is that makes a great model ship builder, Pariser’s got it.
It started as your typical lawyer’s hobby. Twenty years ago, Pariser was a successful trial attorney with his own law firm in New Jersey. He played tournament racquetball on the side. And on the side of that, he did some woodworking.
Then Pariser tore the muscles in one knee, and racquetball was out. So was using the woodworking machines, which required him to stand. Still, Pariser had to do something wholesome: “Lawyers need a hobby that’s so engrossing it keeps you away from thoughts of trial,” he says.
He fished out a wood model ship kit that someone had given him and put it together. It was fun. He bought some more kits, and then got annoyed with the kits because he realized they were inaccurate. “I’d rather make my own mistakes than fix someone else’s,” as he put it. So he started doing “scratch builds” – drawing his own plans and making everything by hand, down to miniature nails and rivets.
It’s not every day that a person finds an occupation that draws on every one of their talents and speaks to all their inclinations.
Not only was Pariser already an experienced woodworker, but he had grown up playing flute, so he had the manual dexterity to do things like lace together toy-sized planks, pin a broken mast one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter, or replace horsehair rigging with museum-quality linen.
The conservation instinct ran in his blood, along with perhaps a little obsessive compulsiveness. Pariser had grown up in a pre-revolutionary home in western New Jersey, which his mother had fanatically refurbished, turning it into one of the best private restorations in the country. She even hooked her own period-appropriate rugs for each room. Like her son, she wasn’t a fan of out-of-the-box patterns. She’d design her own patterns, practice the more technical aspects on small squares (two of which are hanging in frames in Pariser’s bedroom) and then create her wall-to-wall masterpieces.
And Pariser’s background in law had inured him to the monotony of slogging through fine print. When he started drawing his own plans for models, he bought all the back issues of two magazines devoted to historically accurate shipbuilding and read each issue cover to cover. He’s gone to England to do research and has corresponded with museums and libraries in Rotterdam, Oslo, and Stockholm.
Pariser quickly made a name for himself in the shipbuilding fraternity, but for decades it remained an enthusiastic hobby. “Then one day I looked around. Our overhead was very low. The step-kids had graduated from grad school and I was very, very tired of being a lawyer. In 2004, I retired, and started a career as a model ship builder and restorer. That’s what I do.”
Pariser is now secretary of the Shipcraft Guild and the South Street Seaport Museum’s ship model conservator. His office is a converted walk-in closet in his Brooklyn Heights apartment. “It’s so small, I have to go outside to change my mind,” he quips. Everything has its place: thirteen cans of wood stain, fifteen pairs of tweezers and pincers, a band saw, a miniature table saw, two drill presses, sanders, linen lines, metal grinders, the hand-powered machine Pariser invented that makes miniature rope, and the magnifying goggles that hang on a nail behind Pariser’s head.
When Pariser is wearing those goggles, the tiny ships expand to fill his entire field of vision, which explains how he’s able to fashion plank pins that, at ten thousandths of an inch, are nearly microscopic. “I tell people, I don’t work in miniature,” he says, leaning forward confidentially. “I miniaturize myself, and I work in full size.”

Objet d’Art, and Violence

2007-07-25T13:13:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
July 9, 2007

A vandalized car tells of bygone adventures, and that New Yorkers like to wreck things

I scour the roof of the parking lot at Pier 40 for a moving body. Not a soul. Silently, I flagellate myself for not being able to get my lazy ass out of bed. I’m twenty minutes late for the designated 8 a.m. meeting time. Have I missed him?
An athletic-looking guy rides up the ramp on a mountain bike. I step out of the shadows and away from the cars, to make sure he sees me.
I have absolutely no idea what I’m expecting, but from what I’ve gathered so far about Carter Emmart, I doubt he’d be as square-looking as this guy. The guy rides by, locks up his bike, and gets in his car. Not Carter Emmart.
Let me rewind. A few weeks earlier, I had gotten a call from an artist who parks in the parking lot at Pier 40, saying that I might be interested in a car there that had been vandalized. She didn’t know whom it belonged to, but this was no ordinary car.
A couple weeks later, I decided to check it out. By that point I’d lost the scrap of paper on which I’d jotted the car’s description and location. All I remembered was that it was parked on the top level, and something about a bubble in the roof. But that was all I needed.
From every angle, this car screams to be noticed. Painted on the back of the 1984 Ford station wagon is a waving American flag. The Colorado license plate reads ON2MARS. The bumper is decorated with stickers from the Burning Man festival dating back to 1993.
There is a hole in the roof maybe two feet in diameter, fitted with a Plexiglas bubble – an Austin Powers-esque sun roof.
Orange flame lick the sides, and on the hood, a faded, oversized Barbie in a body suit stands on tiptoe and watches as a mushroom cloud spreads over Los Angeles.
Neat stencil letters on the driver’s side door spell out: “LTC C. EMMART” / “PILOT.” Had this guy been driven over the edge in ‘Nam?
Inside and out, the car is in a shambles. The front windshield has been shattered and partially torn out of the frame, and two windows are missing. Both back tires are completely flat. The paint job is covered in juvenile graffiti: oversized genitalia scrawled on the hood, the word “Petafile” on the side door. Cassette tape trails from the doors and gathers around a tire like entrails.
I try the passenger side door. It’s open. I root around and find maps of Colorado, San Francisco, New York and Indiana, a bill from a Texaco in Boulder, a napkin with a couple names and phone numbers on it, and bingo: a bunch of business cards. They belong to Carter Emmart, Science Visualization/Artist for the Digital Galaxy Project at the Hayden Planetarium. I call him, he answers, we set up a time to meet, and now you have been caught up to date.
People often resemble their cars, so I had high expectations, but the Carter Emmart who shows up 45 minutes late, apologizing profusely, with traces of smeared lipstick around his mouth, and smelling of alcohol from last night’s Independence Day bash, blows them out of the water. This guy is a trip.
“PMS was here,” he sighs, pointing to graffiti scrawled on his Plexiglas bubble. He rolls his eyes and flips his long hair out of his face. “That’s creative.”
When Carter inherited this car from his uncle in the early 90’s, it was beige. “It was the only car I ever owned; I just decided I wanted to celebrate it.” At the time, he worked for NASA, which explains the Mars-inspired license plate and paint job, and the bubble (lying down in the back, he could look through the bubble at the stars). He used the car to travel between jobs, and every year, he’d make the trek to the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert.
“The participation in Burning Man is so positive and aggregate,” says Carter, pausing to let his emotions settle down. “For the most part, people that go to Burning Man sort of understand that it’s something you add into and help others build, as opposed to destroy.”
Carter calls his car an “Ode to America,” but much of that ode, like the atomic bomb on the hood and the gas-guzzling whale of a car itself, is critical. “For me, America is a mixed message,” he says, gingerly picking up the plastic oxygen container from Barbie’s space suit out of the front seat.
It was a continual work in progress. The flag in the back was “redneck control,” so he wouldn’t get his ass kicked in the Bible Belt – and he actually got a lot of thumbs up after 9/11, which he found to be strange. Similar rationale went into the “LTC C. EMMART” / “PILOT” on his door; he was actually saluted once in Las Vegas.
A few months ago Carter lost his wallet, and had his credit card replaced. He didn’t realize that the fee for the lot, which had automatically been withdrawn from his account, was no longer being paid. The lot figured his car was abandoned, and then – no one seems to know who did it or when, exactly – vandals went at it.
“That car that’s kind of funny looking? We don’t know who did it,” the lot attendant told me. “Security’s trying to figure it out. They think it was little kids or something.”
Carter has suspicions that the lot turned a blind eye to the vandalism because they thought his car was abandoned, and it was so freaking strange to begin with.
“I’m not sure what happened, but my feeling is that obviously that car called attention to itself. I think the aspect of it that hurts me is that, I understand that it’s still New York, and it’s not as bad as it used to be in that regard, but you know, people can’t admire something without doing something to it. You know, you always got to carve your initials into some shit.”
“Well, I called her Blazing Glory,” he says, fingering the faded words he and his dad had painted just above the windshield. “And she died a spectacular death.”

A Dip of Baptismal Proportion

2007-07-25T13:07:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

July 2, 2007

We swam, we bled, we fretted about infection

I have been anticipating my first plunge into the East River for so long now that ever so gradually, it has taken on the significance of a religious rite.
I had a vision of how it would be.
There was a little beach I had noticed in the East River around 20th Street, tucked away in the cove of Stuyvesant Cove Park. It was the perfect spot.
An expert would lead the way, someone I could paddle after like a brainless duckling. I emailed The Swimmer, a guy I had interviewed for this column a few weeks back who swims off of Manhattan almost daily.
He was busy Thursday, he replied, and he had just been swimming the night before.
And just like that I was thrust out into the wilderness on my own. That was a shame, but his response did put to rest, somewhat, the first of my concerns: the potential hazard of swimming in sewage.
It had rained heavily on Wednesday night. Highways were closed due to flooding, baseball games were cancelled. When it rains like that, our sewage system (which is undergoing a major overhaul) still overflows into the rivers. The Swimmer had been swimming for years, and if he was cool with swimming in the rain, that meant immersion in a sewage-tainted river didn’t have any immediately harmful effects on one’s constitution: a good sign.
My second concern was the prospect of being swept away by the current. Growing up, I spent my summers in a lake, and when it comes to staying afloat in the water, I’m perfectly competent. But I was caught, once, in the undertow in Martha’s Vineyard, and a lifeguard had to do a Baywatch-style rescue and drag me out. Recalling that powerless feeling of being tossed like clothes in a dryer, unable to tell up from down, still makes me gasp for air.
In terms of the sewage issue, it would be preferable to swim at high tide, when the cleaner tidal water would be flowing through the river. On the other hand, drowning is less of a possibility at low tide. The issue turned out to be moot, since there was a limited time window on Thursday during which our photographer and I were both free. We would meet at 3:45, just after low tide, when the river would be at its calmest but nastiest.
“I’m not going in after you,” Andrew, the photographer, laughed nervously when we met at the designated point.
We climbed over the railing separating the park’s esplanade from the beach, and dropped down three feet onto the sand. It wasn’t all that hard to get down there, and we didn’t see any No Trespassing signs, but the beach’s inaccessibility made clear that swimming was not encouraged.
Once down at water level, we could see that the concrete bulkhead had been tagged with colorful graffiti. The little beach was littered with plastic bottles and dead branches, but the sand was fine and soft between my toes. I wiggled out of my clothes and waded in.
The sky didn’t open up or anything, but it was no anticlimax, either. The water was deliciously cold. Cold water gives the illusion of crisp, clean water, so it seemed I was frolicking in a pristine mountain river.
When I got in about knee-deep, however, it struck me that the water was sliding past my legs a little more reluctantly than water should. Indeed, it was a bit viscous, like it might coat me if I stayed still too long – but not to the point of being alarming. Had I not been taking mental notes I might not have noticed it at all.
I pursed my lips, closed my eyes tight and dove in. All was silent – the tinny silence of a hundred faraway motors muted by a vast body of water. The drops that inevitably made their way into my mouth when I emerged tasted not unpleasantly brackish.
I swam out maybe thirty yards to the mouth of the cove – my fear of being swept down to the Statue of Liberty kept me from venturing further – and floated on my back over the wake of a tanker. Then I returned to shore, where a handful of people had gathered to observe my baptism, and clambered over a rocky promontory to the remnants of an old pier sticking out of the water. I was gingerly stepping between the rotting wooden supports when a Water Taxi zoomed by, kicking up a wake that made me stumble into the splintery top of one of the posts.
The scratch was superficial. The blood that trickled down my leg did not concern me – until I considered the contents of the water lapping it away. The bacteria from all that fecal matter were right now mingling with my blood cells. It was time to get out.
As we were leaving, a college-aged couple was climbing onto the beach.
“You swimming?” I asked, feeling like I’d encountered brethren.
“That’s the East River,” said the guy. “I’ll get cancer if I go in there.”
When I got on my bike to head home for a shower, I felt like a kid peddling home from the neighborhood swimming hole. The hair on my head and arms already felt stiff with salt, immune to the laws of gravity or respectability. My skin smelled like summer. The city seemed to have lost its immensity and shrunk into my own back yard.
That night, there was some redness around the scratch on my knee. A callous on my foot was itching so terribly that I was reduced to chafing my foot against the exposed brick wall of my apartment – for an hour. Right now, as I type, I can’t keep from rubbing my eyes, which feel irritated.
Coincidence? Perhaps. Hypochondria? May well be.
I’ll keep you posted.

City Kid-Captain

2007-06-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

June 25, 2007

Pioneer is an urban ship, and that’s no oxymoron

“If we could just muster amidships,” says Captain Aaron Singh. Although his voice is not much louder than conversational, the handful of volunteers and two paid crew scattered around the deck gather around. The command is routine, but the news is dire: an engine check had revealed that salt water had seeped into the engine, which might damage the transmission. “Which would be… bad,” says Singh, 29, who has a knack for keeping things simple.
The crew droops. A class of sixth graders had taken the subway all the way from the Bronx expecting to be taken on a three-hour trawling sail. Volunteer crew had trekked in from outer boroughs for what is, for many, an addictive escape from the city routine. The ship’s educator, who arrives a minute later, introduces herself: “Hi. I’m disappointed.”
Pioneer, the Seaport Museum’s 102-foot schooner, may be the busiest ship at the seaport. She sails every day, sometimes coming in and out of port from nine in the morning until midnight. Each weekday, Pioneer takes school kids on educational sails. To subsidize the school trips, the ship becomes a charter boat in the evenings, and also takes tourists out – the crew even dresses up in pirate costumes on occasion.
So the fact that a replacement part for the ship’s English-made engine could take three to five weeks to arrive is a big deal.
But Singh’s body language is as casual as his shorts and sandals. His speech is unhurried as he lays out the immediate possibilities: either the crew will do the educational workshops with the school kids on land, or they’ll use the wet lab aboard another ship, or the class will reschedule. The class ends up rescheduling, and Singh disappears.
Within minutes, the leak has been identified, the affected part removed, the engine supplier notified. By that afternoon, the part is in the mail. “This company I found in Seattle has the engine, so they took it off one of their engines to send to us because they want to see us operate, so we’ll get it tomorrow morning and put it in,” Singh tells me later on the phone.
Disaster averted.
Singh, 29, is a city boy. He grew up in Manhattan and started sailing through the Sea Scout program out of City Island when he was 12.
One of the requirements of the Sea Scout program was that students gain experience on a larger ship than the program’s 34-foot sloop. So in 1994, Singh and his friend Jonathan Kabak, now captain of the Seaport Museum’s other historic schooner, the Lettie G. Howard, started volunteering at the seaport, collecting hours on the water, and moving up in the ranks. No social networking necessary. Once you have 360 days of time on a vessel, anyone can sit for a captain’s license with the coast guard.
Although she was built in Pennsylvania in 1885, Pioneer has been operating out of the seaport since the Seaport Museum opened up in 1967, and by now is as much a local as her captain. “It’s a city boat,” says Singh. “The boat’s operating out of New York. We are an urban boat. Our crews are from New York City. This is who needs to be crewing on it. This is the audience we need to be taking out,” says Singh.
“I always say that people don’t really know that Manhattan is an island. By sailing, we’re actually teaching by example. So a lot of the students we’re taking out, they can do the same thing. They can be a captain eventually. They can learn how to operate the boat, and do everything that we’re doing.”
The message seems to be getting through. Of the army of volunteers who help out on the boat and the slew of students who come aboard, more than 100 have gone on to make a career of sailing, says Singh. Singh calls the volunteer route “New York’s community sailing program.”
“Our biggest thing is getting people to know that we’re here. You can have a job from 9 to 5, you can have been to work and sail on a six o’clock sail or on the weekends, and not go to Long Island.”
Last year, six crew members decided to quit their day jobs and go off and sail on traditional tall ships.
“One of the appealing things about the seaport is you can escape downtown, you can escape the hustle and bustle,” says Singh. “I know for sure that I couldn’t stand working in midtown. People have to do that, obviously. But to be able to escape and be on the outer edges is definitely a relaxing thing.”
Are passengers surprised to discover that their ship’s captain hails not from Maine or Michigan, but Manhattan?
“I guess people are a little bit surprised,” says Singh, “but they shouldn’t be.”

What If You Could Dive into the River Whenever, Wherever You Wanted?

2007-06-20T10:12:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
June 11, 2007

This guy says you can.

“Let’s see if we can get in. Stay on your bike; we have to escape fast.” I pedal after The Swimmer onto property that belongs to the Sanitation Department. It also happens to be the Gansevoort Peninsula, which juts out into the Hudson just south of 14th Street.
“This place used to be totally abandoned,” says The Swimmer when we come to a fence that separates us from the river. “Nobody cared at all.”
I take out my notebook and begin to write.
“Wait a sec,” says The Swimmer, suddenly nervous. “Before you write anything, what’s your piece going to be about?”
Two city workers pull up in their city car. “What’s going on here?” they ask.
The Swimmer says something about how we’re just looking around.
“This is city property.”
We bike off.
The Swimmer wasn’t always this skittish. His name and photo have appeared in print before, but the heat has gotten more intense as the piers have been turned into manicured, fenced-off Hudson River Park.
“The park cops are really zealous. They’re out of control. They’re really a bunch of assholes. That’s the reason I want to remain sort of invisible. It’s just a legal monster, the Parks Department. It should be the opposite. You go to the river, dive in, be relaxed. Instead, you’re always looking over your neck.”
Ten years ago, The Swimmer, who was not yet The Swimmer, was dangling his feet off the end of a Chelsea Piers pier. No one was paying him any mind. No one gave a shit. It was high tide, so the water was pretty clear. Suddenly he was overcome by the urge to dive in. The water was just fine: he didn’t get any horrible skin diseases or grow extra digits.
Once he’d been in, he couldn’t stay away. He found all sorts of spots, like an old restored lightship called the Frying Pan at Pier 63 Maritime, where he’d use a pile of tires to climb out of the water. He swam every day when it was hot out.
“Our protection was neglect. You could go where you want.” The only rules: “Make sure you don’t hurt yourself and stay out of the way of boats.”
Then 9/11 happened, and afterward, the river “was filled with boats: police boats, coast guard boats.”
Then planning began for the ambitious Hudson River Park, which was to run along the river from Chambers Street to 59th Street. The Swimmer and his friend, who had formed a sort of swimming lobby group, went to meetings with the Parks Department, showed pictures of themselves and others swimming, and proposed ways of making the water accessible.
They had obvious ideas, like cutting a hole in the railing on a pier and building a ramp down to the water, and ingenious ones, like enclosing the area between two piers to create a safe swimming area protected from the current. (Swimmers would still be affected by the current at high tide, but they would just be pushed from one pier to the other, which The Swimmer points out might be fun.)
Not only would swimming make living in the city more fun, but it would draw awareness to the water itself, the Swimmer argued. “The more people get in the water, the more attention they’d pay to it. Environmentally, it would get cleaner and cleaner.”
It seemed like they were being heard. Like something might happen.
Then…it didn’t.
“When it came to designing it, [swimming] was excluded totally.” In fact, one of the first things included in the park’s bylaws was a ban on swimming. According to the Park’s website, “Swimming in the Hudson River along the park is only permitted with a Coast Guard-registered swim race.”
After we’ve visited a few of The Swimmer’s old swimming haunts (now he recommends the East River downtown and the Hudson in the 90s), we stop our bikes in front of a sign that displays the architectural plans for the park.
“It’s such bullshit,” says The Swimmer—but he seems baffled rather than angry. “You can see they design things to look good in a model. They love the way models look. It’s so anal, so over-controlled…Oooh, granite paving stones.”
Annoyed though he is, The Swimmer is far from beaten. He still swims, of course, although he won’t say exactly where, and he is a veritable font of ideas, from a guerilla cleanup and photo shoot of what is currently a garbage-strewn beach to a map of the “New York archipelago,” which would point out all the little islands and beaches so that people could swim and beach-hop or kayak their way around the island.
“If this idea caught on, New York would have this new identity. It’d be like water town,” says The Swimmer.
In the meantime, happy trespassing.

The Pied Piper of Words: F-R-E-E

2007-06-20T10:02:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

June 4, 2007

How a summer music festival charges nothing and rakes in tens of millions

Last July Fourth, I enjoyed one of my first – and one of the few – perks of being a reporter: two tickets to a free Belle and Sebastian show at Battery Park, to which tickets were no longer available.
It’s true that I had decided Belle and Sebastian was too saccharine for my taste, a result of overlistening on my IPod. Still, there had been eyeball scratching for the free first-come, first-served tickets, followed by bitter blog-o-rants by those who had gotten to the give-away points on time to find the tickets already gone, about how “some fans DO hold jobs.” If only because so many other people wanted to go and couldn’t, I felt compelled to take advantage of my otherwise useless press creds. I invited my then-boyfriend and we sat in the taped-off press section, which was sort of far from the stage, but which had plastic chairs and a tent with a free buffet lunch and coolers full of sodas.
As we gobbled down triangular little quesadillas, the sky opened up. After they cleared the park (I think there were concerns about lightning) and then let everyone back in, we hopped over the tape into the non-press section where, if you stood, you could actually see the performers.
Sure, we complained about the rain and about how there was no beer and no place anywhere near the performance to go get beer during the rain interruption, but complaining is what we do – or did (now we don’t talk by orders of his new girlfriend and I complain about that). By the end of the show, I was clapping along and we had no choice but to admit: we had had a picture-perfect summer in the city day, which could be improved upon only by the acquisition of a beer.
Before the encore, the band announced that they’d be heading to a bar in the area called Trinity Place, where the band members would be DJing and hanging out. Well, we needed to drink – Trinity sounded fine to us.
So we beelined it up Broadway, grudgingly paid a $5 per person cover, and had – I’m going to have to estimate – maybe two beers and a whiskey apiece? I remember ogling a bottle of $10 double chocolate stout that turned out to be worth every dollar.
Then we wandered homeward, stopping to watch two young brothers do tricks on their wheeley shoes, pleased with ourselves for having scored a free meal and concert.
Little did we realize, we had paid in kind for our “free” tickets. That’s the idea.
“Once we get them down here, we try to encourage people to shop, to dine, to check out our incredible museums,” says Valerie Lewis, vice president of marketing and communications for the Alliance for Downtown New York, which orchestrates the festival.
“Not everyone is buying flat screen TV’s or Armani suits, but even if they’re patronizing a restaurant or going out for a couple rounds of beers, that’s money spent in Lower Manhattan.”
I’ll admit that I was not particularly jazzed about interviewing anyone with the title of vice president of marketing and communications, but the folks at the Alliance for Downtown New York, Inc. have got the whole thing down to a T, including an aggressive PR guy who kept… on…calling. And then, as usually happens, it turned out that there was a story here, and it wasn’t fluff. It was cold hard cash.
Roughly $35 million was spent last year in Lower Manhattan as a direct result of the festival, according to a survey by the Alliance. (The festival itself costs between $6 and $8 million to put on, depending on the year.) About 75 percent of those dollars are dropped on food and drink, the other 25 percent on shopping. To calculate that number, the Alliance asked festival attendees how much they spent, and how many people were in their party, and multiplied that per-person average by the number of people who attend the festival every year.
The festival, which launched its sixth year the first weekend of June, began as a “sort of a roughshod experiment” to jumpstart the economy post-9/11, but, says Lewis, “we’ve come a million miles since then. We’ve moved from healing the community to trying to revitalize the community with economic development to establishing an arts base here to sort of a nice combination of all three.”
Although Battery Park is overrun by tourists who are sitting ducks for marketers (see: the statues of liberty, the caricaturists, the rice grain name-writers, the fake purses, the I Heart New York T-shirts, the break dancers), this festival is not targeted at them. Last year, over seventy-five percent of festival attendees were from the five boroughs, and only 4.4 percent were international tourists.
“Cause we want to create a lasting impression about Lower Manhattan – a year-round impression,” says Lewis. “I want to bring somebody in from, say, the Bronx, who hasn’t been to Lower Manhattan in over a decade, and say, ‘Wow, I want to come down here,’ or ‘I want to live down here,’ or ‘I want to bring my business down here,’ or ‘I want to shop down here,’ or ‘I want to take kayaking lessons here.’”
Is it a bit slick, a little slimy, to lure music lovers in with the promise of a free show and an eye on their wallets? The hipsters who will take the day off work to queue up for their free tickets to see the New Pornographers on July Fourth might be unsettled to learn that the event was manufactured by a blonde in a gray pants suit from her office in a high-ceilinged office building which you need to present identification to enter.
“I think using arts as an economic development tool is one of the most important things a recovering community can do,” says Lewis. And downtown’s economy, for all it has rebounded, is still struggling. “A lot of people like to say, well it’s five years beyond 9/11, it’s five and a half years beyond – this community still has not fully recovered as far as retail and restaurant patrons.”
Lewis has no qualms about calling the festival “somewhat a PR tool, somewhat a marketing tool.” Music, she points out, has been used in that capacity “all over the country, and it’s been certainly used in New York, if you look at Lincoln Center.” Whatever you call it, there’s no arguing with the numbers: it works.

The Liminal

2007-06-20T09:53:00.000-07:00

Author Ben Gibberd
Our Town downtown

May 28, 2007

We’re all mortal, but no one’s existence is more uncertain than the folks who subsist where the city meets the sea

The newest book in the New York City waterfront canon is not nostalgic. At least, it’s not meant to be. “You know, I tried to avoid it because I’m sort of mistrustful of nostalgia,” says Ben Gibberd, its author.
Gibberd’s 2500-word profiles of people who work or play on our shores are as sanguine as he, and the accompanying photographs by Randy Duchaine show subjects smiling or hard at work or both.
But even the author can’t stop his own book from exuding a wistfulness, not only for the salty “good old days” (which are always remembered more fondly after they’re gone), but even for the present reality. You can’t help but be aware, as you read, that what you’re reading about may already have been replaced by green pedestrian parks and luxury condos.
And while “the book is certainly not a tract, and it’s not meant to be didactic about what the future of the waterfront should be,” when it comes to nostalgia, Gibberd acknowledges: “Inevitably, there is a little bit, I think.”
Of the 21 people profiled, four have either lost their jobs because their businesses went under, or have jobs that are immediately threatened. “I guess the most important one, and in a way the saddest one, is Mike Gallagher, who was one of the owners of the New York Shipyards dry dock, which is now where the IKEA is going to be,” says Gibberd. “They have this incredible, or they did have this incredible dry dock: a 50-foot hold with these wonderful stone walls where they’d bring in these ships to repair them. There was a battle to save it, and I’m not quite sure what’s happened, but I think it’s about to be filled in for a parking lot. So that’s a business that’s gone and that will never come back, and that land is now gone for maritime purposes.”
Another four of the profile subjects are preservationists whose life’s work is to bring back a piece of the working waterfront. David Sharps bought a 1924 wooden barge and fought for the right to fix her up although she was designated “beyond repair.” He’s also a historian: on the morning of his interview he is teaching a group of school children the meaning of the word “obsolete.”
Gerry Weinstein, a steamboat fanatic, is the lone volunteer to show up on “volunteer Saturday” to chip away at his 800-ton pet project, a 1933 steamboat called Lilac. Weinstein has seen past restoration projects end up in scrapyards, and is plenty aware that this one may not get done during his lifetime.
It’s clear these people are passionate about what they do. Many of them have tossed convention and former lives to the wind in order to live outside it all. (“There was a general criteria,” says Gibberd of his subjects. “The harder someone was to get a hold of, the more they didn’t return your phone calls, the more we wanted to have them in the book.”) It’s equally apparent that they’re stalling in the face of inevitability. These ships will rot and sink. The blue collar folk who make their living fishing eels, sewing sails, or painting hulls will be displaced because there are more profitable uses for what has become our “gold coast.”
“It’s sort of hard, because we’re so close up to it, it’s hard to realize that the city in general, and the waterfront very much so, is going through such an incredible change,” says Gibberd, sitting on a wooden bench down at the tourist-busy seaport, his voice contending with Shakira’s and the rumble of the Water Taxi’s engines. “It’s nothing new to say, but it’s the new gilded age, and the city really is going through a period of growth that it hasn’t seen since the twenties.”
Of the billions of dollars of waterfront development going on right now, much is positive, Gibberd points out, like the Brooklyn Bridge Park or the revamping of Governors Island. One of his profiles is of Greg O’Connell, a waterfront developer in Red Hook who wears overalls and gives nonprofits rent-free space. But some of it, like IKEA and its parking lot, are prizes awarded to faceless hig0hest bidders.
Like adult teeth, our piers and maritime businesses are not going to grow back if we lose them. “Once you get rid of the last remnants of the waterfront, and the businesses that they serve, you’re never going to get that back again. Once the working waterfront is gone in New York, it’s gone for good,” says Gibberd. “It’s very easy to de-industrialize a city, and it’s impossible to ever bring industry back,” an afterthought that became clear on 9/11 when there was no place to load or unload emergency vessels near the disaster site.
Still, none of the book’s subjects are wiping their eyes while they build model ships inside bottles. In fact, they’re an inspiring lot. Many have discovered ways of incorporating themselves into the modern waterline, from the obvious (Teddy Jefferson swims in the Hudson, Manny Pangilinan and Josh Hochman surf at Rockaway Beach) to the ingenious (Olga Bloom converted an old steel barge into a world-class floating concert hall, Philip Frabosilo stores his fishing rods in the trunk of his taxi, Pamela Hepburn hung her infant from a snap hook in the wheelhouse of her tugboat while she operated the thing).
Next week, the waterfront will see yet another first. The book’s subjects – or the ones who check their email – its author and photographer will get together on Olga Bloom’s barge-turned-music hall for a floating book launch party and an unlikely meeting of littoral minds.

Were We Swimming in Your Drinking Water?

2007-05-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

No, we weren’t swimming in your drinking water, but these two are.

Our Town downtown
May 21, 2007

A trip back to the ‘burbs to pinpoint the body of water in which we used to trespass

You may have read that New York City is planning to raise your water rates starting in July. Since you probably don’t pay a “water bill” – for tenants, the water charge is generally built into the rent, and for apartment owners, it’s part of the maintenance fee –you may have filed it away in the someone-else’s-problem folder and gotten no further than the headline. That’s what I did.
But then I started thinking that given the subject of my column, perhaps I should understand why our water was getting more expensive to avoid the potential for embarrassment if it should happen to come up in casual conversation.
Turns out the rate hike will be going toward some multi-billion-dollar fix-ups to our water and wastewater infrastructure.
The third-largest item on the New York City Water Board’s agenda is a $1.6 billion filtration plant underneath Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. It will remove biological pathogens from the Croton Water System, which provides us with 10 percent of our water. City water has never been filtered before, but the reservoirs that feed the Croton Water System are located in Westchester and Putnam Counties, where building and population booms have apparently polluted the water to such an extent that it’s become necessary.
“Anybody can go up to Westchester and look around,” said Ian Michaels, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Protection. “There’s a lot of sprawling development.”
That’s where I’m from, and I didn’t need to drive an hour back home to know that he was right. I saw housing developments aplenty sprout up off of back roads and grow like teenage boys. When I was in fourth grade, the elementary school in my town reopened after decades of disuse to accommodate the rocketing kid population, and wing after temporary wing was tacked on until there was barely any playground left. My high school is hardly recognizable as the same place I graduated from in 2000; a huge, institutional-looking edifice ate the two-story brick building that once sufficed as Fox Lane High School.
But I did need to check on something. All this talk of reservoirs had gotten me daydreaming about a soft mucky bottom dotted with hidden sharp rocks that made you step gingerly; floating downriver beneath a canopy of fluorescent-green beech leaves; the claws of our chocolate lab, who would paddle after my brother and me and half drown us in a frenzied rescue attempt; the unpleasantness of putting socks back on wet feet.
That river we used to swim in, the one that fed a reservoir – was that part of the city’s water system? Was that what those No Trespassing signs were about? Had we grown up bathing in the water that then filled your bathtub? The idea pleased me, in a “we’re all connected” kind of way.
I called my dad, my brother – useless. This mystery called for a field trip to my hometown, beautiful but boring Bedford.
It had been awhile. In search of the entrance to the hiking trail that led to the river, I drove all the way to the next town on a winding dirt road, but a few gravelly U-turns later I was there. I parked and jogged the familiar two and a half miles to the river – passing an office retreat, three women with gardening hoes, a father and son, and finally a sign that said “DO NOT GO BEYOND THIS POINT / PRIVATE PROPERTY OWNED BY CONNECTICUT-AMERICAN WATER CO.” – and dove in.
To pass the time as I dripped dry, I sat on a network of twisted roots and looked over the pamphlet I had picked up at the map shelter in the parking lot. It showed the Mianus River – the one I’d just swum in – flowing into S.J. Bargh Reservoir, which, according to the map legend, provides the drinking water for 130,000 residents of Rye, Rye Brook, Port Chester, and Greenwich.
You may be glad to hear that I was not sullying your water, but I was out of a column idea. Refreshed and utterly dejected, I wandered back to my car. How was I going to make this now pointless and time consuming (although admittedly pleasant) trip applicable to the city?
I did know that the nearby Cross River Reservoir was a feeder of the city system; I had looked it up the day before. And although I’ve never recreated in or on said reservoir, I’ve passed it many times and seen dozens of fishing boats on the shore. Maybe something was going on there, or if not, at least I could paddle around in a boat for awhile.
But all the boats were chained to trees to prevent against just such an outing. These were responsible boat owners: on the bench-seat of one upside-down aluminum rowboat was a bumper sticker reading, “I Fish & I Vote.”
There was no one to talk to, absolutely nothing to report. I got back in my car and gunned it New York-ward – inspiration sometimes hits when I’m moving fast – then screeched into a residential side street, grabbed my camera and backtracked on foot.
The swan couple that had caught my eye was elegant but camera-unfriendly: one would plunge its head underwater for fish just as the other’s snaking neck emerged. Despite my stealthy bushwhacking they floated away just as I approached. I waded after them, past broken tree trunks and through a screen of overhanging foliage, determined as a paparazzo after Lindsay Lohan to get a decent shot of the pair of snow white swans bobbing in the water that will course through your dishwasher.
It’s not breaking news, but it’s sort of pleasing in a “we’re all connected” kind of way.
rtucker@manhattanmedia.com

"Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Rock"

2007-05-22T13:27:00.000-07:00

Me, angry, waiting for the ferry in a line thousands-long.

Our Town downtown

May 14, 2007

How Staten Island became a virtual prison for tens of thousands of cyclists and sort of ruined the 5-borough bike tour

I laid my bike down and flopped onto an unoccupied rectangle of grass in swarming Fort Wadsworth Park in Staten Island. The park marked the end of the 42-mile bike tour, a massive affair that traversed all five boroughs and involved more than 30,000 riders, officially (and probably about 60,000 altogether. As I discovered last year, there is no need to register, or pay).
After having raced a friend across the Verrazano Bridge (“It’s not a race!” old men yelled after us. Oh, but it is. Get out of the left lane!), I was winded and happy to be done peddling.
I was not as proud of myself as the fortyish-year-old woman talking on her cell phone a few feet from where I was lying: “Oh my God I am [ital] so [end ital] proud of myself. I’m going to take the day off work tomorrow and get a massage!”
But I was content, and… suddenly… despite having wolfed down free energy bars and orange slices at every rest stop – very hungry.
When the other two riders in our group finally located us among thousands of bikers and dozens of unmarked tents, we began to wander. There was a pet food display, bike demonstrations, a first aid tent and things of that nature.
But we weren’t browsing. One obsessively punctual member of our contingent had gotten up at 5:45 a.m. that morning, and it was now past four in the afternoon. We were in search of two things and two things only: food and exit.
En route to the food tent, we came across a very long line of people pushing their bikes. I have poor estimating skills, but I would venture to guess that this line, which was five thick and wove out of the park gate and down a service road, contained something like a thousand cyclists.
They were not on the burger line, they were not hanging out. Some even had their helmets on. This seemed to be the line to [ital] exit [end ital] the park.
“Are you in line to leave?” I asked a woman in white sneakers, white helmet, and jean shorts, pushing a mountain bike. She bobbed her helmet. I scoffed silently. Tourists and families could wait in line to exit a public park. We, however, would not be penned. The thought made me antsy, despite the mild spring weather and a brain saturated in endorphins.
Suddenly, finding food was second on the to-do list, behind finding a way out.
We were pretty sure that the rules could be circumvented with a bit of ingenuity. Security so far that day had been limited to some police officers and volunteer “marshals” with bullhorns who coordinated traffic and occasionally told riders to slow down, and a few intimidating-looking men in suits who “guarded” the entrance to the Verrazano, but did nothing as hordes of un-registered riders rode by.
We carried our bikes overhead and wove our way toward the fence marking the park’s periphery. I placed my bike over the chest-high fence, then started to climb over. Two security guards appeared from behind a thicket of trees, shaking their heads.
“Wait a minute,” my friend said to one of the guards. “I recognize your face.”
Good call!, I thought. But she wasn’t playing the charm card; the two of them really used to work in the same building. A little impromptu reunion and lots of smiling occurred, but the goodwill didn’t advance our cause any.
“If we let you through, they’d just chase you down and arrest you on the other side.” I can’t remember if they actually mentioned the possibility we’d get shot or if I made that up afterward.
What we hadn’t realized was that Fort Wadsworth, which had been decommissioned in 1994, had again become an active military base. There were men in fatigues moving around on the other side of the fence, even a mounted guard. According to the National Parks website, the base is currently in use by the Coast Guard.
We gave up on that escape route and attempted to leave the way we had come in, via the Verrazano. We were stopped and yelled at by police officers.
We had reached the equivalent of a dead-end in a maze, and would have to backtrack to the one and only correct exit. It was a situation you will never encounter in Manhattan.
Dejected, we made our way back to that massive line and walked our bikes along with the tourists and little kids for about half an hour, until the crowd was sparse enough that we were all able to ride – slowly – with the occasional domino-effect dismount, toward the ferry.
When we were finally within sight of the St. George Ferry Terminal, the spectacle was horrifying: there was a backlog of bikers maybe half a mile long. The sun was going down and it was getting cold. People were elbowing for room in strips of sunlight. Muscles were stiffening. The line wasn’t moving, because ferries weren’t coming, and there was no explanation as to why. A rig attached to the back of a teenage boy’s bike carrying a huge boom box blasting “Shake Your Laffy Taffy” and a stop-off at a pizza place made the wait only slightly more bearable.
Two hours later – long after many private vows had been made never to do the bike tour again, or at least to skip the last leg to Staten Island – a roar erupted: three ferries had shown up at once. We bought overpriced beer at the snack bar onboard and cheered to the end of the ordeal. We had escaped from Alcatraz, er, Staten Island.

The Floating Hospital to Float Again

2007-05-22T13:08:00.000-07:00

Charles Lercara

Our Town downtown

May 7, 2007

Alumni of a 140-year-old city program are emerging from the woodwork for a big fat round-the-island reunion

Like a superhero who’s lost his superpower, like a poet abandoned by his muse, the age-old Floating Hospital has been stripped of the namesake barge that has acted as its headquarters for 140 years. The medical and social services clinic has been landlocked since its dock space near Wall Street was commandeered post-9/11 to make space for emergency ferries. Suddenly homeless, the program’s 180-foot barge, the Lila Acheson Wallace, was “sold upriver,” so to speak, to an entrepreneur who plans to sell it again, billing it as a potential restaurant, conference center or museum.
The loss of its vessel has not prevented The Floating Hospital from fulfilling its mission of providing health and social services to over 50,000 homeless mothers and children a year. In fact, the program has just opened a new headquarters in Long Island City. New York City’s Floating Hospital could, theoretically, follow in the footsteps of Boston’s Floating Hospital for Children, which lost its ship in a fire in the 1920’s and is, according to hospital’s website, “now anchored permanently in modern buildings in downtown Boston.”
But that’s no fun – and having a good time, with waterfront views, has always been just as much a part of the Floating Hospital’s mission as filling cavities.
Says Darla Pasteur, a spokeswoman: “We don’t want to lose 140 years of good will and good work because we don’t have a ship anymore.”
Enter the Queen of Hearts, a 540-person capacity showboat that boasts “The Largest Dance Floor on the Water.” On June 9, the charter ship will become The Floating Hospital for a day, launching from Pier 40 and cruising around Manhattan like the Lila Acheson used to do.
Onboard will be Floating Hospital alums who visited, staffed or volunteered on one of the procession of barges that acted as The Floating Hospital over the years. The Reunion Cruise will launch a series of Healthy Kids’ Cruises that will take place monthly throughout the summer.
Finding these alums, though, is tricky, since many came aboard the ship as children or young adults and have long since moved. But often it’s when you’re not looking for something that you find it.
Awhile back, two representatives from The Floating Hospital were invited to St. Anne’s on the Hill parish meeting in Flushing, to talk about the program. When they were done, Charles Lercara, now 80, felt moved to get up and “ad-lib.” At age 11, Lercara had been one of the “needy kids” for whom The Floating Hospital had offered an unprecedented field trip.
Much of the trip is fuzzy – sixty-nine years is a long interval – but Lercara remembers it being “a real get-together.” The school trip began with a tour of the Coca Cola bottling company on the Lower East Side, which he remembers vividly because it was on that tour that he had his first taste of Coke. And he remembers something else: sitting in the eighth row of a giant theater aboard the barge – “the back seats were way high up and the front seats were low,” so everyone could see – and “Mrs. Roosevelt came walking down the aisle. I was right, right there. She didn’t stop because she was walking fast,” he says, and he doesn’t remember what she said to them that day in her 20-minute health talk. What stuck in his mind was her stature. “She was a tall woman. She had this flamboyant style of clothes, like she had an evening gown on.”
Jack Kaiser knew Charles Lercara “peripherally,” from having seen him around at parish events, but when he got up and started talking about the Floating Hospital, well, says Kaiser, “that was a complete surprise.” As it turned out, the men had more in common than either of them knew. Now it was Kaiser’s turn to ad-lib.
In 1943, Kaiser, then a high school senior at St. John’s Prep and a promising athlete with dreams of becoming a pro baseball player, was recommended by an athletic coach to be a counselor aboard the Floating Hospital. His job, for which he was paid a pittance, was to “play games with the youngsters” maybe four or five days a week over a summer. The rest of his time was spent playing sandlot baseball.
Kaiser went on to play baseball, basketball and soccer at St. John’s University, where he later coached from 1956 to 1973, then served as director of athletics for 23 years, and still serves as athletic director emeritus.
Kaiser thinks maybe his decision to go into athletic education when his dreams of going pro didn’t pan out were rooted in his summer on the barge. “I have to say, it was a great great experience for me.”
Kaiser didn’t mention it when we spoke on the phone, but on May 1, St. John’s University officially dedicated its baseball stadium “in the namesake of former student-athlete, longtime coach and athletics director, John W. ‘Jack’ Kaiser.”

If you have a Floating Hospital story to tell, contact Darla Pasteur at 212-514-7440 x.220 by May 31, 2007and you’ll be eligible for a free ticket to the Reunion Cruise.

Greys’ Anatomy

2007-05-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

April 30, 2007

The drama never ends at the ER for stranded seals, dolphins, porpoises, sea turtles, and yes, the occasional whale

“One, two, three!”
Two women scoop up an angry baby grey seal in what looks like an oversized pool cleaning net. The one wearing heavy duty welding gloves wrestles it down, straddles its back and pushes down hard on its head. The other, in steel mesh gloves, forces its mouth open and shoves one dead fish after another down its throat while the seal makes frantic guttural noises.
I’m no expert, but this little seal looks pissed.
It’s “not very eager to take dead fish,” the Foundation’s director and senior biologist, Robert DiGiovanni Jr., explains. In the wild, seals like their fish alive. They’re also not partial to being force fed.
“If the doctor doesn’t tell you what he’s doing,” he says, “it’s very stressful.”
Making matters worse, this little one is recovering from a broken jaw. But then it’s done, and “One, two, three!” the seal has been scooped back into the net and hoisted into its tank. And then “One, two, three!” another seal is pinned.
It’s feeding time. This struggle happens four times a day in a quarantine room at the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, housed in the Atlantis Marine World Aquarium at the far Eastern tip of Long Island. The giant warehouse-sized space is off-limits the public, so that the animals won’t get accustomed to people and start associating them with food.
The wrestling matches necessary to get the seals to eat, the growling and flopping around, are actually good signs; these animals are still wild.
In the mid-90’s, about 50 percent of the stranded animals that came to the Foundation survived to be released back into the water. Today, that number is up around 70 percent.
Ten years ago, they were a three-person, $300,000 a year operation; now they’ve got eight full-time staff, 125 volunteers and an $800,000 annual budget, as well as more tanks, a couple dedicated rescue trucks, a radiograph machine, a necropsy room, an in-house lab where they can do blood tests at 3 a.m. in an emergency. They go through 350 pounds of fish every day.
But they’ve also got more animals coming in, and they’re not sure why. “As we get bigger, we’re having more occurrences that are unusual,” says DiGiovanni. The whale that beached itself in the Gowanus last week was just another example of an odd incident. “The last few years, people have been seeing [seals] more often. They might be out molting, sunning themselves.”
The Foundation has started putting some of their resources, which come in the form of state grants and private donations (including tin cans of loose change collected by school kids) toward figuring out why they’re still at maximum capacity. They’re currently caring for four sea turtles, a harbor porpoise and 23 seals, when the season for stranded seals should be winding up.
It might be related to the pack ice breaking up early in Canada. Then again, it might not.
To figure that out, the Foundation has started satellite tagging certain animals so they can follow them once they’ve been released. They’re also doing aerial, shipboard and land-based surveys to establish baseline populations of sea turtles and whales, which are less commonly seen and therefore less fully understood.
“They’re out there, we just don’t see them on a regular basis,” DiGiovanni says of the whales off the south shore of Long Island. “If things change in their environment, we could end up seeing them.”
Preparation is key, because there is no way of predicting incidents like the January dolphin stranding off the eastern coast of Long Island or the beached whale in the Gowanus.
As the Foundation finds out more about the specific behavior of different species, they’re using something like 20 percent of their budget to make that knowledge public.
“Each species has a little different behavior,” he says. For instance, it’s normal for seals to “haul out” on land to rest, but a beached whale or dolphin is in trouble. By teaching the public about the specific behaviors of different species, the Foundation is creating an educated network that will act as its eyes and ears.
DiGiovanni points to a mural on the wall of different seals. “This isn’t a dead seal,” he motions to a beached mother. “This seal isn’t crying,” he says of one with runny eyes. “This one doesn’t have a bullet hole in its head – that’s its ear.”
rtucker@manhattanmedia.com

The 5-Ton Underdog

2007-04-19T14:23:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

April 23, 2007

For two days, a baby whale stuck in the Gowanus Canal was New York’s Rudy

I wander past the DO NOT ENTER signs into Sunset Industrial Park in Brooklyn as Tuesday fades into evening, just in time to miss all the action.
A small truck, property of the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research & Preservation, is pulling out. A woman in a red windbreaker who looks like she was born to save whales rolls down the window in response to my knock. She fields my questions in the pauses of her cell phone conversation, hands me a brochure for the Riverhead Foundation, says she’ll be back at first light tomorrow and we part ways.
I don’t know where I’m going, exactly. The guys at the lumberyard a few blocks away, where I first trespassed, told me that yes, they had seen the whale earlier, and yes, he was still popping up every now and again, and yes, there was a way to get out onto the pier, but that the entrance was probably closed at this hour.
But Sunset Industrial Park, at 20th Street and the Gowanus Canal, never really closes, which is disturbing when you think of it from a national security perspective but lucky if you want to see a whale.
A Hasidic Jew is walking aggressively, talis flying out behind him, on a path that will intersect mine.
“Where is the whale?” he wants to know. “My neighbor tells me I have to come out and I will really see something.”
Around the corner? I pick up my pace so we can walk together.
We pass Pepsi trucks and SoBe trucks and trucks that carry either shredders or shredded office documents, and find ourselves on the end of the pier, with a clear view of the concrete-carrying tanker I recognize from television footage shot earlier that day.
There’s a young guy there, shuffling his feet and talking to his editor on his cell phone. This is Jimmy, the unofficial whale tour guide of the evening, a.k.a. a reporter from the Daily News.
He’s gotten good at giving the breakdown: Minke whale, 15 feet, probably disoriented, possibly by the storm, last sighting was over there, but he hasn’t surfaced in a good 45 minutes; earlier in the day there were divers, news copters, the whole nine yards.
As curious carfulls start rolling in after the evening news, Jimmy begins thanking people for coming, apologizing that the whale seems to have disappeared, offering cigarettes. The Hasidic Jew takes one; I take a drag of Jimmy’s.
“Thanks for having us,” laughs a real estate broker, then drives off.
Wednesday, I return to the pier around noon to find a man in a welding mask producing lots of sparks with a blowtorch. Save for that guy, the pier is deserted. The elusive whale has moved! – but only a few blocks north.
There’s a crowd gathered there at the sea wall, of warehouse workers and TV news crews and marine biologists and, on the far shore, tugboat operators – one still in his long underwear – to observe the first whale ever to brave the Gowanus Canal. Comparatively speaking, he’s a little guy (or she’s a little lady), whose back has been scratched up pretty bad. He or she is not making any noise – a hydrophone picked up nothing – but that is neither a good nor bad sign. Whales, unlike dolphins, are not particularly talkative.
There are quasi scientific where-will-the-whale-breach-next games being played and a feeling of camaraderie that extends even to the policemen on the police boat that is coaxing the whale southward, toward the harbor (but without much result since the whale can easily just swim around the boat).
The crowd migrates south as the whale circles back to the spot near the cement tanker where it was first spotted. Then the group settles down, some sitting Indian style on massive cement blocks, others with legs hanging over the edge of the pier. Cameras hang around necks. There’s not much to take pictures of. Everyone has gotten pretty used to the sight of our friend’s grayish-black hump and fin. The pace of this waiting game reminds me of baseball.
The senior biologist from the Riverhead Foundation, Robert Di Giovanni Jr., says that eventually they might try to be more forceful about herding the young whale out of the canal by creating a “wall of sound,” but that would require more boats and high tech equipment and permission from the National Marine Fisheries Service.
“We need to give it a couple more tide cycles before we do anything,” says Giovanni.
I take off around 3:30, looking forward to tomorrow: the fact that the whale made an absolute total of zero progress between yesterday and this afternoon suggests this show could go on indefinitely.
That night, John Quadrozzi, Jr. sends me an email. Quadrozzi – whose sweet demeanor is not what one would expect from the owner of a cement importing company – is the guy who first spotted the whale from his cement tanker, and he has been returning regularly in his black SUV to check on it. He also happened to be the one who first spotted the seal in 2003 that would be named Gowanda.
“It is with much regret that I am informing you, our Minke whale friend passed away this evening. He/she beached itself on some rocks along the Hess Terminal and died shortly thereafter.
“Unlike Gowanda who also paid us a visit back in 2003, was rescued and then set free, the Minke’s fate leaves us on a less positive note. However with all the bad news of the past few days… we can all look back and some day recall, in the midst of it all the little Minke whale who came to the Gowanus Bay, made us all smile and laugh a bit.”

Girl in a Lion’s Den

2007-04-19T14:19:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
April 16, 2007

A young photographer spent four years amongst mobsters and ex-con fishmongers. What was she thinking?

Barbara Mensch is a mother now. If she had had a child back in 1979 when she moved into her loft on Water Street, there’s no way in hell she would have done what she did.
“South Street Story,” a recently released collection of Mensch’s photographs and accompanying text, is the fruit of the four frightening, lonely, frustrating years she spent wandering the docks with her camera, back when the Fulton Fish Market was the biggest wholesale fish market in the country.
Among the book’s opening photos is a series taken inside the Paris Bar, an all-night establishment frequented by waterfront workers. In one photo a white-bearded man is staring at the camera with a look that seems to be saying: Are you fucking kidding me? It was a look Mensch would get used to.
The first time Mensch went down to “the old Paris” it was 4 a.m. on a winter night. (Mensch would also get used to going out at that hour, the fish market’s equivalent of noon.)
She writes: “I could make out faces of the toughest-looking men I had ever seen. They were leaning over the bar, drinking and eating. The group sported heavy jackets; most wore pea caps or wool hats. Metal grappling hooks dangled from their worn jackets, and some of the men leaning over the bar wore blood-encrusted aprons… Suddenly, a large man stepped forward and advanced within an inch of my face. Fixing me with an icy stare, he said, ‘Get the fuck out.’”
Most people would have taken that as a standing order, but Mensch doesn’t set much store by orders. That characteristic of hers became evident as we were looking for a quiet place to do our interview at the seaport. She unhooked a chain and we walked past the DO NOT ENTER sign onto the gangway leading to the Circle Line dock. It was quiet here – no tourists – until the yacht’s intercom made us jump: “One, two! One, two,” and a few minutes later: “Good afternoon, everyone! Welcome aboard the Zephyr, and welcome aboard our first harbor cruise of the day!”
Mensch laughed, a little bitterly, at yet another example of how the seaport had turned into “Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.”
Back when this was the workplace of the hopeless and criminal, Mensch acted with the same disregard for convention. So she wasn’t wanted at the Paris – well that was too damn bad, because that’s where the pictures were. “The following night, I couldn’t sleep and decided to go back to the Paris,” she writes. This persistence in the face of disdain is what allowed Mensch to get her pictures even when she was getting the cold shoulder, and eventually, to earn a little trust from men who didn’t like having women, or cameras, around.
But that would take awhile. For a long hard year or so, she was shut out.
“I couldn’t go there. I couldn’t do it. It was off limits,” she recalls. “It was a man’s world. It was like the minute I walked into… I called it the Lion’s Den, I had to have eyes behind my back. I had to have my guard up, be totally alert.”
Being a woman meant not only that Mensch was afraid for her physical safety, but also that she was seen as a sexual play thing.
“I had to bundle myself up so they couldn’t see what I looked like. All those clothes, so they couldn’t see my figure.”
Sometimes, she would play the game, like when she bribed a boatful of men to pose for a picture by offering to do a strip tease (which she never did). But the game never ended. “You had to prove yourself, and keep proving yourself… If they decided to allow a man into that world, I don’t think they would have given him half the bullshit they gave me.”
“It’s hard for me to express,” she says as we walk back to the Water Street loft where she still lives. She is frustrated at the limitations of speech; how to convey the courage it took to walk down this street that now looks like it belongs in Universal Studios? “The men, their arms… You’ve never seen such big arms! You,” she gestures at me, “you couldn’t walk down the street here, no way. You’d be gobbled up.”
Suddenly, she is coming at me, leaning in, arms raised in what would be an intimidating posture if she weren’t slighter and shorter than me. “You gotta camera?” she says, imitating a heavy Italian accent. Her face is not an inch from my face. “Lemme see that camera.” I can’t help but laugh, but she’s not joking.
“How often did you feel fear?” I ask her.
“Fear, fear…” she says aloud, turning the word over. “All the time.”
In the early phase of her project, Mensch felt invincible, like she could do this with or without the men’s cooperation or consent.
“As the sun rose over the Brooklyn Bridge, I came face to face with a group of grizzled-looking men smoking cigarettes while standing next to their hand trucks. Looking like a pride of lions, they huddled around flames rising from large oil cans,” she writes.
“Still feeling triumphant from my victory in the Paris Bar, I started to take pictures. At that moment a chunk of ice about the size of a baseball hit my face.”
She had been warned.
Many of the photos that portray the “hate” half of Mensch’s love-hate relationship with the seaport – backs turned to the camera, paranoid stares – were edited out in favor of more commercially appealing shots. As a result, the book is more picturesque and less tough than the world in which Mensch actually lived.
But that story is there, if you look for it – especially in the early photos, like the one of the white-bearded man at the Paris.
What drove the young photographer to keep coming back? She’s fiercely competitive, for one. “I wanted to show these tough guys I could do something,” she says. But it’s not easy for Mensch to put herself back in her younger shoes. That self almost puzzles her now.
“I was just obsessed. And maybe you have to be obsessed to do something. I just could not get any peace until I got this story.”

The Crappiest Footbridge

2007-04-19T14:11:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

April 9, 2007

10th Street FDR overpass is a dog poop landmine

A big puddle with a McDonald’s cup floating in it defends the entrance to the footbridge at East 10th Street like a moat. If you want to get onto the bridge without soaking your shoes, you have to climb over the railing. So the bridge that leads over the FDR into East River Park is deserted on a rainy weekday morning – but there is ample evidence of recent passers-over.
On the morning of April 4th, there are no fewer than fifteen masses of dog crap dotting the overpass.
I’m going with the word “mass” because some of the piles of crap had softened and separated in the rain, and in other cases puddles of diarrhea had spread out, clinging to grains of the sidewalk and treads of sneakers and bike tires. So neither “pile” nor “mound” would adequately describe every fecal mass.
There is a pile that had somehow been deposited on top of a low railing a foot above the ground. Protected from the rain and elements, it had become desiccated until it was the consistency of a dry crumbly cookie, then it appeared to have petrified. Another mass looked like it might still be warm. And someone had been feeding their pooch corn.
There are four clear garbage bags tied at regular intervals to the link fence that encloses the bridge, but they’re mostly filled with rain water, empty forties, plastic bottles and wrappers, an empty carton of OJ, coffee cups and the like. Ostensibly, the bags are meant to be receptacles whose convenient location would encourage dog owners to actually pick up after their dogs, but for some reason, the majority of dog crap on this particular bridge never makes it into those orphan garbage bags that belong to no garbage can. It ends up right where it lands.
Anyone who uses the park regularly knows not to be eating or thinking about eating while crossing that bridge. “It’s always here, always here,” says a sweaty red-haired man in a knit cap, walking over the bridge with ear buds in his ears as he cools down from his jog. “It’s disgusting.”
The problem is not an unusual one, especially in and around parks. The Department of Sanitation is planning a “spring offensive against those people who don’t pick up after their dogs,” says spokeswoman Kathy Dawkins, that will include an ad blitz to raise public awareness and potentially raising the fine for not picking up behind your dog from $100 to $250.
But it’s unusually bad here. The 1951 footbridge’s long-held casual status as the shittiest of the footbridges leading to East River Park is now semi-official. I did a tally.
On the 6th Street footbridge, there were remnants of a broken glass bottle, one garbage bag, and only four fecal masses, which may seem like a lot when you’re jogging a slalom course around them, but coming from the 10th Street bridge changes your perspective entirely.
I could practically have eaten off of the Delancey Street overpass, on which nary a piece of litter was to be found. One garbage bag containing one water bottle hung on the fence at its western base. The order that reigns here might be attributable to the security shack at the foot of the bridge, where a guard watches over the parking lot adjacent to a housing development. The bridge’s only blight is a misspelled Parks Department sign that proclaims this is the “Delancy St. Foot Bridge.”
All three foot bridges lead from housing projects to the park. They’ve all got signs announcing that they are part of the Greenway system. So why is one so much grosser than the others?
No one in any official capacity seems to know. “I haven’t heard anything about this. I have not,” says Edwin Chan, a community associate for Community Board 3.
“I have no idea about that because the footbridges are not part of the Department of Sanitation. It’s Parks or D.E.C.,” says Dawkins, of the Sanitation Department.
“I’m pretty sure that’s D.O.T., so check with them,” says a Parks Department spokesman.
A D.O.T. spokesman said he’d call right back, then didn’t.
A young woman watching her red-nosed Pit Bull, Dynasty, roam around a grassy space in front of the Riis Houses adjacent to the 10th Street foot bridge had a hypothesis. “A lot of people run their dogs over the bridge,” she says. “And when they’re running, the dogs can’t hold it in.”
But why, I ask, is there more shit on this bridge than, say, on the 6th Street bridge just four blocks south of here?She thinks there might be more dog owners living at the Riis Houses, at 10th Street, than at the Wald Houses, at 6th Street. There certainly are a lot of pit bulls around.

To the Faraway Land of Tottenville

2007-04-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
April 2, 2007

Lettie G. Howard heads to the shipyard for her pre-season makeover

Jonathan Kabak woke up every hour on Tuesday night. He wasn’t exactly sure why. His subconscious might have been worried he’d be late.
He had to be at the seaport by 6:30 a.m. – high tide.
His schooner, the 125-foot Lettie G. Howard, draws 11 feet of water. Jonathan was slightly concerned that she would scrape the bottom of the harbor if they set off after the tide had started to ebb. He’d heard from the ship’s previous captain that there was a shallow section – a mud bar of sorts – and he didn’t want to take any chances.
Jonathan is not really used to uncertainty. He’s been sailing in and around South Street Seaport since he was 18, and he’s been captaining ships for ten years now, but Wednesday morning the Lettie G. Howard would travel a route Jonathan had only navigated a couple times before: for her first voyage of the season she’d shove off from a spot between the hulking Ambrose lightship and the Water Taxi dock, motor through the Kill Van Kull and the Arthur Kill and haul out at the shipyard in Tottenville, Staten Island, for her paint job and mandatory bi-yearly check-up.
If Jonathan is at all impatient as the minutes tick by on Wednesday morning and we are still waiting for two late passengers, you’d never know it. He walks around at a leisurely pace with his arms crossed, directing eager volunteers to his first mate, Denise Meagher, when they ask how they can help. Denise is running around untying lines, hauling big steel coffee thermoses and groceries, directing the lifting and lowering of the life boat that doubles as a tugboat.
“Wow, there are a lot of people watching you,” Jonathan says wryly as Denise struggles to start the lifeboat’s little outboard engine. It’s true. There are a bunch of us onboard – friends, seaport volunteers, me – who don’t really know what the hell we’re doing but feel awkward doing nothing at all when it’s very clear there is lots to be done. We’ve just helped lift the lifeboat and lower it into the water, and now a knot of us is standing there observing as Denise pulls and pulls, and chokes the engine, and pulls some more. “I’ll be one of the people who isn’t watching you,” Jonathan says and walks off.
The sun is peeking just under the Williamsburg Bridge by the time we start out on our southbound journey. Once we’re well underway, Jonathan offers the helm to anyone who wants to steer, then sings some Jimmy Buffet song and points out occasional points of interest. The third mate, David Gunn, shows a few of the non-crew aboard how to check the bilges to make sure we’re not taking on water, which, he explains, is particularly important on the first trip of the season. He shows us where the flashlights are and has us each practice checking. He says someone on the crew will ask us to do a boat check every fifteen minutes.
But then the sun comes out from behind a cloud and it turns into a glorious day, and the scenery – the smokestacks and gigantic oil steamers and tug boats and, best of all, the graveyard where old tugboats and ferries are abandoned to rot and sink – is right out of some Armageddon movie and is not to be missed. We do a grand total of zero boat checks. I think David did them all himself.
Unfortunately, we make very good time. The currents are with us most of the way, and we cover the twenty-plus miles in four hours and arrive at the boatyard almost an hour before we’re expected.
“Big Red,” the little red lifeboat, is dispatched carrying two emissaries to confer with the boatyard guys. They come back an hour later bearing what is ostensibly bad news, but it makes me happy because I’d rather be here than in the office. We can’t dock, according to the boatyard guy; the tide has begun to ebb and the water level is too low.
“What kind of crack is he smoking?” Jonathan asks, going over tide charts.
Shortly thereafter a compromise is hit upon, and we end up tying up to a tugboat on the periphery of the boatyard. Now that we’re attached to land, I feel I should get back to the office. I ignore that feeling, and settle down to a buffet of sandwich meats and cheese and soda and fruit, and bagels and lox leftover from breakfast.
On the long, hot train ride to the city, a couple people doze off. Jonathan looks ready to, but he’s got a couple legs of his journey in front of him.
He’s headed to the seaport to pick up his car, then home to Brooklyn to have dinner with his wife, then back to Tottenville to bring his ship into the boatyard at high tide the next morning – 7 a.m.

The Lure of the Stamp

2007-03-23T13:54:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

March 26, 2007

Mail artists have more fun

Ed Higgins is an unlikely salesman.
His Ludlow Street studio doesn’t have a buzzer – not broken, just never did – so I call, as instructed, when I get there. “Yup,” he says in his voice made of gravel. “Be right down.”
He chain smokes on his bed with his cowboy boots crossed and the news on, talking about his work and looking over occasionally to offer me a beer or hand me a book or suggest I get a tape recorder. (I have one. I forgot it. He says it’s probably good practice.) He is lankier than Lyle Lovett and can reach most things in his bedroom cum work studio from his bed.
Like his faded jeans with their smattering of stains, Higgins’ apartment looks like he’s lived in it forever, almost like it formed around him – and indeed, he’s been here since the 70’s and is sitting on a goldmine, paying “three-something” a month for what would be worth well over a grand a month if he moved in tomorrow.
He’s still got to be a salesman. Half his income used to come from construction work, back when he made $25 an hour supervising construction sites. Now that the field is saturated with workers willing to do the same job for $7 an hour, it’s no longer worth his time. So E.F. Higgins III makes his entire living making stamps – and selling them.
“Do you want to send that back to me when you’re done or you want to buy it for twenty bucks?” he asks as I page through a chapbook he put together in 2000. Neither had crossed my mind when he tossed it to me a few seconds earlier.
“Uh, I guess… I can just bring it back,” I answer.
I end up dropping $16 on a bundle deal that includes the pamphlet, which he inscribes like an old pro, and a colorful patch featuring one of his stamps and his signature wingnut logo (“‘wingnut’ is sort of slang from the Midwest,” Higgins explains, that means “crazy, off the wall. Not dangerous, just kind of fun-goofy.”)
There’s not much money in mail art. Higgins has some subscribers who pay to receive monthly mailings, and sometimes he’ll barter, like when he gave a guy a subscription in return for an old digital camera. But stamp artists are mostly just interested in communicating with each other – which Higgins does daily, by mail. He’s got a correspondence going with hundreds of other stamp artists from around the world and about forty on a regular basis.
He’ll decorate an envelope with the stamps he’s created from full-sized paintings. (“I would hope to be thought of as a good painter as well as a good stamp artist,” he says, which is not goal common to all mail artists. Some have political goals, others are photographers.) Inside, he encloses a communication: a sheet of stamps.
The stamps, worth nothing in the eyes of the USPS, are actually miniature copies of paintings that have been photographed, scanned, shrunken down, laid on gum paper and perforated. Higgins’ sheets each have an arcane labeling system by which he can tell the date and series number, which is important since his “company,” Doo Da Postage Works, has produced over 750 editions of stamps. The recipient can “frame ‘em, hang ‘em on the wall, tear ‘em up, use ‘em.” What’s important is inter-artist communication.
The original paintings for one of Higgins’ most recent stamp series are on display at 429 Greenwich Street in SoHo. Hanging from wires on the brick wall is an entire collection of aggressive-looking but personable fishing lures (and there were dozens more paintings that didn’t make it to the gallery) done in acrylics and watercolor washes.
Names like the Bayou Special Spoon, Boyagian Lure, Green Baguette Pencil Plug, Schoerpf Spinner, and Alger’s Tantalizer make you think Higgins’ dad must have been a fisherman or something. Nah – Higgins just likes their “cartoon-ness… their curvy shape, and how that works in conjunction with the sharp hooks.”
Five years ago, he picked up a beat-up specialty book in Michigan called “Made in Michigan Fishing Lures II.” He was drawn to the diagrams. “Some of them were real goofy-looking,” Higgins recalls. Flipping through the hundreds of Post-it-marked pages, I recognize some of the lures from having seen them in the gallery: the googly eyes, the disjointed marionette-like bodies that stoked his imagination.
But I don’t see anything in the book as ugly as Friggles, a lure-like creature on display at the gallery that looks like it was drawn by someone with cerebral palsy. It’s a joint work: the border is done by C.T. Chew, a Seattle-based mail artist, who creates the context: a middle school science competition. Friggles himself is drawn by Higgins, its various parts labeled as if it were a microscopic organism and the accompanying text written as though Higgins were a seventh grader hoping to win the challenge.
You’ve got to see it to get it, and even then, it may leave you scratching your head. But it’ll make you grin all the same, like an inside joke between old friends that you can’t help laughing at even though you’re on the outside.

Drink Locally, Be A Good Person Globally

2007-03-19T11:04:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

March 19, 2007

For one day, NYC tap water will be branded -- but you've probably already heard

On all other days we get free tap water at restaurants; why on March 22 would we pay?
It all started last October. The creative minds of a SoHo advertising firm were hard at work to come up with something… big. The challenge, which had been posed to them by Esquire Magazine: build a brand out of nothing.
“So we came up with a bunch of super-silly ideas to build a fictitious brand, send people on a wild goose chase,” says Andrew Essex, CEO of the advertising firm Droga5. “But we happened to be sitting around a restaurant. It was the week that India ostensibly ran out of water.”
“Paying $47 for a piece of chicken,” he recalls, “and realizing that you get this bountiful, magnificent tap water for free and realizing that you take it completely for granted” sparked an idea. Thus was born a brand.
“We thought we could brand New York City’s tap water: we’d call it New York Tap, and then we could get the restaurants to sell it constantly, and that would be a great thing and that would be that.”
However, kind of like all the awesome ideas I come up with, like a floating love seat that moves at the speed of the average pedestrian or a game show where the winner would become a presidential candidate, Droga5’s brainchild didn’t quite hold up when it encountered reality.
“We subsequently learned that that was not even remotely viable, that bottled water is a huge source of revenue for the restaurants.”
Only a little bit daunted, they headed to the revision table. “We thought maybe we could do it for a week,” says Essex.
“And some restaurateurs said: ‘Mmm, not so much.’”
Still, it was the best idea they had, and they knew it was a good one, even if no one else did. Water, the most valuable resource in the world, cost nothing here. That made it a huge untapped fountain of revenue – if they could only put a label on it. “In advertising there’s a chestnut that you pay $100 for the swoosh and $5 for the sneaker,” says Essex. “If you could put a label on the tap water that they serve, you’d suddenly make it valuable to people.”
Their restaurateur friends suggested they try it for a day. “And then once we modified our expectations, we realized, well that would be cool.”
Droga5 found out the United Nations had something called World Water Day on March 22, “so we thought, well that’s clearly the day to do it.”
Then they realized that they were going to be making money that they, being a for-profit business, could not collect. And so they called up UNICEF and asked, hey, do you want some money?
Unsurprisingly, “They completely embraced it, went over the moon for it,” says Essex. “We have their complete backing, it’s their plan to take it globally after this year. You know, we’ll start in New York and then next year they can move it exponentially to other cities that have first-rate, plentiful, clean water. So there will be New York Tap, Chicago Tap, Sidney Tap, London Tap, Geneva tap, and we think it’ll make a real difference in terms of revenue and awareness.”
The rest, Droga5 could do in their sleep. “We created ads for it, created a logo, a look. We lined up support of four or five of the top restaurateurs and chefs in the city. We got a sister agency to create a magnificent website, all pro bono.”
They’ve been advertising as only an advertising company can. By the time March 22 rolls around, every sequestered juror and elderly hermit in all five boroughs will have seen an ad for New York Tap.
I first saw a cute essay by George Saunders in New York Magazine last week about his lifelong antagonistic relationship with water, personified. At that point, I thought this Tap Project might be a cool, relatively obscure idea for a Water Log. Then I saw an ad on the website gothamist.com. Then I realized that a massive advertising campaign was about to crest and I was just surfing along with it, but oh well.
Essays by ten prominent novelists will be running in print publications. Reuters donated two big Times Square billboards on March 21st and 22nd, Van Wagner donated 100 free phone kiosks to be plastered with ads. The New York Times gave a full page ad that Essex said will likely run on March 21. It will look like a menu and say something like, “Special of the Day: Tap Water, $1,” and it will list all the participating restaurants, which was over 300 as of last Wednesday and increasing by more than twenty each day. The day of the event, Microsoft is giving them the homepage of the MSN network.
So how will it work? Well, in case you haven’t seen the ads: on March 22, you go to one of the participating restaurants, get a glass of tap water and pay for it. The money goes to UNICEF, to provide safe drinking water to children around the world.
New York Tap will raise money and awareness about the scarcity of drinking water, but that’s not all. This is the best ad campaign ever – for advertising itself. If this kind of buzz can be created over tap water, what could happen with a product that doesn’t come out of everyone’s sink? A full-scale Japanese little girl-style craze.

My Kind of Book Club

2007-03-19T10:56:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
March 12, 2007

Reading the book is optional, and they serve cookies

I’ve always avoided book clubs although I do a fair amount of reading and I think I recall that I enjoy talking about books. What I don’t like is frantically paging through a book trying to prefabricate a semi-intelligent comment that will make it appear as though I’ve read the book, then spending so much energy trying to figure out where in the discussion to insert that comment that I am incapable of listening to anyone else. I spent more than enough time doing that in college.
I have found my book club.
Last Thursday marked the third meeting of the Seaport Book Club, sponsored by the South Street Seaport Museum, and my second attempt at attending. Back in January I paid $13.95 for David Cordingly’s book about pirates, “Under the Black Flag,” and the grinning skull on its spine has sat on my bookshelf deriding my profligacy ever since. I didn’t make it that time. Thursday evening all the way down on Water Street is a commitment.
This month’s selection – Joan Druett’s “She Captains: Heroines and Helliones of the Sea” – was hard to find. It wasn’t in stock at any Barnes & Nobles in Manhattan, and I’ll be honest, when I finally did get my hands on it at the library, it wasn’t very good. Didactic feminism and a bibliography half as long as the book itself is an inauspicious combo.
“Thus it can be seen that women were as distinguished for bold enterprise as their male equivalents,” Druett writes in the introduction, having given the reader a smattering of instances of she-mariners from various continents and centuries that did not make for a very comprehensive argument. “The rivers and beaches and seas were equal-opportunity spheres back then,” she concludes.
I dutifully slogged through a few chapters, and was rewarded with some entertaining snippets about cross dressing sailor “boys,” and female lighthouse keepers who were completely abashed by the media frenzy that followed a “heroic” rescue for what was, to them, a part of the job description. All in all, however, skimming seemed sufficient.
Perhaps not the best choice of book, but apparently it’s Women’s History Month. And that would make the other attendees more interesting anyway. Who would want to read this book at all, much less read it and then plod through it again with the group?
But then, as 6 p.m. approached, butterflies started fluttering ever so gently in my stomach. I had spent maybe an hour with the book, and I wasn’t allowed to take it out of the library, so all I had was a haphazard page of barely legible notes: passages I had copied in order to deride them in this column.
I was suddenly afraid I didn’t have much to contribute. They weren’t going to, like, call on me, were they?
I shot off an email to the book club coordinator, Leslie Shope, asking if she happened to have an extra copy of the book on hand (so I could pull my move if I had to. You know, the impromptu “close reading”).
Her response, though very friendly, made me slightly uncomfortable. She wrote: “I don’t have an extra copy, but you’re welcome to use mine. I’ve been taking notes all day, so I won’t need it too much.”
Taking notes all day! Oh no. This was a seriously academic gathering. That on top of the last e-mail she’s written in response to my RSVP – “It should be a small group, but good conversation” – made me decide I didn’t want to go anymore. (Small group equals greater obligation on each person to not be a dud.) I felt the scratchings of a sore throat, too.
Alas, it was Thursday night, and I had a Water Log to write. But I was in a bad mood, and that was not made better by the fact that I had dawdled to the point where there was no way to avoid being late.
What a pleasant surprise it was, then, when I barged into the Melville Gallery five minutes after six and (a) not one of the five people seated around the table gave me a look when I made a racket taking off my coat, and scarf, and hat, and gloves, (b) excluding Leslie, only one person had read the book, and those who had not unabashedly admitted it and (c) there were two plates of cookies.
Discussion ranged from related to the book (“Let’s hear some of those stories!” a woman exhorted Leslie) to somewhat relevant (“The Pirate Queen,” a play about Grace O’Malley, is opening on Broadway) to tangential (“I miss grubby old South Street”) to way off target (“What about this woman astro-nut?”).
Most, if not all of the six people who eventually showed up had come before, and there was an emerging easiness about the conversation that was as warm as the light on the gallery’s wood floors and beams.
“Next month,” said Leslie, wrapping up, “is ‘Moby Dick.’”
“That’s a big book!” shouts a white-haired man. “I’m not going to read that! I think I’m going to read Cliff’s Notes!”
I think I might, too.

Seafood from Long Ago and Far Away

2007-03-19T10:50:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

March 5, 2007

Oyster bars are back; fish n’ chips are now a New York tradition

A tiny six-seat oyster bar recently opened its diminutive door on Second Avenue in the East Village, tucked between a local drug store and a Turkish eatery. It’s got an upstairs that seats about twenty, but its half-size ground floor and its sign announcing, simply, OYSTER BAR, in painted capital letters, hearken back to late nineteenth century New York, where oyster stands were as commonplace as hot dog stands today and the streets were literally lined with oyster shells (that’s where Pearl Street gets its name).
Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar is actually not new, just moved from its previous location, which opened in 2003 in a carriage house on East Fifth Street between Second and Third Avenues, but this incarnation has got an understated old time quality that recalls the days when oysters could be hand harvested from the river and there was nothing noteworthy about an oyster bar around the corner. Gone are the red and white checked curtains and tablecloths that adorned the old restaurant, gone is the name, Jack’s, in cursive on the window.
This is just an oyster bar – still not as common a sight as a hot dog stand, but no longer such a rarity, either.
Oyster bars vanished from the city after the oysters all but disappeared from our rivers in the beginning of the 19th century. Grand Central Oyster Bar was in a niche of its own when it opened up in 1913 (serving imported oysters).
It was not until the past decade that oyster bars – not just seafood restaurants that sold oysters – started popping back up downtown. In 1997, Shaffer City Oyster Bar & Grill opened on West 21st Street and Pearl Oyster Bar started doing business on Cornelia Street. That year, there were nine oyster bars in Manhattan, according to Shaffer City owner A. Jay Shaffer. Then “oysters boomed big time.” This year there are 78, he says, although only a handful are of the real deal that offer dozens of different types of oysters.
“If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Pearl Oyster Bar has certainly become one of the most flattered restaurants in New York, perhaps even in America,” Rebecca Charles, Pearl Oyster Bar’s owner, announces on her restaurant’s website.
Why the oyster bar boom? “I guess they figured out that specializing a restaurant helps sell food,” is Shaffer’s hypothesis.
Shaffer is even populating the waters as near as Long Island and as far as Nova Scotia with his own oyster beds: a traditional New York-style operation if ever there was one.
Then there are fish n’ chips, another down-by-the-docks tradition, but not an offering native to our seaport – until recently. Now we’ve got an authentic chip cutter from London on Greenwich Avenue and Tasmanian sea bass flown in twice weekly from Australia to be fried on Rivington Street.
From the British talk radio playing over the speakers to the Cockney accents behind the register and among the customers eating at the counter, A Salt & Battery feels like my best imagining of a British chippie. Nicky Perry and her husband opened the fish n’ chips shop in 2000, because the customers at their tiny West Village British tea shop kept asking where they could get them. (The last downtown fish n’ chips shop had closed a decade earlier.)
A Salt & Battery was such a hit that a second location seemed like a good idea. Perry and her husband got the keys to their East Village storefront on September 1, 2001, expecting to receive their building permit on September 15. Then 9/11 happened. For five months, the chippie-to-be sat vacant, digging the couple into a financial hole that would force them to close the Second Avenue shop prematurely.
Still, the Lower East Side would have its deep fried fish and eat them too, whether British or Aussie. As Perry, a Londoner, puts it, “everyone’s copying me. Everyone is doing it in their restaurants, at way more cost than I am.”
Bondi Road, named for the beach in Sydney whose image adorns the restaurant’s walls, began beer battering in 2006 in SoHo. The sit-down restaurant cum bar boasts on its website, “Whereas the English may have invented fish & chips, Australians perfected it.”
May be, but now we’ve incorporated the trend, and it’s become as New York as oysters.

So You Backed That Thing Up

2007-02-27T14:40:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown
February 26, 2007

You’re not alone. NYC may be country’s clog capital

“I don’t get why it clogged,” my roommate moans, her head in her hands and her elbows on her knees, doubled over in misery on our futon.
Last weekend was an eventful one at our three-bedroom East Village apartment. Saturday night saw my normally conscientious, slightly built roommate vomiting and apologizing profusely and vomiting some more after pounding hard liquor until 3 a.m. at a house party in Brooklyn.
When I opened the door to the apartment on Sunday afternoon, after being out all morning, my poor hung-over half-to-death roommate called out from her supine position on the futon, in the loudest voice she could muster: “Don’t use the bathroom. The toilet’s clogged. I’ll fix it when I feel better.”
That evening, my other roommate and I returned with takeout dinner to find a mayday situation. Our pathetic roommate was in dire straits in the bathroom. She was holding onto the toilet’s float ball to stop the water from running, she yelled to us, and if she let go, it would flood.
We sighed and continued into the living room. I called our super while unwrapping my shawafel sandwich. “We have a problem with our toilet,” I told him. He said he’d be right up. “Diakuiu,” I said. It’s the only Ukranian word in my vocabulary; he taught it to me just the other day. Usually he gets a kick out of it when I use that word. Not this time.
Up he came, our stoic and ever-smiling landlord, armed with a plunger. But not smiling.
After a request for Tupperware containers that made us cringe, and many splattering and sucking noises, we heard a flush. Half an hour later, success. (Although now our sink is clogged… with sewage.)
So what happened? Maybe the products of my wretched roommate’s drunkenness and subsequent hung-over-ness were too much for the plumbing system in our aging tenement. Or it might just be that she had the misfortune of being the one to use it when it gave up flushing.
Whatever the cause of the cease-function, it seems that toilet clogging may happen more in New York City than elsewhere. According to a survey by SCOTT Tissue (one of those phoners where they call a hundred people in each city and ask them a series of questions), 68 percent of New Yorkers have had a clog in their home, which makes us the cloggiest of the 25 major cities they surveyed.
The survey may, of course, be bunk. The Plumbing Foundation City of New York, Inc., had never heard of it, and the guy who answered the phone there couldn’t think of any reason that New York City’s toilets would be especially clog-prone. It didn’t seem like he was trying very hard, though. I mean, I could at least make some educated guesses.
I still thought the public relations people trying to sell SCOTT’s fast-dissolving toilet paper may have stumbled onto something. So I called Henry Gifford, a pioneering engineer and former East Village landlord who knows a lot about a lot. He warned that this survey could be “baloney,” then came up with a few theories as to why it might not.
First there’s the obvious one: density. We live packed together and use fewer toilets per capita, taxing the drain pipes. “You go in the suburbs, and they build a three-bedroom house, and they have three bathrooms, or two full and one half,” says Gifford.
Then there’s the problem that some older tenements don’t have separate vent pipes, which run parallel to the drainpipe to accommodate the air that gets pushed ahead of a full plug or pulled behind it.
But there’s another issue that affects buildings old and new, big and bigger. New York has always got to be different, and that holds true for the material we use for our drain pipes: cast iron, not plastic.
“The whole country, the whole world uses plastic drains – PVC, the white plastic – and New York still uses cast iron,” says Gifford. “You’re allowed PVC under three families, under three stories, which we don’t actually build much more of in New York.”
That material is more expensive, which benefits the plumbing unions, but other than that, it has some characteristics that are problematic: a rough surface inside, and a high thermal mass, which takes heat out of the waste and causes it to condense, forming a coating of gook on the pipe’s inside surface.
So what is there to do? Plunge that thing and cross your fingers, because you’re stuck with the crapper you’ve got, no matter how crappy.
“If I owned the building I would just go change the toilet, but I guess that’s why I don’t own buildings,” says Gifford. “The smart thing to do is let it keep clogging until they get sick of it and move out, then you can raise the rent. Then when you renovate, you can put in new toilets.”

'May I Barge In?'

2007-02-27T14:33:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown

February 19, 2007

Suitors line up to dance with Lady Liberty

Last Thursday was one of those days you don’t go out unless you have to, you get your lunch from the deli in your building or you get it delivered, your cell phone goes from two battery bars to dead in the course of a two-minute conversation. There was an announcement in the subway that the MTA was enacting some sort of “cold weather plan,” which involved storing all their equipment underground, and meant that the express would be running on the local track. It was 22 degrees out but felt like 8, with gusts up to 25 miles an hour.
Not, in other words, a day for sightseeing, boating, or being up on high, exposed monuments. Not if you’re a New Yorker.
“Where you from?” a security guard at the screening checkpoint underneath a big white tent at Battery Park asks me as I shed coat, scarf, hat, gloves (thankfully, they weren’t asking for shoes, a concession possibly due to the wetness of the floor) in preparation to proceed through a metal detector. “Westchester, originally. Now the East Village.”
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
My answer – “I’ve always wanted to see it” – rings hollow. We both know that New Yorkers don’t go to the Statue of Liberty, ever, and definitely not today.
Tourists, on the other hand, flock to the monument like Muslims to Mecca. It seems to have been written in a guidebook implanted in their deep collective subconscious; they appear to have no choice but to make the pilgrimage.
The threat of frostbite? A young German man buttons the hood of his girlfriend’s parka tight under her chin, then pats her on the head. They both grin. They’re into it, man.
Two rounds of airport-tight security, no liquids or backpacks allowed? They rent storage lockers and march on, re-buckling the belts that hold up their fantastic Italian jeans.
Oh, the statue itself is closed? They climb a narrow staircase to the top of the pedestal, recording for all posterity the posterior of the person in front of them, then fire rounds of digital photos up under Lady Liberty’s skirt.
In 2005, 4.2 million people rode the Circle Line Ferry, which loops from Battery Park to Liberty Island to Ellis Island and back to Battery Park – and it wasn’t because the 1950’s and 60’s vessels were super-fast or the hot dogs and nachos particularly good (although when you’re fending off hypothermia, a relish laden hot dog does hit the spot). At $11.50 for an adult ticket, that amounts to a big fat chunk of easy change: $35 million of revenue in 2005.
So when the National Park Service announced on December 28, 2006 that the contract to run the ferry was up for grabs after 50 years of operation by Circle Line, it’s easy to imagine mouths frothing, even taking into account that the winning bidder would have to hand over 18 percent of its revenue to the Park Service.
Representatives from sixteen companies, including New York Waterway, New York Water Taxi and McAllister Towing, showed up for a tour of the ferry operations on January 9. The Times reports that some of the potential bidders for the 10-year contract weren’t all that impressed with the seven-boat fleet.
The company spokespeople wouldn’t talk to me about what they liked and what they didn’t over the phone. One spokeswoman finally clued me into the fact that none of these companies were going to reveal their “special sauce” before their bids were due.
The companies are limited, though, in how innovative they can be, because the winning bidder, if it’s not Circle Line, would be required to buy the fleet from Circle Line.
One can anticipate, and understand, the desire to replace the clunkers with faster, more modern vessels, but here’s the thing: the tourists didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the ferry’s lack of amenities or speed. The fat pigeons strutting amongst passengers’ feet, the shortage of seats and the stained, outdated emergency instructions made the ferry ride as legitimate a New York experience as taking the subway.
“I like this kind of chairs,” said a Chinese high school girl, pointing to the wooden slat benches bolted into the floor around the periphery of the upper deck – a set-up that actually does create a communal feeling, a sort of central plaza of Babel.
But even if they can’t do much with the fleet, bidders are being encouraged by public representatives and activists to add stops to their route, like Governor’s Island, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Hudson River Park, Jacob Riis Park and the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. Proposals are due February 26.
On the subway back from my death-defying visit to the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal, I noticed a middle-aged father and twenty-or-so-year-old son pair I’d seen on the ferry.
“How’d you like the Statue of Liberty?” I asked the dad.
“Very nice,” he said in a thick accent, I think Italian.
“How come you decided to go see it?” I asked, then rephrased it three different ways in an attempt to break through the puzzled mask that had clamped down on his face.
He clearly wished I would stop harassing him. “It’s the holidays,” he shrugged.
The train stopped. He and his shaggy-haired son jumped up simultaneously. “Okay, bye!” he grinned, suddenly ecstatic. “We going to Ground Zero now!”

The Floating Pool Lady in Waiting

2007-02-09T13:04:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown

February 12, 2007

Brooklynites may be first to swim in the pool on a barge; Manhattanites, rotten eggs

“Can I come aboard?” I yell, although it’s clear there’s no point yelling. The trucks rumbling by on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway drown out my words, and the wind coming off the water sweeps them away.
The bundled man aboard the barge puts a hand to his hooded ear and shrugs: the universal sign for “There’s no way I could possibly hear you!”
I point to myself, then to the makeshift ramp leading from the pier to the barge. He shrugs again, thinks about it for a second, then nods, hesitantly.
Four construction men gather on deck, curious, as I clamber aboard The Floating Pool Lady, an approximately 280-foot barge impressively, almost miraculously parallel parked (parallel docked?) at Pier 2 in Brooklyn Heights.
Can I take a look around? I ask no one in particular.
Fine by me, one of them tells me. But if the general contractor comes around, he’ll deny he let me onboard.
Fair enough. Despite an abundance of No Trespassing signs, security seems pretty lax here, a few piers away from the cruise ship terminal. The security booth is empty. Piles of two-by-fours and plywood are probably not worth securing. And if he does come around I’ll just drop the name Ann Buttenweiser, the woman behind this operation, to whom the general contractor reports.
It is an odd sight, a swimming pool in the deck of a barge, although of course it’s standard on cruise ships. But in its previous incarnation this vessel had been a serious no-frills cargo carrier, and a coat of fresh blue paint has not exactly disguised its industrial character – but it’s clearly not meant to. “THE FLOATING POOL LADY” is stenciled in white capital letters on the stern, and underneath, “NEW YORK, NEW YORK.” The spaces between the letters are slightly irregular.
So even though I’m expecting it, it takes me a moment to realize that the rectangle recessed four feet in the deck, whose bottom is covered by an uneven layer of ice, is not some sort of storage area, but an honest to god pool. Or at least, it will be.
“Right now the pool is just a container,” explains Buttenweiser. “It’s a rectangle that holds water, but we have to put in the filters, and the things around the edges where the water spills over, and those kinds of things.”
The other work that remains to be done is putting roofs on the dressing rooms, laying down pavers around the pool that people will walk on, and building a spray pool on the upper deck.
When the pool will open depends in part on when the construction is completed, but the major hurdle is finding the right spot to moor the giant barge. It is, in fact, a bureaucratic nightmare that would be impossible to get through if Buttenweiser didn’t have an “in”: she’s a former Parks Department official.
She still alternates between “they” and “we” when talking about working with the Parks Department. “They didn’t believe I was actually going to do this. They didn’t push it, then when we finally saw it was going to come to New York, then all of a sudden we’re working to try to find a site, which should have been done… possibly could have been done earlier.”
“If I hadn’t worked in these city agencies, I never would have started something like this,” she says. “At least I know where to go.”
Where The Floating Pool Lady will go is another question, and one that remains unanswered for the time being. It looks like she’ll stay put in her present location at Pier 2 this summer, and might possibly be open for swimming. Next summer, she will likely head to the Bronx.
Like a lot of New Yorkers, The Floating Pool Lady is finding it impossible to get a place in Manhattan.
“We certainly have talked with the Hudson River Park Conservancy time and time and time again,” says Buttenweiser. “They don’t have any site on the waterfront. We need water, we need sewage disposal, and we need electricity. And they don’t have a place in the park where they have hook-ups on the waterfront.”
But The Floating Pool Lady is meant to move every six months, so maybe we’ll see her float by.

Fields, Ho!

2007-02-02T12:49:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown

February 10, 2007

A 63-field sports complex is coming to Randall’s Island. (People are pissed.)

It’s a balmy summer weeknight. A women’s Ultimate Frisbee team is running a warm-up drill in the outfield of a semi-lit baseball field in East River Park. Twenty yards away, a boys’ Little League team fields balls hit by their female coach. Errant baseballs drop in the Frisbee players’ midst like grenades, followed each time by a kid with an open mitt expecting his ball to be thrown back to him.
An Ultimate player nearly gets hit by a pop fly. She holds the offending ball and tells the kid who has come to retrieve it: "Next time, say 'Heads.'"
“Gimme the ball,” the boy demands.
“It’s common courtesy,” replies the woman, her voice rising along with her temper. “You could hurt someone.”
Like gangs that smell a disturbance, the two teams perk up; two knots of people begin to form where there had been two drills a minute before.
“You’re on our field!” the Little League coach yells, making the accusation general and bringing all of us into the melee.
“All we’re asking is for some respect,” says the Ultimate player, using the kid’s baseball to gesticulate angrily.
“You want me to call the cops?” the coach threatens. “Because you’re trespassing on our field.”
I glance at my watch. She’s right, it’s 8:55 p.m. We had gotten here half an hour early to warm up, so that we could get a halfway decent practice in before the lights turned off at 10:30, but our permit did not officially begin until 9 p.m.
Nevertheless, my blood is beginning to roil. As the captain of the Ultimate team, I decide it’s time for me to intervene. “Go ahead!” I yell back at her. “By the time they get here, it’ll be our field.”
It was, in retrospect, ridiculous. A group of professional and college-aged women out here to play a sport whose main tenet is “Spirit of the Game,” and a Little League team coached by a volunteer whose goal is to keep Lower East Side kids off the streets and teach them baseball – and we’re threatening to call the cops on each other.
Why can’t we all just get along? Because there’s not enough space. We’ve exchanged looks, if not angry words, with practitioners of rugby, soccer, baseball, Capoeira, touch football – even the Brooklyn men’s Ultimate team, whose ranks include spouses of the women’s team. All I can do is shrug my shoulders and apologize to our recruits fresh out of Stanford: “This is New York Ultimate,” I smile ingratiatingly, throwing girls’ bags over the chain link fence to a forgotten slip of a field where the lawn may be a foot high, but at least we can do plyos.
But there’s a buzz going around the athletic community: more fields are on the way. The Randall’s Island Sports Foundation has been plugging away on a three-phase plan for over fifteen years. The first phase, completed in 2006, was $42 million Icahn Stadium and a soccer field.
The second phase will be the largest addition of playing fields in the city in over three decades. It will include renovations of the existing 36 fields on Randall’s Island, many of which are dusty and un-lined, and the addition of 27 new fields, for a total of 63 playing fields. If all goes according to plan, phase two should begin in early 2007.
Not everyone is psyched. The field renovations will be footed, in part, by the 20 private schools that currently use the majority of the fields. They’ll be chipping in $52.4 million over 20 years, and the city will cover the rest (more than $90 million of city money has been earmarked so far). In return, those 20 schools will have exclusive use of at least 42 of the new fields from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. for the prime twenty weeks of the year. Next in line for prime time on the remaining 21 fields are public school kids, then community and adult leagues. (It’s easier for adults to play at night, but not until the fields are lit. So for now, everyone’s vying for the same time.)
At a hearing of the City Council’s Parks Committee last week, the normal attendees were joined by athletes and coaches wedged in standing room, waiting their turn to explain why their club needs and deserves access to these fields. After a long hour and a half, a dad with a baby girl in a stroller had to go; he handed his presentation on CYO Baseball to someone else, to be delivered to the powers that be.
“I’m disappointed in you. To do something like this…” Councilman Charles Barron lectured Adrian Benepe, the Parks Commissioner, after inquiring rhetorically about the ethnic breakdown of the 20 private schools. “No pun intended, but you’re way out of the ballpark.”
The anger in that room is justified – it isn’t fair that private school kids should have better fields, in addition to better everything else – but the thing is, you need money to make things happen.
Going to the private schools for that money was “a no-brainer,” said Aimee Boden, executive director of the Randall’s Island Sports Foundation, because they’re the ones who currently use the fields, who’ll be displaced by construction, and who would, by the Parks Department’s own “grandfathering” clause, get first dibs on the renovated fields even if they hadn’t chipped in.
Public-private partnership is how Icahn Stadium got built. It seems to me to be how the world works.

What Goes Around Comes Around, and Around

2007-01-26T12:24:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown
January 29, 2007

Sewage dumped in the East River meanders with the tide

Sometimes people tell me that the East River is not technically a river. Or they write East “River,” then in parentheses, explain why that’s actually a misnomer. (It is in fact a tidal strait connecting New York Bay and Long Island Sound). It always gets to me. It’s a narrow body of moving water, it’s got “River” in its name, for God’s sake. Why split hairs?

Then one night last week I took a bike ride along my favorite tidal strait. The water was undulating slowly like thick cookie batter that’s almost too much for the egg beater, but I couldn’t focus on any one ripple because the swells were gliding by at a pretty good clip. And they were moving… north. I’m awful at geography, easily turned around, but it seemed to me that the river should not be rushing away from the harbor. (Similarly, at low tide in the Hudson, the ocean rushes in and pushes north. The Hudson is not your average river, either, but a tidal estuary, where salty sea water meets fresh water.)

Suddenly that tidal strait business made sense. The East River isn’t fed by freshwater streams, like a normal river. It’s connected to the Atlantic Ocean at both ends; on the north, through the Long Island Sound, and on the south, through New York Harbor. So it’s open at both ends to tidal influences. In other words, it flows both ways.

The East River’s un-river-like behavior is not news, but a hundred years ago it was. In the first decade of the 20^th century, when New Yorkers were getting typhoid from swimming in the increasingly polluted rivers and eating locally farmed oysters, the Metropolitan Sewerage Commission – composed of a handful of engineers and a physician – was formed to figure out what was happening to the raw sewage being dumped into the rivers.

At first, the commission was optimistic that the sewage would eventually flush into the ocean. “It may possibly be found that we are fortunate enough to have a harbor that flushes itself,” the president of the commission, Dr. George Soper, told the New York Times in 1909. “There are two outlets to the ocean, and the high tide at the Narrows does not correspond with the high tide at Hell Gate. It may be proved that there is a slight excess movement of the current south, and careful observations are now being made to verify this surmise.”

Over the next few years, the commission conducted experiments that included releasing floats – some say the floats were barrels – from different points, following them on a launch, and mapping their progress.

One float was dropped in the water three miles north of where the Harlem River meets the Long Island Sound. Over the course of three and a half days it floated 108 miles, traveling down to the Brooklyn Bridge, then back. It was picked up within a mile of its starting place.

A Times reporter in 1910 described the maps of the floats’ progress as “prints on which were traced zig-zag lines resembling more than anything else the erratic movements of an undecided crab. There were many of the prints and not one of them bore a straight line, as if the float had made up his mind not to go any way in particular.”

Like the floats, the commission determined that “in most cases the sewage that flows into the two rivers at the upper part of Manhattan drifts down to the Battery or a little below, then turns and goes back again.”

Headlines became increasingly panicky: “Typhoid and Outbreaks of Other Diseases Traced to Evil Conditions in the Rivers and Harbor”; “Metropolitan Commission Gives Warning That Remedial Action is Imperative”; “Menace to Public Health; “HARBOR WATER POLLUTED; Sewage Commission Suggests Reforms and Abolition of River Bathe.”

The commission’s gloomy final report was a far cry from Dr. Soper’s blithe hypothesis. “It has been proved that, contrary to popular belief, the tidal currents do not flush out the harbor satisfactorily, but cause the sewage to oscillate back and forth near its points of origin.”

Today, the East River remains mysterious, and contaminated. And ninety-some-odd years after it was thought up, variations of Dr. Soper’s experiment are still being done to map the river’s idiosyncrasies. In lieu of barrels, researchers now inject sulfur hexafluoride “tracers” into the river to dye the water, but even now they follow the meandering path of their tracers the old fashioned way: they zigzag alongside in their boat.

Rent is $1, but Tenants Have a Multi-Million Dollar Job To Do

2007-01-26T12:21:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown

November 20 2006

A six-person office maintains Stuyvesant Cove Park and educates the public

There is a 20-foot by 40-foot shack just south of the Gulf gas station at 23^rd Street and the East River, in the middle of an otherwise empty lot. The little structure, with one car parked out front, seems out of place against the industrial skyline of Queens, like it was just plopped down here between the river and the FDR. Indeed, it was.

This building, a model of eco-friendly construction with its steeply slanted roof covered by photovoltaic panels and waterless urinal, was on display at the 2000 Earth Day Fair in Battery Park City. It was taken apart and put into storage until 2003, when it was put back together just north of the newly created Stuyvesant Cove Park.

It doesn’t seem big enough to hold its own here, on what used to be the site of a concrete factory and underground gasoline storage facility. Particularly this day, when fashionable fall coats have been replaced by big winter parkas with fur-lined hoods, the stand-alone shack looks defenseless against the elements.

But it’s toasty inside, which is particularly surprising when I learn that the heat is not on. The walls, it turns out, are insulated by thick foam, and the single large room – creatively divided into office space for six full-time employees and classroom space for environmental classes that are free to the public – is warmed by the sun reflecting off the East River and streaming in through the big south-facing windows.

This is Solar One, the headquarters for the maintenance of Stuyvesant Cove Park, a 1.9-acre riverfront tract between 18^th and 23^rd Streets with a winding walkway that was converted from a brownfield in 2003. Half the annual cost of planting and maintaining the park, or $100,000, is provided by the city’s Economic Development Corporation. Solar One must raise the other half, as part of the terms of its lease. Much of Solar One’s portion comes from volunteer hours, which they can write off for the value of minimum wage. The park is primarily maintained by a core of 40 volunteers, plus high school students and trade union groups. Only one of the six full-time employees at Solar One, the park manager, is actually responsible for park maintenance.

The others are focused on administration, public outreach and the giant project that will put this little company on the map: Solar 2.

Solar 2 will generate more energy than it actually uses, making it the first “net-zero” building of its size and kind anywhere in the northeast. The two-story structure, designed by green architects Kiss + Cathcart, will stand where Solar One now stands and serve as a environmental classroom and an example of what’s possible in green urban engineering. It will rise to the height of the FDR overpass, but no higher, and the first story will be mostly open space, so the building will not piss off Stuyvesant Town residents by restricting their views of the river. It will fill the empty blacktop with a new café (which will make Solar 2 the only place you can buy non-gas station food east of the FDR), a play area for kids, and a bigger stage than the one currently used by Solar One for performances like concerts that use solar-powered amps.

The second floor will have an “eco-apartment,” which will look like a typical New York City studio apartment, complete with its own balcony, and completely outfitted with green products, including a water-collection system and fluorescent light bulbs (they’re not that bad anymore, insists Solar One’s executive director, Chris Collins), and a see-through floor that will allow you to see what happens when you flick on a light or turn on a faucet.

The Solar One team has raised $1.2 million to date for the building that will be its new office. Money has come from the Manhattan delegation of the City Council, Councilman Dan Garodnick and Speaker Christine Quinn, Borough President Scott Stringer, the Kresge Foundation’s green building initiative, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Collins hopes to have raised the full $12.5 million price tag by 2008 so they can start building by 2009.

But for now, there’s a lot of outreach yet to be done, because most people still don’t know there’s anything there on the other side of the FDR, between the Gulf gas station and the Con Ed plant.

And Then There Were Two

2007-01-26T11:55:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown
December 18, 2006

Second death on Hudson River bike path means first was no freak accident

It hit home when I read that Eric Ng, a 22-year-old NYU graduate who’d been biking home from a concert at the Knitting Factory, was mowed down by a guy who was so drunk he had failed to realize he was driving not on the highway, but on the bike path.

Six months ago, when I heard about the first death to take place on the Hudson River bike path, I filed it away as a statistic and hopped on my bike to ride to work. This time, the news sunk deeper.

I am starting to feel, when I’m on my bike, like a deer in Westchester. The ghost bikes memorializing dead cyclists that increasingly occupy our intersections remind me of road kill.

The Hudson River bike path, supposed to be one of the few places in Manhattan safe enough even for kids on training wheels, is now home to two ghost bikes.

The first death in the four-year history of the path seemed like it might have been a freak accident. Carl Nacht, a 56-year old doctor – my dad’s doctor, in fact – was biking with his wife when an NYPD tow truck turned from the highway into the tow pound at 38^th Street and struck Nacht, throwing him onto the hood of another tow truck. After three days in intensive care, Nacht died of head injuries.

Freak accidents happen all the time in this city. When a crane falls off a building and crushes a taxi, when a man is attacked by a crazy guy with a chainsaw in the subway, we don’t cross the street to avoid walking under a crane, and we certainly don’t stop riding the subway.

But Ng’s death makes clear that Nacht’s was not a one in a million thing. Once two cranes fall, once two people get attacked with chainsaws, that’s when people start looking up, taking cabs.

And there’s another reason, too, why Ng’s death has stayed with me – to the point where I’ve started making excuses not to ride my bike to work (it’s cold, I don’t want to be sweaty, I want to relax and drink my coffee… it’s all only half-true. The other half is, I think, I don’t want to become a vegetable today.) It’s that Ng reminds me of me.

Dr. Carl Nacht was not my age, not someone I would have known well. No matter that he was a marathoner and an experienced cyclist, something deep-seated in my cocky unconscious swept the accident aside with the rationale that I, being younger and quicker, would have seen the tow truck turning and hit the brakes in time. How many close calls have left me pumped up on adrenaline, a little shaken, but ultimately reassured of my indestructibility?

But Ng was twenty-two (could have been me). He was on his way from the Knitting Factory to a party in the East Village (could have been me). He must have been cocksure, too, because he wasn’t wearing a helmet (could have been me) – not that it would have mattered, given how fast the car was moving when it hit him. (Nacht wasn’t wearing a helmet, either, but I didn’t take much notice of the circumstances surrounding his death).

What, I wondered, were other cyclists thinking? Maybe I was being a drama queen about the whole thing. Maybe I’d stopped riding to work because I was just getting lazy. It’s hard to pin down our own motivations.

So thirteen days after Ng’s death, I biked down to his memorial ghost bike, chained to a signpost just north of Clarkson Street on the Hudson River bike path. Flies buzzed around wilting flowers stuck through the spokes of the white bike. I read the notes – the ones that weren’t sealed – that were tucked in with the flowers and between the rocks piled into a cairn.

A Chinese delivery man headed south on his bike stopped to watch. He said something to me in Chinese, which he kept repeating. I couldn’t tell if it was a question (Did you know him?) or a statement. He clucked his tongue and shook his head, then biked off.

Amy Madden, her dog running alongside her bike, stopped, somber. “I think about getting hit by a car every single time I get on a bike,” she said. “It’s deplorable. The one place they’ve set aside for us to ride, and they can’t keep us safe.”

Ezra Caldwell, on a stripped-down road bike, dismounted to take a picture of the memorial, which he will post alongside photos of Nacht’s ghost bike on his Flickr page. He had just had an altercation with a city bus driver who had pulled right across the bike path in front of Caldwell. Caldwell rode after the driver and yelled at him – right in front of a cop car. The cops paid no attention.

Caldwell has been a courier for fifteen years, and while Ng’s death pisses him off, it doesn’t scare him.

“You learn to look up the road,” he said. “I’m a pretty defensive rider, I really pay attention.”

But two deaths, in six months, on this path alone? (Between 1996 and 2005, only one of the city’s 225 cyclist fatalities occurred when the cyclist was riding in a marked bike lane, according to a report by the city.)

“I find that freaky,” Caldwell said.

The Salt of the Streets

2007-01-26T11:42:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown
December 25, 2006

Those piles on the waterfront, we see them but we don't

Manhattan’s terrain changes each year as winter approaches. Usually flat, our landscape sprouts a few hills along forgotten stretches of waterfront while we’re not looking.

The hills are made of salt – the salt that will be used to combat the snow that may or may not visit us this winter and make our streets impassable.

The salt hill that first caught my attention was in the Red Hook Recreational Area in Brooklyn. It sits there in its grayness all year round, gradually flattening out, occasionally providing a teenage boy with a diversion (climbing it) or a way to show off (sliding back down). But when I went to the park a few weeks ago, the hill had been transformed. From a distance it looked as if the gigantic mountain was covering all the playing fields. It was massive to the point of drawing laughs, it looked so ridiculous. A mountain in the industrial heart of Red Hook! What was it? It had been sitting there all year in its reduced form, and no one had ever stopped to think about what it was made out of or why it was there. Now we would have had to morons not to guess it (although it took awhile). Salt!

I contacted the Department of Sanitation. Could someone talk to me about the salt stockpiles downtown? They were busy, preparing for the holidays (and probably tidying up the salt mountains), and couldn’t talk on the phone, but Keith Mellis, executive officer of the community affairs department, found a few minutes to indulge my curiosity over e-mail.

His answers are perhaps a little sparse, but you won’t find any of this information on Google. So enjoy.

The rock salt comes from South America (holy crap!), and is transported to New York City by truck (that’s a long drive). The Department of Sanitation begins its snow season with a minimum of 200,000 tons of rock salt (I assume that covers all five boroughs), and can order additional salt if necessary. They are already fully stocked.

You’re curious, I bet, about whether they order the same amount of salt each year, or if they have some idea of how much it’s supposed to snow. That would be difficult, since weather.com can only project a week ahead, but, it turns out, it can be done. The Department of Sanitation uses not one but three private weather forecasters: Metro Weather, Weather Data Net, and Compu-Weather, “and we find this system to be accurate,” writes Mellis.

Last year, there were 160,000 tons of rock salt left over at the end of the snow season. (I assume that’s because they ordered more than the minimum of 200,000 tons, since last winter was very snowy. We had over forty inches.) That salt stays in the piles until the next snow season rolls around.

There are two stockpiles downtown. I biked down to take a look. One is a lame little hill plopped in the middle of an empty parking lot in front of the Department of Sanitation site on the East River, just north of the Manhattan Bridge. The other is a more impressive stockpile that takes up about two-thirds of the salt shed at the Department of Sanitation site on the Hudson, around Twelfth Street.

The pile on the East Side is not where I expected it to be. I actually biked right by it, even though I saw it. That’s because a salt shed just went up this fall right underneath the Manhattan Bridge – a few months ago it had no roof, and now it looks like it’s completed – and I’d figured the rush was so that it could be ready when the salt came. But the shed sits gated and empty, and the salt sits in a pile under the FDR.

Maybe no one told the delivery guys that they were supposed to bring the salt to a different place this year? What is the point of the empty salt shed they worked feverishly to finish? The salt looks so much neater in the shed, like it’s actually supposed to be there, and is there really no better use for that empty lot?

That’s one mystery I don’t know the answer to. But at least now you can tell everyone you know that the salt they put down when it snows comes from South America.

A Nautical Institution, If You Can Find It

2007-01-26T11:36:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown
January 8, 2007

An out-of-the-way storefront with a steadfast customer base

On the off chance you find yourself on Duane Street, between West Broadway and Greenwich Street, you might well walk by New York Nautical without seeing it. The blue “NEW YORK NAUTICAL INSTRUMENT and SERVICE CORP.” sign propped in the half-papered-over ground floor window looks like it’s at least a couple decades old. If curiosity prompted you to look it up online when you got home, and then successfully ascertained that the website was newyorknautical.com, you’d be further confused: the address listed on the site is 140 West Broadway. That’s the store’s old location; the website hasn’t been updated in about five years.

New York Nautical, which used to get some walk-in customers when it was on West Broadway, has become a strictly word-of-mouth institution.

And an institution it is, according to Smitty, who’s been working there almost twenty-six years and has been the store’s manager for three. “I’m an institution!” he’s yelling on the phone when I walk in. “You didn’t know that?”

The store’s gap-toothed shelves are lined and piled with nautical books that anyone might read, (“Shipwrecks Around Cape Cod”), nautical books that you probably wouldn’t read unless you were pretty damn interested (“The Cruise Ship Phenomenon in North America”), and nautical text books and pamphlets so technical that you can’t help but feel sorry for the ship captain studying for his license renewal exam (“Summary of Corrections, 2006 Charts, East Coast of North and South America”); collectibles and gifts (the most popular pre-Christmas items were chart weight compasses and rigging knives, and the most expensive item in the store is a Chelsea ship’s clock, at $2,400); and hundreds, maybe thousands of nautical charts that cover every body of water in the world (“Don’t call them ‘maps!’ warns an employee. ‘Smitty will kill you.’”).

Before it moved here, to its practically unmarked location on this little-traveled Tribeca side street, New York Nautical did business at its 140 West Broadway location for 30 years, and before that – “well now you talkin’ ‘bout history,” says Smitty. Suffice to say that the store’s been around for about eighty years.

The funny thing about Smitty is that despite his encyclopedic knowledge of his maps – er, charts – and equipment, he doesn’t sail. Ever. “No, I’m a land lover,” he says with a dismissive shake of the head.

“I’ll put it this way. A lot of people come in here that do sail, want to take me with them. I don’t get in no small boats. If it’s not a cruise ship, I’m not going. I’m just not a boat person. Besides, I don’t swim. Chances of a cruise ship going down are pretty slim.”

Smitty was hired as summer help in 1980 to fill in for someone out on vacation, but he didn’t leave when that employee got back. “That was because about two weeks there, I basically knew, not all the ins and out, but the most common ins and outs,” Smitty recalls. “You had a lot of people that did work here, they didn’t have what I had. That’s why I’m still here.” He had an aptitude for quickly measuring distances on maps, and “most importantly, you name an area, I basically knew what chart number to go and find. When it would take someone ten minutes to find it, it took me one.”

The fact that he can’t stand boats doesn’t seem to hurt Smitty’s credibility. Eighty-five percent of the customers who come once, come back, Smitty estimates.

The thirty or so customers who come in on an average day are about evenly split between commercial mariners and recreational yachters. But there’s also the occasional artist – Smitty gets maybe two a week – looking for a chart to hang up on the wall. “They’re not to the quickest to work with,” and they present a different type of challenge for Smitty: he’s got to think about the charts – land masses and bodies of water, islands and piers – in terms of aesthetics.

Then there are the law firms. “We get lots of law firms, yes,” Smitty nods, staring straight ahead at the model of a sailboat. “Sometimes there’s an accident somewhere, and they need to have a chart from that area, information on that area, and they know if they come to me, I’ll get it for them fast.”

78-Year-Old Captain Wants to Sail Back into Town

2007-01-26T11:30:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown
January 15, 2007

First ship to call South Street Seaport Museum home may return to Manhattan

“So how’d you know it was me?” Teddy Charles keeps asking.

We had planned to meet in front of a diner in Riverhead, Long Island, near where the Hampton Jitney lets off. Never having laid eyes on Teddy Charles before, I walked straight to his car and got in.

What gave him away? Aside from the fact that he was the only one idling in the parking lot? It could have been his Volkswagon Rabbit, a tiny beat-up two-door relic that gets 50 miles to the gallon and requires two people to open the passenger-side door; or the giant white sail furled upon itself in the back seat/trunk area; or maybe that you don’t see many 78-year-old guys wearing shades and cruising around in such a vehicle. This was clearly Teddy Charles.

Charles’ life, as he tells it, seems to have unfolded as a series of fortuitous opportunities for which he was totally unprepared.

The first transpired when he was maybe twelve, spending the summer on the Long Island Sound. All the kids owned 16-foot sailboats, and after going out in their boats a few times, Teddy “got really hot on it.” One day, he recalls, “I asked one of the kids, ‘Are you going to take your boat out today?,’ and he said, ‘Nah, go ahead, you take it.’ I hadn’t the vaguest idea, but being young, I said ‘Sure, why not.’ The lesson I learned, it’s still good today: it’s very easy to sail out, and it can be difficult to sail back. I didn’t know how to tack. I learned.”

Good timing, and a proficiency with percussion instruments, would get Teddy out of his hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts (“the cultural anus of the world,” he calls it), and into Julliard through a back door. “It was right after the war, otherwise I never would have gotten in. It was a summer extension program; it was a lot easier to get in.”

And a few years later, yet another lucky break– in the form of Thelonious Monk showing up late for a gig – landed him at the piano at a midtown jazz club and launched his professional career as a vibraphonist and composer.

But living in Manhattan, close to the sea but so far removed, Charles eventually started to miss the water. “Well,” he thought, “I used to know how to sail. I’ll get a boat.” He bought a 1903 43-foot yawl, “fixed it up, went out sailing. Never sailed a big boat before but I learned quickly… It was almost the end of my music career.”

A few upgrades later, and he was the somewhat hesitant owner of the Mary E, a 1906 75-foot sword fishing schooner that was not at her prettiest.

She was “hardly fixed up at all from being a fishing schooner,” Charles recalls. “No staysail, schooner rig, nothing, stainless steel, just old time stuff, and I loved it. Actually, I didn’t like the way it looked at first. Ugly boat, but once we got it rigged out, got some sails on her, I started to really get to liking her.”

Operating out of City Island, Charles took New Yorkers and tourists alike on weeklong trips to the Vineyard and weekend trips to Block Island, and was even chartered by the National Park Service to sail students from New York to Miami, stopping at every national park on the way.

Around that time, Peter Stanford, “a go-getter type,” founded the Seaport Museum, intending to recreate the seaport’s old-time feel. In 1975, Stanford asked Charles to bring the Mary E to the seaport.

“We were doing great,” recalls Charles. “People flocked to go on the boat.” But the Mary E’s success would only a last a month. “They saw we were doing so good, they decided they’d better bring the Pioneer in.” The 102-foot Pioneer, which still sails out of Pier 16, quickly overshadowed the Mary E.

“They moved the Pioneer in front of me, moved the Mary E way back in the pier so it was difficult to get in and out, took my signs down so they could advertise the sailings for the Pioneer. I was so subordinated. I was just sitting there. Nothing was happening.”

The museum was also not going as planned. There had been big plans to “restore this here, put a seafood restaurant here, just like the days of old South Street, bowsprits coming up over the East River Drive and so forth,” recalls Charles. “It was all a sham. Next thing you knew there was a Citibank rising in the spot where it was supposed to be the seaport… Everyone who was serious took their boat someplace else.” Charles followed suit. “When they fired Peter Stanford, I went with him.”

In 1976, less than a year after he moved to the seaport, Charles took the Mary E to Greenport, where he started a charter business that’s still bustling today. He goes out on three trips a day, seven days a week.

But these days, Charles has been feeling the tug of the big city. “I’ve thought about bringing the boat back to New York, too,” he says, slowly, as if the notion is still forming itself. “There’s an awful lot of business in New York.”

He’s got a gig coming up at Kitano, a midtown hotel that offers live jazz, and he’s been asked to record some of the pieces he’s composed. There’s music on the stand in front of his vibraphone at home, and for the first time in a long time, he didn’t go down south this winter.

“Ideally, I’d probably like to have the boat in Manhattan, so I’d be accessible to New York clubs again. Run the boat a good part of the time and play music a good part of the time. Ideally.”

New York Has No Secret Spots

2007-01-26T09:11:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown
January 22, 2007

I thought no one else thought about living by the seaport

Many months ago I was wandering down by the South Street Seaport, wondering if it was worth seeing the Bodies Exhibition and deciding, again, it was too weird, when I had a wonderful daydream that made me think I could live in Manhattan indefinitely.
It was ten or so years from now. I had a family, a baby. We’d just moved into a huge apartment in a red brick building with high ceilings and enough floor space to have a ping-pong table with plenty of room for aggressive baseline rallies. The building used to be a warehouse of some sort, formerly home to something related to the fish market, or maybe the bottom floor was still a warehouse where the vendors of touristy items stored their wares overnight. You could see the mast of the seaport’s tallest ship above the FDR from the glass-paned windows.
My kid would grow up swimming in the river, which would be clean enough by that time that you could do things like that without showering immediately afterwards. He’d have a bike or a skateboard, because when he wanted to see his friends he’d have a trek to make to get to Manhattan proper. Or so I envisioned.
But I should have known, when the fish market closed, that things down there were in serious flux.
Turns out, my kid will have only to step around the corner to the cobblestone side street to find enough kids to play a game of stickball – with subs. But wait, no, because there will be traffic on those wide old streets, because all those kids will have parents who have cars and Wall Street bonuses and gyms in their buildings and roof terraces and walk-in refrigerators for Fresh Direct deliveries.
According to the Alliance for Downtown New York, I’m not the only one who’s drawn to the smell of the water. In the next two years the number of residents living south of Chambers Street will swell from 38,000 to 45,000. Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff is happy to report that the one square mile that is Manhattan’s southern tip is going through “the single biggest concentration of construction activity in New York’s history.” Thirty-eight million dollars are being invested in Fulton Street retail, the vacancy rate for Lower Manhattan is the lowest it’s been since 9/11

The Specter of a Wet Suit

2006-12-13T15:08:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown
November 13, 2006

A fraternity of divers is keeping the city afloat. But no one ever sees them.

New Yorkers are blasé, sure. But I would wager that not one is immune to the power of Times Square to make you feel for a few heart-thumping seconds like a kid on Christmas morning. Even squinting Wall Street brokers must be impressed by all that glass and glimmer when they step out for lunch into the infinitely reflected sun.
That individual human beings constructed these mammoth skyscrapers and television screens the size of swimming pools is astonishing – but not mysterious. Like an army of ants, construction guys are everywhere, hammering up on scaffolding, maneuvering heavy machinery on blocked-off streets, eating lunch out of brown paper bags, catcalling as you walk by.
But drive through the Holland Tunnel in the silence that reigns when the radio cuts out, and questions may begin to echo. How the hell did they build a tunnel underneath the water? And who is “they,” anyway?
“We’re kind of the unsung heroes of New York,” says Eric Van Dormolen, 28, one of those mysterious underwater-builder-guys.
Divers can not only spot a diving site a mile away by compressors, pumps, and welding machines, they can also probably recognize half the guys on the crew. “But anybody else walking by has no idea [it’s a work site] until a diver comes out of the water,” says Van Dormolen.
Even mechanics don’t know anything about the tools marine constructors use, which, for obvious reasons, aren’t electric. “There’s a machine shop next to my house, I go there all the time. They never heard of a hydraulic chain saw until I took one there to get it repaired.”
High-profile projects like the Holland Tunnel don’t happen much anymore. Now it’s the housekeeping, like installing a chain-link fence around the Holland Tunnel to keep out terrorists, that’s keeping divers busier than ever.
Usually, work slows down in winter, but not this year. “It’s funny, this year it looks like the winter’s going to be busier than the summer, simply cause there’s so much work going on,” says Richard Kennedy, in his early thirties, who’s been in the marine construction industry for 20 years. Kennedy stays at Van Dormolen’s house in Northport, Long Island when he’s working on a job in the area. “The city is starting to rebuild its infrastructure, which has been left to disintegrate over the years.”
The rebuilding includes all the West Side piers, which are part of the bike path that goes all the way up the West Side; Manhattan’s new Staten Island ferry terminal; electricity-generating turbines going into the bed of the East River; a temporary outboard for the FDR, which is soon to have a major lane shift into the river while the highway is repaired; and the Department of Environmental Protection’s rehabilitation of all of its sewage facilities.
At $51.41 an hour, these guys make a better salary than most construction workers, but it still doesn’t seem like enough to swim in shit. That’s where love of the job comes in.
“Dive schools advertise – oh you’re going to make all this money, you’ll do really well.” says Van Dormolen. “When people see the dollar signs, they don’t realize what the work is. They don’t even like diving.”
These are the ones who won’t make it. Only thirty percent of divers who graduated from the requisite five-month training course with Van Dormolen are still diving five years later. Kennedy says that number is unusually high.
“If you’re down there underneath some huge load, you’re freezing your ass off in February, and you’re saying, what the hell am I doing in this dirty, gross water? You gotta like it.”
“You gotta get a buzz out of being underwater,” Kennedy agrees.
“I’d never want to clean out a Port-O-Potty. But jump in it? Okay,” laughs Van Dormolen.
All the work on the sewage system is part of a push to clean up the water, and it’s working. That’s the other reason there’s so much work for divers right now. Certain borer worms, called Teredo and Limnoria, are now thriving in the less-polluted rivers and munching away at piers. “The worms are back,” says Van Dormolen, which is good for divers since piers comprise the bulk of their jobs.
But like little kids, what these two marine divers like best is “burning steel underwater!” Kennedy almost shouts. Why? “Cause it’s cool! Using 5000 degree fire under water, it’s pretty awesome.”
Van Dormolen is currently working on a project burning the steel jackets off the foundations of Robert Moses Bridge in Bay Shore, Long Island, to break them open so they can be replaced by fiberglass jackets that will better protect from ice damage.
No one crossing the bridge will ever know the new fiberglass jackets are there.
“That’s the hardest part about selling a job sometimes,” says Van Dormolen. “If I put in $10,000 into my house, I put in the roof, the siding, maybe paint it, and say ‘Oh wow, it looks nice.’ People put $1 million into their pier, they never see it. It’s like, ‘All right, I can take this million dollars, I can build a park, and a dog walk, and all this stuff, or I can put a million dollars into something that nobody will ever see.’
But obviously it has to be there or everything will fall down.”

Move Over, Captain

2006-12-13T14:55:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown
December 4, 2006

Docking super container ships is a job for an expert

In your daydreams you may have imagined that the man at the helm of the massive container ship hulking up the Hudson was a salty mariner from Alaska, hell, Siberia, with a long white beard and a permanent squint from the sun reflecting off the sea. And you wouldn’t be completely wrong: the ship’s captain is standing on the ship’s deck, but he’s no longer the one giving orders. The man now in charge is a specialist, a harbor pilot, who climbed aboard the ship just north of the Verrazano Bridge, and will direct it through the channel to its final destination in about an hour.
It takes a certain personality type to be able to take control of a ship away from its captain. “You have to have a little ego,” says Bob Flannery, a 27-year veteran of the industry whose family has been in the shipping business for “four or five generations, depending on who you speak to.”
“You’re taking charge of a man’s ship; the captain is always in charge of his ship. You’re coming in, making the decisions… The inflection of your voice, the way you present yourself [are very important].”
“Either one of us could be technically responsible for between 500 million and a billion dollars’ worth of stuff in a given week,” says Rich Wieners, a veteran pilot relaxing in a reclining chair between jobs.
Do they ever get nervous?
“We don’t have time!” Flannery asserts, in captain mode.
“Pick me?” Wieners chimes in from across the room. “Yes! Yes I do.”
“But you can’t show it,” Flannery laughs, acknowledging that even he is not immune to the jitters. “You try not to show it because if you show you’re nervous, the captain might override a decision you make, and that’s when things happen. You might have to go change your underwear after the shift, but as long as you don’t see it, it’s okay.”
When the captain’s really starting to sweat, Flannery resorts to a tactic not just anyone could pull off in a situation that could literally be life or death: humor. “This is the first time I’ve done this, Captain,” he might say, looking stricken with fear, “and it’s pretty windy today, so I’m going to take my time if you don’t mind.” That always lightens the mood, Flannery chuckles.
“But you know what?” he adds. “The guy that doesn’t get nervous is the guy that should retire.”
“He’s the guy that’s ripe for an accident,” Wieners nods.
And in this business, which involves orchestrating up to four tugboats to push and pull a 960-foot super cargo ship around a 130 degree curve, there is no room for error.
“These days, you get a little oil in the water and you’re out of a job,” says Flannery.
To make matters trickier, the channel is undergoing a decades-long dredging project that makes it accessible to ever-larger ships, while causing the current to get stronger and stronger. As Flannery puts it: “You’re letting all this extra water in, it’s got to go back out again.”
Flannery was elected president of Metro Pilots, a company of 15 harbor pilots, because he keeps abreast of what’s going on and he’s “got a pretty decent personality to talk to people,” he acknowledges. But the additional responsibility, which includes meetings with the coastguard, is a labor of love. “That and two dollars gets me on a bus,” Flannery laughs.
Still, Flannery’s not complaining. He and his fellow pilots, who work exclusively for Moran Shipyard, make good money, he says. (The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that ship captains, mates, and marine pilots in New York State earned an average salary of $62,330 in 2005. The Bureau also ranked support activities for water transportation, which includes harbor piloting, among the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the country.)
That these guys love their job is obvious just from the maritime trivia Wieners likes to throw at Flannery. They talk about which dock is the oldest in Brooklyn like some men talk about poker hands or baseball stats.
If they didn’t, they’d never have made it through more than two decades on a schedule as harrowing as a fireman’s or an emergency room doctor’s. It’s 48 hours on, 48 off. When they’re on duty, the pilots sleep in snatches in a trailer at the shipyard in Staten Island, away from their homes and families.
Wieners, for instance, had gone on duty at 2 a.m. the night before I spoke to him. “I’m off duty now, I’ll go back on duty at midnight. So I could drive back to Connecticut, fight traffic back and forth, or I can go in there [a room in the trailer] and lay down for a few hours and be bright eyed and bushy tailed at midnight again.”
All 15 partners in the company are equal, which means seniority status does not result in more palatable shifts. If your shift falls on December 25, you’re working Christmas. The one day they’ve all had off, ever, was September 12, 2001.
Ironically, because they work all hours, these guys can give off the appearance that they’ve got nothing to do but watch “Law & Order” in the middle of the afternoon.
“My kids will sometimes say, ‘Dad, don’t you ever work?’” Flannery laughs. “I could have done two jobs before they got up to go to school and then been back home again!”

The Tuesday Ladies

2006-12-11T09:26:00.000-08:00

Our Town Downtown
December 11, 2006

A century-old tradition is still keeping seafarers warm

Adeline Tegnazian’s scarf-in-progress looks different than June Beckett’s, and not just because Tegnazian’s multicolored yarn has produced a Christmasy explosion of red, green and white with shiny flecks that resemble tinsel, while Beckett’s stripes in orange, maroon and three shades of green remind one of gummy worms lined up side by side. It’s the shape: Tegnazian’s is rectangular, as scarves usually are, while Beckett’s is significantly thinner in the middle than at its ends, giving it the unusual shape of a kayak paddle.
Why? Because Tegnazian is working on a mariner’s scarf while Beckett is knitting a seafarer’s scarf, both of which will be distributed by chaplains at the Port of New York and New Jersey in time for Christmas. If you think of “seafarer” and “mariner” as synonyms, well, so did I. Seafarers, it turns out, are the ones making ocean crossings, and often they hail from tropical or temperate countries, while river mariners work inland, and spend less time at sea.
I’m still not sure why the seafarers require modified scarves. The question is dismissed by Tegnazian. “That’s how it’s always been done,” she says proudly. “Tradition.”
Indeed, with a few exceptions (the yarn is acrylic now, not wool, so it can be laundered), the hustle and bustle filling a second floor room of the Seaman’s Church Institute could almost have taken place a century ago, as horses and buggies rolled by on Water Street. Granted, the gift packages did not contain disposable digital cameras when Christmas-at-Sea began in the 1890’s, but the conversation – green tea with honey, lemon and cloves is a good remedy for arthritis – has not changed all that much.
The ranks of 3500 volunteers across the country include men, kids, prison inmates and even Wall Streeters who come into the Seaman’s Church Institute on lunch break to help sort and package. Still, the large majority are seniors (“older adults!” someone yells reproachfully from across the room), and female. Some have or had husbands or fathers who went to sea, and one volunteer at the Seaman’s Church had been to sea herself, but most have no connection to the seamen who will be wearing their scarves, hats, socks, vests, and face masks. They trek here once a week from places like Bay Ridge, Washington Heights and even Connecticut, because they heard about it from a friend of a friend, came down to see how they could help – and twenty years later are part of a happy clique that exchanges recipes and goes out for lunch in Chinatown.
“Tuesday is the best group,” Tegnazian states as incontrovertible fact. With a regular attendance of between twelve and fifteen volunteers, it’s the largest group (about eight volunteers usually show up Monday, Wednesday and Thursday), but since most volunteers stick to their one day of the week, it seems it would be impossible to make an accurate comparison. Still, they’re vehement: the Tuesday ladies “are from way back,” says one volunteer; “there’s just a good feeling on Tuesdays,” says another.
Last year, the program handed out 16,169 items, and this year, director Barbara Clauson is hoping to deliver 18,000 Christmas gifts to mariners in ports from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. Clauson’s mother directed the program for 26 years, and for the past decade Clauson has been single-handedly coordinating thousands of volunteer knitters from every state in the country, each one of whom receives a note from her when they send in a knitted item. The packing, which began in earnest in October, must be finished by Christmas, and the long tables are covered with boxes of and neat piles of the odds and ends that will go into each package. They will continue accepting knitted goods until Christmas day; anything they receive after that gets stored for next year.
“It’s extremely hectic,” says Clauson, clutching red and green spools of yarn to her chest. “The days are long, the weeks are long.” Still, she wants to do more: she’s hoping a knitting group might make the Seaman’s Church Institute its headquarters, and she wants to see more community participation.
Many of the volunteers pre-date Clauson, but all seem to love her. “She’s the best we’ve had,” says Sylvia Meyers, who lives across the street and has been staying late to help with packaging. Stuffing plastic bags with one knitted item, a comb, a nail clipper, a magnifying glass (in case eyeglasses break), a sewing kit, a pair of shoe laces, a keychain, a homemade greeting card, and sometimes a disposable digital camera (so the seamen can take pictures on Christmas day) can be tiresomely repetitive work, but it also provides a tactile satisfaction.
“You get to use your hands,” says Nora Agatstein, extending long fingers adorned with rings. Many of the women do crafts anyway, says Agatstein, who not only crochets for Christmas-at-Sea, but also does origami and beading.
Meyers does not knit, which makes it all the more rewarding “to feel all the wonderful knitted items,” she says. As she shows off the colorful hats waiting to be packaged, she presses down on the soft piles that have come from around the country and wound up here, in her hands.

A World-Class Exhibit Sits Empty on Water Street

2006-11-20T14:28:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown
November 20, 2006

Lonely seaside watercolors in a lonely seaside gallery

I’ve been at the office late at night, drinking Red Bull to the non-sound of sleeping computers, I’ve eaten at an Indian restaurant at 5 p.m. and been the only object of a hovering waiter’s attention, and last season I went to a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden.
But I have never felt as alone in Manhattan as I did last Tuesday afternoon, as I wandered the deserted one-room gallery at 241 Water Street, gazing at one after another lonely watercolor by renowned painter Barbara Ernst Prey.
One of Ernst’s paintings hangs in the White House, and she is the only living American painter with a work on exhibit at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. She has been called “maybe the most widely viewed painter in the world” by the New Yorker. But not here, at the Seaman’s Church Institute.
“We’re kind of off the beaten path,” says a middle-aged man who greeted me at the front desk. “If we were in SoHo…”
It is not only the three empty tables and twelve empty chairs set up for lively discussion that made me feel so eerily alone, it was the paintings themselves.
In thirty-five paintings depicting seaside life in Maine, there are only two human figures. Both are fishermen in coveralls. One, the subject of a large portrait called “The Mender,” is repairing a fishing net. His features are unformed and his eyes are obscured beneath thr brim of a baseball cap, which is covered by the hood of a sweatshirt. The other, a mere half-inch in height, is leaning away from the viewer, over the side of his fishing boat in a miniature painting maybe six by eight inches.
A theme that ties many of the paintings together is that humans are deliberately absent, a tactic that may stem from the first painting Ernst did after 9/11. Titled “Ladies in Red,” the watercolor depicts two empty red chairs overlooking the water. Their occupants would not be returning.
But this series, “Works on Water,” is not meant to be sad. In an interview with a cultural correspondent for the L.A. Times, Ernst said of her inanimate subjects: “Oftentimes I know the people. Or, if it is a house, I know the people who live inside. So for me it is a type of portrait, it’s not just the house. It’s the personal connection to the house.”
The portrait is more universal without a human image, Prey has explained. Human figures would become the focal point and, in Prey’s words, “stop the viewer.”
Still, the paintings with no people can be sad, and a little unnerving.
There is not a whole lot of difference between “Ladies in Red” and “Family Portrait,” in which six empty red chairs, and a footrest and a table, are clustered on a hilltop under a white sky. Five are facing the same direction; the sixth is askew, as if its occupant got up in a hurry and almost knocked it over. The family may be on their way back home after a playful afternoon picnic. Or – the white sky and the nearly toppled chair make it hard to avoid thinking it – their chairs may be empty for a more macabre reason.
There is not the ominous undertone in the painting “Early Risers” that can be felt in “Family Portrait,” and yet the two empty chairs half-facing each other on a front porch, where two early risers will presumably soon be sitting, comprise an isolating image. The warm yellow lights are on in the house in the foreground, and two quilts blow on a clothesline out back, so all appears to be well, but the viewer is cut off from what must be a cozy breakfast scene inside. We are not allowed even a glimpse through the lit windows.
The result is that the viewer is left with a vague kind of yearning to be connected to the people inside, to know more about them, especially what’s keeping them from occupying their places in their chairs or . The lack of personal connection makes us linger long in front of each painting, and the loneliness that it provokes stays with us long after we have left the gallery.
As I passed the suits on lunch break, and descended into the subway, my heart was still in my throat. Maybe I was still getting over the unusual feeling of having been all alone for over an hour in silence broken only by a faraway vacuum cleaner, or maybe I was still worrying over the six empty red chairs.

A Long Way Home

2006-11-03T13:42:00.000-08:00

Reporting to you from the River Styx

Our Town downtown
October 6, 2006

It seems a strange and distant land, Staten Island. Like those big ferries disappearing across the dark river into the night might be captained by Charon and headed for Hades. The Hudson, after all, bears some similarity to the mythical River Styx, which was so foul that gods forced to drink the river’s water would lose their voice for nine years.
But with a notable exception in 2003 when the ferry operator crashed into the dock, the five ferry boats that take people away from the South Ferry Terminal in Manhattan always bring them back – 70,000 every day.
We talked to four.

5:23 p.m.
Bridget, a young woman who grew up on S.I. and got a job at the MetroTech Center in Brooklyn five months ago, is sitting on a low window ledge at the Whitehall Terminal in Manhattan near the big glass doors that will open when the ferry arrives.
Q: How long does your commute take, including the subway ride?
A: An hour and a half.
Q: So do you get up obscenely early?
A: Pretty much. Five forty-five. It sucks. I’m moving to Long Island soon. That commute’s going to suck, too.
Q: What’s annoying about the ferry?
A: Getting on and off is bad. The crowd, pushing through.
Q: Has the ferry improved since you were a kid?
A: Yeah, it’s gotten better in the last two years. [Whitehall terminal] is brighter, more supervised. I don’t feel nervous here. Before, it just wasn’t well lit or clean. Plus it just looks nicer.
Q: Do you sit inside or stand outside on the deck?
A: I sit inside. The tourist are outside, getting their photos. It’s an event for them. It’s a commute for us.
Q: Do you ever worry it’ll crash again?
A: When you hear it docking, it always makes that noise, and you never really know what’s going on.

5:36 p.m.
Anthony, wearing a leather jacket and reading the Daily News, usually takes the express bus from midtown. He’s lived on S.I. for 16 years.
Q: How come you’re taking the ferry today?
A: To avoid getting stuck in traffic. When I want to play it safe, I take this and then the train.
Q: You’re feeling safe today?
A: Well I knew I needed to get home at a certain time. This is usually pretty consistent, although on a good [traffic] day, the bus and the ferry are about the same.
Q: How long does your commute take?
A: An hour and twenty minutes.
Q: Do you find people on the ferry more willing to strike up a conversation than commuters on the subway or bus?
A: Maybe the ferry has more of a crowd of people being sociable. More tourists.
Q: When is your favorite time of year to ride the ferry?
A: In between seasons, like this, when it’s nice out.

5:40
Robert, a student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, sits by the exit so he can get off the ferry quickly and onto the Staten Island Railroad. His commute takes him two hours each way.
Q: What do you do during your two-hour commute?
A: Enjoy the scenery, listen to my CD player, read the newspaper.
Q: Do you ever talk to people?
A: I usually keep to myself. I sit toward the end, as you can see, so I can get a good spot on the train.
Q: Have you lived anywhere else in the city?
A: Brooklyn, yeah, but then my father moved to Staten Island.
Q: How does Staten Island compare?
A: I like Brooklyn better, but I guess it’s adjustable.
Q: Compared to the subway, how efficient is the ferry?
A: Well it’s direct transportation, going from one place to the next. With the subway, you have all these stops.

6:06
Mike is going from Staten Island to Manhattan to party with his friends. He’ll take the ferry back later tonight.
Q: You’re one of the few local people out on the deck.
A: I get claustrophobic. I’m inside for two minutes, I gotta come out. I’m outside, I go back in. That’s how I always was in school, too.
Q: Do you ever worry about the ferry crashing again?
A: Yeah, ever since that incident, when the ferry hit an iceberg or something… I’m thinking of the Titanic, I think. If something happened I’d probably swim about 30 yards, then I’d sink. I’d take one of those parachutes with me. Those, you know, life jackets.

Down Under That Mammoth Bridge Overpass

2006-11-03T13:00:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown
October 30, 2006

Noisy and foul? Smells like a skate park

Under the Manhattan Bridge, next to the Pathmark that is Manhattan’s largest grocery store, a skeleton is rising on the waterfront. It looks like it might be a boathouse. It’s not. The city is building a storage facility where it can stockpile salt in the winter to spread on snowy streets.
Necessary? Probably. Exciting? Not at all.
The concrete scraps of land under our majestic bridges have always served as the receptacles for the things that none of us wants in our backyard.
The Brooklyn Bridge overpass is so out-of-the-way that a cache of emergency supplies from the Cold War era was found only this year inside the bridge’s foundation. Where else in Manhattan could you store water drums, paper blankets and hundreds of thousands of crackers for decades without anyone’s noticing?
Currently, much of the area under the bridge is a fenced-off parking space for city vehicles. Where the bridge comes out of the ground, it still smells like piss and graffiti adorns every surface. That’s what makes it the only possible location for the city’s most storied and influential skate spot: the Brooklyn Banks.
The Banks, near the intersection of Pearl Street and Robert Wagner Place, is about thirty percent smaller than it was in its heyday, after the Parks Department renovated the area in 2004 and took some of the land for a park – the green kind, not the skate kind. But it still draws a daily crew from high-schoolers just hitting puberty to guys in their early twenties, who roll down to the Banks on skateboards, BMX bikes and roller blades.
When the park closed for renovations in 2004, “we just terrorized the city,” says Chino, a 22-year-old “street rider” and father of two. Street riders are BMX bikers whose bikes are specially equipped to ride rails, ledges and stairs – and have no brakes.
“You’ll know the spots we been in because all the ledges are black and chipped,” says Chino. The gashes in the side of the rectangular ledge at the Banks, which the street riders like to grind, make it easy to understand why street riders are considered nuisances and terminally shooed off the streets by the police.
Riding in a park designed for them may seem like less of a rush than riding the streets, but the street riders keep it interesting with breakneck stunts, like riding forwards up the sloped brick bank and then coming down full-speed backwards (no helmets), and by making their own changes to the terrain.
“Let’s go find wood,” says one street rider to the others, who then head north and disappear. I imagine it’s some sort of street lingo. No, Chino explains, they’re actually going to look for a flat piece of plywood they can lay over the stairs to complete their homemade ramp.
What they like best about the Banks has little to do with its setup. Says Scott, a 17-year-old street rider also known as “the one-inch Korean,” the best thing about the Banks is that “nobody kicks you out.”
That’s the beauty of down-under-the-overpass. Developers who will fight tooth and nail for waterfront property on this island have not thought of looking here. Yet.
“We get kicked out of everywhere,” shrugs Max, a 17-year-old skateboarder and student at Friends Seminary. Everywhere but here, the Manhattan Bridge Skatepark that opened last summer in the cavernous, deserted underbelly of the bridge. It’s even more deserted than the Banks. There’s no one around to kick them out, no one to make sure they don’t enter after dusk through a rolled-back section of fencing.
To find the park, follow the bridge through Chinatown past hundreds of food stalls, through cobblestone alleyways and past fenced-off lots full of litter until you hear the slap of skateboards. You’re there, where Market Street would meet Monroe Street if the grid existed here.
The thundering of passing trains can get “annoying,” says Max, as can the waterfall that pours down when trains go by on rainy days, but these annoyances are less major than those at other parks. Like the basketball players at Tompkins Square or the BMX bikers at the Banks.
On a nice day, a hundred kids do ollies over the flat-top pyramid, grind the rails, or sit and watch on the concrete steps that smell like piss, in front of a backdrop of water-stained rock face maybe 150 feet high criss-crossed by bare piping and topped by the bridge. It’s colossal and industrial and straight out of a movie, but the skaters are casual about it.
“Street spots are better,” says Max, because there’s “an endless amount of it.”
The park is called “one of the worst places on the planet” on a skateboarding website.
That’s why it’s theirs.

Turning the Tide into Megawatts

2006-10-23T13:38:00.001-07:00

Our Town downtown
October 23, 2006

An ever-renewable resource is about to be tapped

One day in the not-so-far future when you boot up your computer, its screen may be brightened by power that comes from one of the darkest places in this city: the murky, mucky bed of the East River.
High tide in the East River, a channel between the Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean, is particularly strong, reaching over five knots or almost six miles per hour, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It’s said that if you jump in you’ll be at the Statue of Liberty in no time. Last week, the drowned body of a 16-year-old boy who went into the water near Pike Slip was found near Pier 17.
Verdant Power is determined to tap into that force by installing an approximately 37-acre field of turbines between Roosevelt Island and Queens that will extend from the Roosevelt Island Bridge to the northern tip of Roosevelt Island. The field will have three to four hundred turbines and will generate 10 megawatts, enough to power about 8,000 homes.
The 16-foot diameter turbines, which look like underwater windmills, will be bolted to steel pipes filled with mortar and socketed to rock in the riverbed, and will swivel with the tide. Each turbine will have three blades which will rotate at the speed of the water, between 32 and 35 revolutions per minute, which the company claims is slow enough to avoid harming fish passing through the turbine field.
Fish safety has been the subject of a three-year discussion between Verdant Power, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and a handful of local environmental groups. The result of the back-and-forth is that Verdant Power has just finished installing two million dollars’ worth of fish surveillance equipment in the river.
Because the water is extremely cloudy, two different fish monitoring systems will be used in lieu of cameras: hydroacoustic transducers, which uses the echoes from when fish swim through an acoustic beam, and a high-definition sonar system called Didson, used specifically to observe and count fish in turbid conditions.
“We think it’s overkill,” said Trey Taylor, president of Verdant Power, but “we’re anxious to get this right.” Taylor believes that the surveillance equipment will provide empirical evidence that the slow-moving, blunt-edged turbines do no harm to the fish or the environment. If that can be proven, it will pave the way not only for the Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy project, but for four or five other potential sites in the tri-state area as well.
The going is slow because this field of free-flow turbines is the first of its kind. Similar systems from England to Scotland have relied on one massive energy-generating unit or a dam.
In 2003 Verdant Power tested a single turbine, suspended in the East River from a barge, for about five weeks. Its next step is to install six more – first two, then an additional four. Because the project is experimental, the company was granted permission to install its “six-pack” without obtaining a full hydropower license, but it will have to apply for a license based on data collected from the six-pack before going ahead with the full turbine field.
Drilling is scheduled to begin next week, and the first two turbines should be installed the week of November 6. Once the state Department of Environmental Conservation gives the thumbs up, another four turbines will go in, completing the “six-pack.”
Verdant Power seems to be good at making partners of potential adversaries. The company gave Riverkeeper access to its state-of-the-art equipment and asked the group to help monitor fish traffic. Riverkeeper was one of four environmental groups that said the company had not done enough research assessing the project’s environmental impact.
Verdant Power is also in close communication with Con Edison, because the six-pack will be supplying power to two Con Ed customers: a Gristedes supermarket and the Motorgate Parking Garage, both located on Roosevelt Island near the on-shore control room connected to the six-pack via cables.
When the tide gets strong, Verdant Power will take over from Con Ed as power supplier to the garage and grocery store. The companies will use computerized communications to transition seamlessly. “You won’t even see the lights flicker,” says Taylor.
Roosevelt Island maintenance workers park and plug in their battery-powered golf cart-like vehicles in the Motorgate garage. Taylor seems tickled to point out that an emissions-free power source will be charging emissions-free vehicles.
Verdant Power has spent $3 million to date on this project, and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority has kicked in $2 million. The final price tag will probably be around $20 million, says Taylor, and the date of completion, 2008.
The next step for Verdant Power is to get costs down from well over $4000 per kilowatt to between $2000 and $2500 per kilowatt “from water to wire.”
One priceless advantage of locally-produced power is that it doesn’t have to go through the overloaded power grid, which is susceptible to blackouts and terrorist attacks. The state requires that eighty percent of the city’s forecasted peak load be home-grown. In 2003, a task force of power companies and government agencies projected that in order to meet that requirement, the city would need to generate 3780 more kilowatts by 2008. The turbine field will produce ten thousand kilowatts.
“During the next blackout,” says Taylor, “Roosevelt Island will be all lit up.”

--By Becca Tucker

Rowing Hard, Going Nowhere

2006-10-23T13:36:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
October 2, 2006

When wind and tide conspire, a 10-foot rowboat fights to break even

Bronya Weinberg pulls two oars through the choppy Hudson with all the might her petite body can muster. The fiberglass dinghy starts forward, then slows until the next stroke drags it northward again. Soline McLain, Weinberg’s rowing partner, keeps the course using a harness and yoke the two have rigged up to the rudder. For twenty minutes Weinberg keeps it up, face glistening and triceps straining, while McLain holds due north, altering course to northwest every few minutes to avoid being swamped by wakes from ocean liners.
The ten-by-four-foot dinghy gets frequent visits from concerned coastguards because it’s by far the smallest vessel on the water. But “they like our life jackets,” says Weinberg, and “they like that we’re not far from home.”
“Home” is Pier 40, located where West Houston Street meets the Hudson River. When McLain turns the boat back toward the pier so they can switch rowers in the quieter waters, they are still exactly parallel with Pier 40. Like a high school physics text book problem with a too-neat answer, the fat little boat’s forward momentum has been completely negated by the pull from the south-running tide and the push from the wind, coming from north-northwest at ten miles an hour.
Weinberg and McLain expected this: Weinberg had copied the expected hour-by-hour levels of the tide onto a pink index card, along with the direction and strength of the wind and the time of sunset (to make sure they’d be back before dark). They knew the tide would be at its strongest at five in the afternoon, when the water from lakes and mountains to the north would be rushing down to the ocean. Still, they had to get their daily workout in between four, when McLain, a 26-year-old paralegal at a small law firm, was able to slip away from work, and 6:49 p.m., when the sun would set. What’s more, they relish the struggle with the elements.
In an only-in-New-York moment, Weinberg – who gives her age as “over 40” – and McLain struck up a friendship a year and a half ago when they met through Floating the Apple, a nonprofit with a boathouse at Pier 40 that takes people out rowing, and discovered that in addition to an interest in rowing, they shared a passion for aerial dancing.
Weinberg had been an aerial dancer for thirty-five years, specializing in the Spanish Web. She once “danced up and down the S.S. Peking,” she says, spinning around as high as 60 feet above the deck, attached to the rope only by her own limbs. McLain, who studied English and Anglo Saxon languages and rowed crew at Oxford, had just gotten into aerial dancing on a fixed trapeze through her roommate.
The two started rowing together on a little skiff up in Nyack that had been sitting unused on land for years. They converted it from a sailboat, named it the Cape Dames, and outfitted their rig with thole pins and thole rings in lieu of oarlocks, fastened collars onto two plastic oars so that they wouldn’t slip, and fashioned a harness and yoke which would make it easier for the coxswain to control the rudder.
Two months ago their boat was delivered to the 79th Street Boat Basin. They got it to the dock on Pier 40 in fifty minutes, and their daily routine of rowing for as many hours as possible began. These sessions are serious – equipment onboard includes a strobe light, radio, and miniature fog horn in an aerosol can – and they are also seriously chatty. The two women have a million things to talk about, like the case McLain is working on, which coastguards are cutest, and their joint ambitions, of which they have many.
One of their plans, still in the “conceptual stage,” is an aerial dance performance that would take place in a boat, with audiences looking down from various bridges. “Imagine seeing a boat come by with aerial dancers,” says Weinberg, who considers it the most natural idea in the world for a performance piece.
Another of their plans – to circumnavigate the island of Manhattan – is less nebulous. In fact, they’ve both done it a handful of times in eight-person boats through Floating the Apple, but this was to be just the two of them in the little boat they built. McLain wrote up a press release peppered with exclamation points announcing that their “Power Row” would take place on Saturday, September 23.
At 7 a.m. on that gray morning, the two set out from Pier 40 on what they hoped would be a five-hour, twenty-six mile trip. They rowed south against tide and wind, past the financial district, almost to the tip of the island. The wind from the south kept getting stronger until the women were struggling just to keep from being pushed backwards. What’s more, the wind speed was supposed to double from nine or 10 miles an hour to nearly twenty by the afternoon. Tired and disappointed, the Cape Dames turned back – but so did the much sturdier Floating the Apple boats on the same mission, which made them feel better.

-- Becca Tucker

The Biggest Sewer

2006-10-23T13:28:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
October 16, 2006

From your toilet to the Hudson

Sewage overflow is a phenomenon we’re all too familiar with.
You flush the toilet. Instead of going down, the water level begins to rise. In horror you watch the porcelain bowl fill, hoping beyond hope that the water will recede. The contents circle the bowl, bumping against the lip, looking for a way out. You step back, helpless. Then it happens: water rushes under the toilet seat, and the current carries the bowl’s contents over the seat and onto the floor. You flee the bathroom and jam rolled up towels under the door.
What most New Yorkers don’t know is that’s what happens in our sewer system every time we have a heavy rain. Approximately seventy times a year, storm water fills our sewage pipes, and the system overflows directly into our waterways, raw sewage and all, through 450 combined sewer outfalls around the city. In an average year, about 27 billion gallons of untreated waste water pour through those outfalls into the city’s surface waters, according to Riverkeeper, an environmental advocacy group.
If this system seems incredibly archaic, it is. Construction of our combined sewers began in 1850, before sewer treatment plants existed, when dumping untreated sewage into the river was considered the proper method of disposal. Now the 746 communities around the country that use combined sewers have to figure out how to improve a system built for another era – and shutting down the system for repair is not an option.
The toxic overflow, which carries bacteria and viruses, pesticides, fertilizers, oils, litter and sediment into the rivers encircling Manhattan, is the major contaminant preventing them from being “swimmable,” an ambiguous term whose definition varies from one organization to the next.
A map released by the New York City Department of Environmental Conservation in 2000 as part of its “Urban Watershed Use and Standards Attainment Project” classifies the waters bordering Manhattan as appropriate for fishing, but not for bathing, while the Hudson River north of Manhattan is classified as okay for bathing, as are the waters off the southern shorelines of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.
Even so, the contamination of our waterways has been reduced ten-fold in the past thirty years, according to the Hudson River Foundation’s Health of the Harbor Report. “This decrease,” the report states, “is due mainly to… a strict permitting system for the discharge of these chemicals into our waterways, and improved sewage treatment.”
And it’s got to keep getting better, says the state. A 1994 state mandate orders all cities that use combined sewage systems to establish nine short-term measures, including ensuring that nothing is flowing into the water during dry weather, culling floating matter out of the water, and alerting the public of where the outfalls are, presumably so we can avoid swimming in raw sewage.
The city Department of Environmental Protection now has twenty-three floating barriers and 130,000 catch basins to pick up debris, which is then removed by skimmer vessels, and it has three boats that monitor the outflows on the shoreline. Construction is underway on three massive new tanks that will hold excess sewer outfall until it can be treated, at a cost of $757 million, and three more are being planned. Some of the projects are already done; others, like a storage facility for combined sewer overflow at Newtown Creek, are not scheduled to begin until 2015.
But the required public notification system, if it exists at all, leaves a lot to be desired. Take, for instance, three Hispanic fishermen on the East River esplanade a few blocks above South Street Seaport. They fish most nice days, they say, and they catch blue crabs and all sorts of fish, including bass and perch.
“What kind you want?” one fisherman asks.
Often, they throw the fish back, but sometimes they’ll clean and eat them.
“It’s clean,” the most talkative of the three fishermen asserts. “There’s no more raw sewage coming in here.” He motions upriver. “Not like before.”
According to the State Department of Health, it’s okay to eat the fish you catch in the New York City area, with the exceptions, varying from area to area, of certain types of catfish, eel, shad, perch, and the green “mustard” in lobsters and crabs. It is, however, dangerous to eat more than one river-caught meal a week, the department warns, because they contain contaminants that can build up in your body and, in worst-case scenarios, cause cancer and birth defects. It’s also a bad idea for women of childbearing age or children under 15 to be eating fish from the river at all.
The fishermen don’t know about those warnings. They have no idea they are standing on top of an outflow, or that there are dozens more to their north and south.
In addition to nine short-term stop-gap measures, the city is required by the state to develop a long-term plan to deal with its combined sewer overflows. According to Mark Klein, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, the department is “fifty percent of the way through the long-term plan.” A PowerPoint presentation given at a recent meeting of the Citizens Advisory Committee of the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program listed the city’s long-term goals, whuch include the vague pledge to “reconcile water quality standards to highest reasonably attainable uses.”
Does that mean we’ll be able to swim in our rivers? Anyone?

-- Becca Tucker

Guess Who's Back

2006-10-23T11:50:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
October 9, 2006

You still can’t eat ‘em, but the oysters in our rivers are good for us

Next time you’re walking along the Hudson or East River, take a deep breath. On these between-seasons days when it’s warm in the sun and cool in the shade, the wind coming off the water sometimes carries a brackish scent that smells almost balmy. It may not compare to the sweet breeze the Dutch wrote of when they landed in the New Netherlands in the early seventeenth century, but it’s startling nonetheless to be reminded that nature surrounds us even here.

New Yorkers are used to the idea that we’ve killed everything in our rivers with industrial and human waste. We no longer rely on the shipping or fishing industries and we’ve got twenty bridges and dozens of subway lines crossing over and under the river and connecting us to every borough, Roosevelt Island, Ward’s Island and Jersey. Our rivers have lost their significant and we’ve lost interest.

“Of the many odd things about New Yorkers, there is this,” writes Mark Kurlansky in the preface to his latest work of nonfiction, “The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell.” “How is it that a people living in the world’s greatest port, a city with no neighborhood that is far from the waterfront, a city whose location was chosen because of the sea, where the great cargo ships and tankers, mighty little tugs, yachts, and harbor patrol boats glide by, has lost all connection with the sea, almost forgotten that the sea is there?”

Kurlansky tackled the question in his book, through the lens of the decline and fall of New York’s once-great oyster industry, and he addressed it again at a lecture last week at the Museum of the City of New York.

The story of the fouling of our rivers begins in 1609 when Henry Hudson sailed into New York Harbor on a Dutch vessel and thought maybe the river that would take his name was the mouth of a passage to China. They settled in and immediately began commercial relations with the Native Americans.

Even back then, “New York was always New York, and New Yorkers were always New Yorkers,” quipped Kurlansky. He was referring not only to the early settlers’ love of a good deal and inclination for investing in real estate, but also to the tendency of this island’s natives to create untenable situations and then deal with them when they become unavoidable rather than planning in advance.

Aside from slaughtering a whole village of Native Americans, the first notable instance of our lack of foresight was the wall that Peter Stuyvesant – a gruff, irritating guy who reminds Kurlansky of “a seventeenth-century Rudy Giuliani” – built on what is now Wall Street to protect the colony from invasion by the British. First of all, it was a stupid place to build a wall because it didn’t guard against invasion from the sea (the British would eventually take the city without firing a single shot). But the immediate effect of the wall, which separated the village from a picturesque lake called the Collect, was that people could no longer see the lake and so they immediately forgot about their former favorite picnic site and started dumping their garbage – including sewage and animal carcasses – over the wall. The place started to stink and townspeople started getting sick, which worried lawmakers a little bit, but certainly no one had the foresight to realize or care that their stinking pile of shit was running straight into the rivers.

“No one thought about the fact that these ditches ran into the Hudson River and the East River, which flowed over oyster beds,” Kurlansky wrote. “It was the rivers of the New York area that gave the oyster beds their life, and in time the rivers would kill them.”

The out of sight, out of mind mentality was so engrained that it was not until 1987 that the city passed a law against dumping sewage in the harbor. By then, the last of the oyster beds that once produced half the world’s oysters had long been contaminated by bacteria and shut down by the city.

But somehow, even when the Gowanus Canal was releasing black bubbles the size of basketballs and fish from the bay were found laced with PCBs and their fins were falling off, the thick-shelled oysters never fully disappeared from our rivers. Diseased, yes; extinct, no.

Today there are groups like Baykeeper and Riverwatch that are actually growing oyster gardens on private piers and then moving the oysters to existing oyster reefs. They’re not edible and won’t be for a long time, but they’re the best thing in the world for the water because they filter and clean the water, so much so that one environmentalist, quoted in “The Big Oyster,” estimates that “if the oysters were here in the numbers they used to be, they would clear the water in the harbor in a few days.”

It’s a pleasant daydream, but the reality is that there are probably too many of us doing too much polluting to re-create an environment in which juicy, edible oysters can thrive and reproduce. “Perhaps it is not just unnatural but a threat to nature,” wrote Kurlinsky of Manhattan. “There’s an argument to be made,” he added the other night, “that it’s not exactly sane to park eight million people on the estuary of a river.”

-- Becca Tucker