Every time such an article appears my whole day is ruined. Because I think that if I ever get up the courage to marry and have a family, how will I be able to show my children Forty-second Street if there is no Forty-second Street? And if I lack the nerve and turn into a seedy old bachelor, then I will need Forty-second Street all the more, in those golden waning years.

All of Manhattan tilts towards that magnetic field of neon. Ever tried ambling the streets of New York without any destination? I know that I am pulled toward that glittering needle – at first into the triangle around Times Square, with the three-card-monte sharks and the Bible screamers and the sad-eyed camera stores bobbing me around until I wind up on the street, West Forty-second, between Seventh and Eight avenues. then I don’t know where to start to turn my head and look. Heaven for a film lover is ten marquees that change bills every day. Forty-second street comes close.

It was here I used to rush to at eleven in the morning, cutting classes in college to see Rules of the Game with my legs dangling over the Apollo balcony. And here I caught up with the flicks that opened and closed fast and nobody else would show: with the last great Westerns of Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks, with Otto Preminger’s melodramas, like Hurry Sundown and In Harm’s Way. And the show in the balcony was as interesting as the one on the screen. First you saw concessionaires hawking ice cream and caramel popcorn in between (and sometimes during) films, those sad sacks in white Good Humor uniforms climbing up the balcoy steps; then the reefers would be passed around in back, along with criticism of the characters: “That girl is dumb !” ” Why don’t she just get out of there?” (This during a scene with a psychotic killer stalking a coed, what could be better?) The chorus in the audience started directing advice and taunts – “You better run, girl! I wouldn’t stay in that house by myself, that’s for damn sure.”

Meanwhile some vagrant in the pit was snoring too louddly, having come into the theatre only to escape the cold and rainy street, and was two-thirds through is second double-bill with his head between his knees as an usher approached and rudely shook him awake. Shortly after, a fight would start between pit and balcony, the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, because some joker from on high had been throwing popcorn at the patrons below. All manner of threats were exchanged. Then someone tossed lit cigarettes from the balcony, each one a dying firecracker, drawing the attention of everyone in the theatre. Meanwhile, the glories of late Hollywood-studio auteur style, outdoor night sequences in bluish black with just a few klieg highlights, tracking shots around corrals, men in white sheets, Jane Fonda making love to a saxophone, who can figure out what’s going on? “Shut up!” someone yelled. It turned out to be me. I was appalled at myself and sank deepr into my seat. What a way to see a movie!

All that’s changed, you’ll say; I’m just being sentimental. The Apollo stopped showing art films years ago and now it’s kung fu and sex from one end of the street to the other. Or as the article puts it, “violent or pornographic movies.” But you knew, even if I never walked into another Fort-second Street movie house again , which is highly unlikely, it would still do me good to take in the street periodially for health reasons, like a sauna. Such concentrated steaminess. Do planners know how hard it is to achieve a visual clutter so extreme that it makes the simple traversal of one city block as adventurous as running a gauntlet? Sure, there are hustlers, thieves, prostitutes, cripples, derelicts, winos, molesters, droolers, acosters – I’m not denying it . Would you prefer to cement over the whole beehive with a dipsy-doodle exhibition hall and kick out those people so they’ll congregate on another block and make a new heaven and hell somewhere else, maybe not as bright and never as satisfyingly central?

The politics of such civil plans are transparent. What’s objected to here is not movie houses and pinball parlors but the people who go into them, who are the wrong class and the wrong color. No need to dwell on the racism and antagonism to down-and-out poor people that is the real message behind urgent appeals to “clean up” Times Square. But I wonder if this city knows how lucky it is to have a raunchy street so famous and so densely compacted. We are told that tourists can ride escalators in the new Forty-second Street and visit a gallery with an object or two on loan from each of the city museums; whoopee-do. Don’t they know that tourists, even the straightest, come to New York City partly because they’ve heard that we’ve got a real Sodom and Gomorrah? They want to see something that they can go back home and tell their neighbors was “dis-gusting! I mean – vermin!” Not that I see it that way, but it’s nice to know that people who feel that way can go to a place and be shocked by it every time.

I remember taking my then mother-in-law from out of town on a tour of New York City. She was very proper, and I wanted to protect her sensibilities – I was much youner then – so when we were within sight of that dangerous street I turned westward a block early. Imagine her disappointment as I took her down Forty-third Street, by the esteemed grey New York Times headquarters. Nohing but loading trucks and offices.

Supposing, though, that I had taken her on a tour of the strip – or, to leave my ex-mother in law out of it, supposing for purposes of this essay that we not evade the issue, but go into the topless bars and massage parlors, porno movies and bookstalls. I don’t pretend to have an encyclopedic knowledge of these dens, but as an occasional imbiber, I will be happy to pass on what I know, in the interests of social science.

Stand outside any pornographic move theater in a large city on a quiet afternoon, and watch who goes in. You will probably see a smattering of old men, widowers and inactive pensioners; some young blacks and hispanics, mostly unemployed; a core of neatly dressed manual and clerial workers, black and white (the pornography parlor being one of our few models of racial integration); and a small number of middle-class businessmen.

Why do men go to to pornography shows? The most obvious answer is that they are looking for a sexual satisfaction that is missing in their own lives. It is safe to say that the majority of people in this country, single or maried, do not have happy sex lives. In lieu of the real thing many will accept images, experiences once removed.

The patrons of pornography may be divided into two types: occasional and regular. The occasional customer may approach pornogrphy as an annual cleansing of the senses. Some unhappily married men use it as a kind of mental adultery; others may even be happily married or involved with someone, but feel the need from time to time to check into the Hotel of Erotic Dreams, to see what they have been missing. (Not always does pornography win out over real life; the man may run home to his wife or love with a new sense of how lucky he is.) There are also inexperienced young men who look to pronography for education. If it implants false or, as the antipornography groups say, with some justice “perverted” notions of sexuality, it also conveys demonstrations of a range lovemaking possibilities – assuming, as marriage manuals have done, a teachng function that the society is too prudish to undertake.

However, the novice, the married man on moral holiday or the bachelor aesthete like me are all marginal. The industry would die on its feet if they had to rely on these occasional clients. What keeps pornography alive are the repeaters. The look they give as they approach the movie ticket-taker and slip five dollars across the booth opening is that of a pinched lab rat who has finally spotted a straight run of several hours within the maze. They are looking for mental space as much as for Eros.

Once inside, they take their seats quietly in the darkened hall (they are the most docile of spetators, and the most solitary) with as much seat and row distance as possible from other spectators. Very rarely do they venture a brotherly word to their neighbor. Each is there to be swept away in the great flood.

Men go to pornography for excitement, but also, I think, to be put in touch with their sadness. They know that before the experiene is over, the connection between their own desire and the lusty bodies dangled before them will have been missed. Elegiac is the mood that often settles on a pornography audience. They go in search of something they don’t have, that they half remember perhaps having had. The aged hero in Kawabata’s novelThe House of Sleeping Beauties is overtaken by sensual memories and regrets while contemplating the sleeping form of a young woman, in a brothel for men too old to do anything else. So the watchers of pornography often seem to be using the spectacle before them as a meditation screen from which to contemplate the missed opportunities of a lifetime. All the bodies in a film are as good as “asleep” in the sense that they cannot be roused to respond to us. Even when the entertainment is live, the convention that the performer herself cannot be made love to means that, for all the provocative come-ons of the artiste, the customer must remain as though in a stupor, interpreting but not interacting. At most, he may touch himself, but not the other. This is the essential pathos behind all pornographic spectacle.

Some people have objected to the fact that these pornograpy parlors are “nothing more than masturbation halls.” An Equal Times expose reports that there are naked women dancing in the peep show ‘carousel’ or performing ‘live lesbian sex’ on stage while men jerk off and the janitor comes around time and time again with the Lysol bucket.” Is there something wrong with masturbation? Would it have been better not to use the Lysol?

The problem cannot be that customers are wrong to masturbate in public places, since everyone knows that these particular public places are employed for that purpose, and decent citizens need not go there in the first place. The only thing these men can be faulted for is not having strong enough imaginations to produce erotic images on their own, so they could jerk off at home and save some money.

No, I will be told, the objection is not that they are masturbating, but that they are masturbating off of women exploited as sexual objects.

Let us ask first who is being exploited. The woman on the film is certainly undisturbed by the jets of sperm her beauty has insired. She contracted to do the films months ago. When the entertainment is live, the performer may indeed feel grossed out by some of her male customers responses, but it is a job she chose, and if she quits there will be many others to take her place. The job may be horrible, or it may be like any other job, depending on the performer’s point of view; in either case, the antiporn forces are not in the business of organizing female workers in the pornography industry to improve their conditions. No, their concern is not so much with the exploitation of the particular woman performing the simulated (or real) sex act, but with collective womanhood, all of whom are claimed to be affected by the reproduction of degraded images of females as sex objects.

There is much to be said for and against this argument. Better polemicists than I have got their feet stuck in these bear traps, and I suspect that I would not be any more succesful at disentangling the justice and logic on both sides. Feminists themselves are divided on these issues. On the one hand, the injustice and pain caused by sexual roles in our society merit angry opposition. On the other hand, there is a case for the defense of imagination, however barbaric. There are the rights of communities to set standards of decency, versus rights of minorities to seek private pleasures; the understandable desire of parents to control the intake of the young, balanced against the protection of free speech; the intuitive connection felt by many between pornography and violent crimes against women, and the lack of hard evidence to support this hypothesis. Finally, there is the pragmatic question: Is it practical to wage war against pornography, knowing that it will probably always be with us? What would you propose in it’s stead?

I confess I myself see nothing terribly wrong with pornography; but then, I have never felt myelf victimized by it. I would only question, from the discredited (and hitherto largely ignored) standpoint of the pornography customer, whether the stuff is being accurately described in the first place.

For instance, regarding the matter of sex objects, it needs to be pointed out that men no less than women have shallow, thinglike personalities in pornographic presentaions. There is precious little characterizations of a novelistic sort in pornography. Part of the promise of pornography is that people can engage in pleasure without having to deal with each other’s personalities. In such an arena, where there are no dramatis personae, only nerve ends receptive to pleasure, one could as easily say about the perfornmers that, rather than being reduced to sexual objects, they have been elevated into embodiments of the physical life, like dancers. Everything personal has been extinguished, except during the minimal “frame” establishing a situation, the scant dues paid to narrative. With pornography at its purest – the loop – even the remotest suggestion of a story is removed and we are left with a continuosuly repeating reel of sex acts. All pornography follows, like Schnitzler’s Ronde , a circular form. Its theatrical paraphernalia – The G-strings, the whips, the dildos, the boas – belong to a spectacle inherently repetitious.

Pornography is a sort of utopian kingdom, where the women are always ready and the men are always hard and they go at it for what seems like forever, and when they come they don’t need to rest, they start again with someone else; and so they spend their lives screwing and have no worries about money or leaking radiators or family illnesses. Gone are psychological scars, fears of not impressing the other, needs for special treatment. There is no rejection in this utopia, no “He’s not my type” or She’s too bland” or “I don’t think he’s intelligent enough for me.” Everyone else will do. No sooner met than made. Pornography transcends all of life’s hesitations and doubts.

A milkman rings the doorbell and is met by a housewife in a negligee. She offers him a cup of cofee, the milk “accidently” spills on her, she runs into a kitchen to wash off her slip, he peeks at her naked breast through the doorway, she sees him staring and gives him a look of indignation that slides irresistibly into melting hunger. The next moment they are in the bedroom (oh, those sudden transitions of lowered resistance – you keep thinking you must have missed something), and the rest is – unmemorable.

Most pornography shows consist of what the trade calls “sucking and fucking.” To watch people going at these activities for any length of time is numbing experience. At first one is titillated, then aroused, maybe even stirred, excited, at the edge of one’s seat. Then the effect wears off. If pornography is a timeless world freed from social responsibilities, it is also a static one. The problem it has faced as entertainment is how to build interest. The progression may go from a blow job to straight intercourse to lesbian sex to a threesome to an orgy or whatever, but the attempt to create an ascending curve of sexual stimulation will usually not keep up with the descending curve of involvement. The last scenes are generally anticlimactic, in more ways than one. Here the physiology of male arousal and pornographic spectacle may be at odds. The first close-up of genitals and penetartion can be rapturous; by the tenth one feels as though one were taking a turkey-basting course.

It may be the nature of all utopias to be boring. But I am convinced that pornography is meant to be boring. Men bring to it their painfully aroused libidos in the hope not only that they will be turned on but that they will be turned off. Not enough has been made of pornography as a depressant and an anti-aphrodisiac. The thoughtful, slugged look in the eyes of customers leaving such exhibitions shows that they have indeed rid themselves of some of their annoying sexual energy. For some of these men it is a way of looking the devil of satisfied sexual desire in the face and outstaring it, the reward for which is a hard-won indifference.

Not only is the stylized picture of sexuality represented in pornography unreal, but I would argue that those who frequent it know it is unreal. Pornography is like science fiction about a planet on which nothing can grow or develop because nothing important is at risk. The orgasm? It would be inappropriate to apply a Maileresque search for bigger and better orgasma to this more standardless, unteleological planet. The orgasms in pornography are not graded, they are simply presented matter-of-factly in rough interchangeable sequence. Since there are no sexual dysfunctions that we are allowed to see, no failures to lubricate or premature ejaculations (“cut! Take two!”), the sense of vulnerability and uniqueness in sexual comunion is lost, which is perhaps why D.H. Lawrence hated pornography. There is nothing at stake. One watches it, like a slow baseball game between two teams already eliminated from the pennant race, for a moment of awkward surprise.

In many ways, the experience of pornography resembles dream life. Both place us before a stream of images in which the normal laws of social reality are suspended. No sooner desire a thing than it begins to occur. Taboos of incest, class, color, age, gender, number, genus and species fall with a fluttering fluidity. All that has been repressed pops out. It is not surprising that hostility and violence also make their appearance; but as in dreams, they are only part of what happens, not the whole. As with dreams, too, the pornography watcher suspends criteria of quality, kowing that there will be a great deal of dross for every moment of magic.

To try to separate the broad stream of pornography into good and bad is a little like attempting to screen out uninteresting from interesting dreams, pleasant from horrible ones. That is why I think the effort to defend pornography by pointing to legitimate specmens of erotic art is misguided. As soon as the style becomes too brilliant it ceases to be pornography; it becomes “literature” or “art cinema.” Pornography may be a sort of art-making activity too, but the sublimity that it does momentarily attain is never far from its sludgelike mediocrity. And it is this very mediocrity from which it draws its secret energy.

I don’t want to leave this subject before reporting one final experience: a visit to a topless-bottomless bar. One night, in a benign mood, rounding out a pleasant evening with my older brother, I had suggested we stop in one of the clip joints on Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street. It was a sort of long-delayed rite of whoring together, something we had never had the courage to do while growing up; and I knew it would go no further this night than sitting at a bar being soaked for expensive drinks, which is essentiallly what happened, and staring at some female flesh. I expected to be dissapointed; but it is in the nature of such ventures into the underworld that you want to know, in what way will I be dissapointed?

It was a small, surly room, much like an off-off-Broadway theater between productions, perhaps because of the unfinished wooden flats used for dance platforms and the uncertain lighting. On one platform stood a young woman, completely naked, scratching her nose. She looked a sthough she had just stepped out of a bath and was trying to remember where she had put her glasses. From time to time she would remember to sway vaguely to the beat of the disco music, but mostly she just stood there like a figure model waiting to be told it was time to take a break.

She was a mildly pretty brunette with a ski-jump nose and slavic feautures, and I imagined her growing up in one of those goulash-and-paprika restaurants in the east Eighties, where everyone spoke Magyar and the middle-aged men with thinning hair got dressed up on Sundays and told jokes to her chubby mother, who worked the espresso machine, and once a year they all went on a boat ride.

On the other platform, a black woman was shaking for all she was worth, definitely earning her salary. She did an odd trick, which was to put her fingers by her crotch and snap them as if igniting a match – a metaphor. She tried winking and talking sexy to the deadbeat cusomers, but they – we – were like lobotomy cases with blue stigmata of electroshock on our foreheads.

Crossing in front of her, a much more haggard woman with a see-through nightie and battle-scarred face and bony legs approached us at the bar and asked if we would buy her a drink, “for thirty dollars.” We could drink it “inside” if we liked and have some fun. We declined and she went on to another customer.

At a table near the door, the manager (or was he the bouncer?), a heavyset man round like a bowling ball in a shiny black suit, was talking to another man about something he had in his eye. He lowered the skin under his eyelid and showed the other man – a boil or sty. Then, oblivious to the black woman, who was shaking her lips and trying to maintain at least some semblance of erotic illusion, he got up on the same platform, standing with his back to the audience, to use the tall mirror behind her. He worried his eyelid this way and that, trying to see himself in the dim mirror light. “See, it’s all red,” he called over to his friend. “I told you it was swollen!”

The man with the carbuncle sharing the platform with the topless dancer was that intrusion of the mundane into the lewd that always strikes me as the essence of Forty-second Street. I don’t find it dehumanizing, but rather, all too human. It depends on what your definition of human is.

1980

– — Hart Crane, “The Bridge”

**

For all but the disabled, walking is a basic human activity, just below eating and sleeping. Consequently, peripatetic literature is vast: rarely does a novel or poetry volume lack some walk. But it’s a strange sub-genre: a writer can’t help wondering how to put a leash on the infinite. How do you begin to impose a structure on what could easily degenerate into shapeless listing? How do you distribute your attention between nature, passersby, architecture, social issues? What needs does the literary walk fulfill for the writer?

Most written-down walks are undertaken alone. The walk becomes a technique to deal with, act out, dramatize, defend, or deplore one’s solitude. With solitude, of course, comes a danger: self-preoccupation. The literary walk inscribes the struggle between self-absorption and self-forgetting, between the poison of ego-brooding and the healing parade of sensory stimuli. One of the classic preoccupations of peripatetic literature is how a mood changes in the process of traversing a city on foot. In the meantime, perception is sharpened, by charting the precise movement between interior monologue ("the daily fodder of my mind" is how Rousseau put it in The Reveries of the Solitary Walker) and outward attentiveness, like the rack focus in movies that pulls first the foreground, then the background into clarity.

Walking also offers the chance to sample other class realities: sipping the life above one’s station as well as below it. This peripatetic "slumming" (a combination of envy and disdain, voyeurism and sympathy, held in temporary abeyance) yields, at its worst, a numbed indifference to social inequities, by reducing them to spectacle, or by inspiring the fantasy that one knows how the other half lives; at its best, however, it can open one’s eyes to the realities of destitution, which beats a refusal to look at all.

The urban walk-poem or story is a species of travel literature, one in which, without going anywhere, you often adopt a stance of unfamiliarity in your own town. In New York, precisely because it is so polyglot and international, the walker-writer can turn a corner and imagine being in Prague, say, or Montevideo. Some walks follow habitual routes, and are intended to reassure; others are undertaken to disorient oneself in a strange neighborhood–to court, as in childhood, the sensation of being lost and afraid, albeit in safe, small doses.

Such walking requires leisure. Idlers and literary bohemians, looking down on nine-to-five "wage slaves," try to swallow their guilt towards the worker and promote walking into a sacred vocation, much like the nineteenth-century flâneurs who strolled around Paris, and whom Walter Benjamin called "connoisseurs of the sidewalk." A wine connoisseur appreciates the best and often the most expensive vintages; but the connoisseur of streets, while charmed by the leafy quiet and exclusive shops in a wealthy area, is more likely to grow enthusiastic over a section a bit more ragged. Street connoisseurs are often drawn to borders between neighborhoods, which inherit the different, high-low, joli-laid personalities of both. It’s this sort of cognitive dissonance that the urban connoisseur takes pride in recognizing and then resolving aesthetically.

The urban connoisseur is also an amateur archeologist of the recently vanished past. Not surprisingly, an elegiac tone creeps into this genre, as personal memories intersect with what had formerly existed on a particular spot. The walker-writer cannot help seeing, superimposed over the present edifice, its former incarnation, and he/she sings the necropolis, the litany of all those torn-down Pennsylvania Stations and Les Halles marketplaces that goes: Lost New York, Lost Boston, Lost Tokyo, Lost Paris.

*

In exploring the Manhattan waterfront, I’ve felt myself returning to an old habit, rambling around New York. I used to have a passion for walking; now it’s something I recognize I can do naturally, like falling back on an old coping strategy.

I first began coming to Manhattan on foot, from Brooklyn. My family would walk across the Williamsburgh Bridge at sundown on a Saturday night, like many of our neighbors, to mark the Sabbath’s end with a meal at a Manhattan dairy restaurant, usually Ratner’s or Rappaport’s. Not that my parents were particularly observant Jews, but living in an Orthodox/Hassidic area, they adapted to the local custom. Later, as a teenager, I took to walking across the bridge myself, a poeticizing adolescent mesmerized by motes in air. These spots, which I told myself only I could see, thanks to my sensitivity, floating before the housing projects that already walled off the Lower East Side’s edge from the river, represented the possibility of a transcendent escape from the ghetto where I felt imprisoned. Not motes but money, I came to see later, was the ticket out.

"Before him, then," wrote James Baldwin in Go Tell It on the Mountain, "the slope stretched upward, and above it the brilliant sky, and beyond it, cloudy and far away, he saw the skyline of New York. He did not know why, but there arose in him an exultation and a sense of power, and he ran up the hill like an engine, or a madman, willing to throw himself headlong into the city that glowed before him."

This passage epitomizes a literature about sensitive provincials from the Midwest, the outer boroughs, or Harlem, approaching the City with a lump in their throats. I do not propose to add my lump. Rather, let me fast-forward through adolescence, college, a first marriage at twenty, conjugal cocooning in Washington Heights, divorce at twenty-five, a California-runaway period; skip ahead to my late twenties, when I returned to live in New York, this time on the Upper East Side, and to search out the city, as an avid bachelor this time.

I walked. How I walked! In midtown Manhattan you walk as though on a conveyor belt, the grid pulling you along. It is not a restful sensation, true: there are none of those piazzas, like in Rome, where you can cool your feet in a sidewalk café and stare across at a fountain. You keep moving, you feel purposeful, wary, pointed, athletic. You can gauge your progress to an appointment by the rule of thumb that a block takes roughly a minute on foot, and, given the vagaries of traffic and subway delays, walking is often the most reliable transport option, as well as the most economical. Meanwhile, the grid acts as a reassuring compass, always ready to orient you. It pulls your eye straight up the avenue, to those long unimpeded vistas; looking left or right, if you are anywhere near the waterfront, you can catch a peripheral glimpse of river, or a sunset made lovelier by the city’s atmospheric pollutants; and so your gaze keeps adjusting astigmatically between long distance and middle range, and all the while there is so much coming at you that you have to attend to the immediate surround, dodging bodies and seizing openings. You take in the street by layers: this guy with the hat stepping too close to your shoulder; the storefront signs and window displays prompting impulse purchases; the stone-cut ornaments just above your head (cornices, cherubs, lions) and sometimes a whole second-story tier of retail or an upstairs restaurant; the wall posters on construction sites selling movies, politicians, rock stars; and finally, the tops of buildings, for which the best touches are often saved: Babylonian roof gardens, green copper domes, medieval castle turrets, Mayan setbacks, Greek temples, and all manner of pointy needles symbolizing the heavenward aspirations of commerce.

I also loved the ability of Manhattan’s streets to absorb without fuss the most varied mix of people. Rich or poor, white or black, gay or straight, for the moment, at least, everyone in the pedestrian swirl is assigned the same human value: you are either in my way or not.

Around this time I began to appreciate the performance art of pedestrianism. Each New Yorker can seem like a minor character who has honed his or her persona into a sharp, three-second cameo. You have only an instant to catch the passerby’s unique gesture or telltale accessory: a cough, hair primping, insouciant drawing on a cigarette, nubby red scarf, words muttered under the breath, eyebrow squinched in doubt. Diane Arbus used to say that in that split-second of passing someone, she looked for the flaw. I would say I look for the self-dramatizing element. How often you see perfectly sane people walking along grimacing to themselves, giggling, or wincing at some memory. Once, I passed a man in a three-piece suit who let out a sigh as intimate as if he had been sitting on the toilet. The expression worn on the street is perhaps more unconscious, therefore truer, than at work or at love. The crowded streets bring out, on the one hand, a pure self-absorption unembarrassed by witnesses; on the other hand, a secret conviction that one is being watched by Higher Powers, the anxious eyes of pedestrians all seeming to ask: Oh Lord, why hast Thou forsaken me?

*

With Walt Whitman, I encountered an even more omnivorous appetite than mine for walking in crowds. Whitman celebrated Manhattan at a time when it was elbowing aside Boston and Philadelphia as the most populous American metropolis. His positive love of crowds was unusual for the nineteenth century, when many American intellectuals were expressing a fastidious scorn for the "mob." Whitman’s fellow New Yorker, Edgar Allen Poe, who said that "democracy is a very admirable form of government–for dogs," wrote a short story, "A Man of the Crowd," in which he equated the boulevard walker with an automaton who "refuses to be alone." Whitman saw no contradiction between joining a crowd and being alone. His solitary, essential self was not threatened by the masses; rather, he took energy and comfort from their surrounding bodies. William James said admiringly of Whitman: "He felt the human crowd as rapturously as Wordsworth felt the mountains…." It’s certainly true that Whitman substituted the crowd for nature as a fit poetic subject, and made it a metaphor for American democracy, but the crowd fulfilled another function for him: it turned him on.

His gaze peeled beneath the city’s houses to the ghosts of remembered or fantasized erotic encounters. The crowd was for him a continually tantalizing, pullulating field of sexual potential: attraction, arousal, frustration, resignation, sometimes even fulfillment, a point he made clear in "City of Orgies":

…as I pass O Manhattan, your frequent and swift flash of eyes

offering me love,

Offering response to my own–these repay me,

Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me.

Whitman’s impact on walking-round literature was vast, partly because his all-embracing, synthesizing persona helped organize the streets’ random stimuli: what we now call the problem of "sensory overload." Specifically, Whitman perfected the list-poem or inventory. It was a megalomaniac solution, perhaps, with the "I" becoming a vacuum cleaner that sweeps up everything in its path and warms it with the empathic suction-blast of self. This gargantuan process of assimilation, engorging the world by looking at and naming it, was fueled by the desire to make it with everything in the cosmos. "I Am He That Aches With Love," he writes. In the process, Whitman ennobles the walk: his long verse lines are streets we’re asked to saunter along.

Many writers since have linked the physiology of walking and writing. The mind relaxes through the calming, repeated movement of a stroll, while the legs’ cadences trigger the rhythms of poetry.

Another solution for organizing peripatetic experience on the page was to shave the walk down to an anecdote. The master of this approach was Charles Reznikoff, the Objectivist poet who died in 1976. Reznikoff was a great walker, putting in twenty miles a day, usually starting from his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He walked, as much as anything, to get material. But he felt no responsibility to give a full report of the walk; on returning home, he would focus on only that image or situation that had moved him. Many of his poems are miniature narratives, told in spare, plain language.

Reznikoff was particularly interested in how different ethnic groups–Italians, Jews, Southern Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Poles–adjusted to New York. He sympathized with the poor, suffering, resilient city folk he met on his walks, and his poems conveyed the impression that accidental encounters with strangers or gregarious shopkeepers could be among the most nourishing experiences of city life. It was the unexpected rapport that touched him. Walking was both a way for the poet to be alone and–controlledly, indirectly–with others, knowing the spark of intimacy would last only a short while and incur no further obligations.

I knew Reznikoff slightly, and used to come across him in the Éclair, an old-fashioned German pastry cafe on West 72nd Street. Bald-headed, with glasses, dipping his nose in his coffee like a bird’s beak, he wore a somewhat resigned, defeated air, which made me associate him with the Depression years. Knowing he had received less recognition as a poet than he deserved (at times even publishing his own books), I thought I saw traces of bitterness and disappointment in him, fiercely suppressed behind a set of gentle shrugs. Alongside the manifest tenderness in his work, there was a preoccupation with cruelty, though the cruelty was often directed at himself–as in this walking poem, where his stale solitude is not mitigated by any invigorating encounter:

I am alone–

and glad to be alone;

I do not like people who walk about

so late; who walk slowly after midnight

through the leaves fallen on sidewalks.

I do not like

my own face

in the little mirrors of the slot-machines

before the crowded stores.

Self-dislike is the Doppelganger dogging the walker, who must evade it all costs by immersion in the present. We know that feeling of suddenly catching a reflection of ourselves in a car-mirror and not liking what we see.

*

After I returned to New York and resumed my habitual walking, it so happened I fell under the tutelage of a Jungian shrink who encouraged me to attend to the present moment–a hopeless proposition, in the long run; but for a while, I schooled myself in concrete detail (the opposite of motes), in the street’s one-thing-after-anotherness. No therapist alone could have gotten me to live in the present, but this was also a general recipe among poets I admired, such as Reznikoff, Frank O’Hara and Edwin Denby, and I wanted at the time to be a poet, like them, of proudly urban verse. In the meantime I kept diaries, telling myself: You need not seek, the streets will deliver all in due time.

In front of Carnegie Hall near the Russian Tea Room, there was a crazy man screaming his lungs out, something about "Man is an animal!"–in any case, not very interesting from the viewpoint of language or ideas. People were swerving away from him, but he was tyrannizing the whole street with his insane yelling. Finally I had had enough: I said, "Oh, shut up!" Straightaway he got a happy gleam in his eye. I made a beeline for the coffee shop across the street and sat down at a table, but he came in right after me, and in front of the cash register man and a dozen customers on stools, he began poking his finger at me. I realized now that he was much taller than I had thought. I started making the motion with my hand of patting the waves, the now-wait-a-minute-buddy-calm-down gesture.

"You want me on your back?" he yelled with satisfaction. "Huh? You want ME ON YOUR BACK, Mister?!" I had to admit he had a point.

**

The truncated anecdote: so often this was what I brought home from my walks and tried to work up into something literary. I was squeezing the sidewalks for free entertainment. Often enough, they obliged. Urbanists are fond of comparing the streets of a metropolis to a theatrical set–a tricky metaphor and, by now, a tiresome one. The American theater being what it is today, the streets are probably a more reliable source of diversion. But what they give you, for the most part, are curtain-raisers.

#

I walked, I walked. In cold weather I appreciated the chestnut sellers, the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, the chalky elephant-gray lighting of Radio City and the NBC Building, and the way various towers around midtown were suddenly competing to illuminate their crowns. In hot weather I became a connoisseur of halter tops and sidewalk book vendors.

After years of this peripatetic lyricism, the effect began to wear off. Alone, I’d walk the avenues annoyed, too indrawn to appreciate detail. At times, the city bored me with its density, it’s celebrated this-that-and-the-other. But then, whenever it suited me, I’d fall into my walker-in-the-city act. With Kay, for instance, a woman who dated me, off and on, for years, obligingly playing my femme fatale: when she and I went for a walk, and she began dissecting her depressions, sometimes, to change the subject, I’d show off my famous affection for the streets, pointing out brickwork, mansards, gargoyles, quoins, lampposts attracting snow, cute dogs with curly tails, the asphalt rainbows after a summer storm. She’d say: "It’s only when I’m seeing you that New York has that shimmer of enchantment. Because you love it so."

There is about this walking (usually in the case of men, though not exclusively) an imperialistic vanity, as though you could possess a city by marking it with your shoe leather, side-by-side with a conviction of incurable solitude, that stems from early feelings of powerlessness: mind-locked, onanistic, boastful, defensive, and melancholy (as all flirtations with the infinite must be). Perhaps, like Whitman, I also walked looking for erotic adventure, and, though I never actually picked up anyone on these peregrinations, they were all undertaken under the sign of Venus. I was not looking to find romance itself, so much as to be invaded by sharp glimpses of heart-stopping beauty, to take back with me and muse over in my rooms. It seemed to me that with so many of the women I passed, I could achieve happiness. While my actual bachelor experiences ought to have chastened this naïveté, I never succeeded in rooting out the utopian dream of finding my soulmate, or at least her fleeting paradigm, in the street.

Then I fell in love in my late forties, and remarried. At first I wondered, since the aesthetic response to beauty never dies, if the streets might pose a continuous challenge to my fidelity, mentally if not physically. Of course I still look at pretty women, sometimes longingly, but one main result of marriage has been that I find myself walking less. Manhattan, that mecca for singles, has become less purposefully fascinating, now that the hunt is over. Besides, I am expected at home.

These days, when I walk around Manhattan, often I don’t really see the city: that is, I see it in a blur, taking in only what I need to navigate its streets. At times I’ll even perversely read a book as I walk, espying only as much of the streetscape as peripheral vision around the volume’s borders will allow. I resent the pressure (which I’ve put on myself–nobody asked me to!) to find grace in the old lobbies and water towers, or piquancy in the physiognomies of my fellow citizens. Yes, New York is amazing, but must I always pay it homage? As a native son, don’t I have the right to take it for granted? How often have I conned myself into being astonished by the Flatiron Building, making believe I was a tourist seeing it for the first time! No more. If New York is going to astonish me, it had better do so without my lifting a finger.

It still does, even if the astonishment is milder. In late May, I love to walk around Greenwich Village in the afternoon and see the three o’clock sun on the facades of red-bricked, Federal-style townhouses. I think there’s some mystery to the light at this time of year, but then I realize it’s only that the trees are coming into bloom, and I’m seeing the light filtered through and softened by erose leaves, which cast delicate shadows against the building walls. Also, there’s a perfect correspondence in scale: one tree, one townhouse. An equivalence, a relationship. By July, you are so used to the fullness of the trees that you don’t notice the light any more–you notice the heat. And of course in winter the sun is dimmer and the trees are bare. But there really is something miraculous about the sun-licked facades at that time of year. And your energy is higher, because it’s fun to walk around in Spring with a nip still in the air.

*

The above chapter appears in Phillip Lopate’s "Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan"

Whenever we are tempted to bemoan the monotony of these brick high-rise compounds that dominate the riverbanks of the Lower East Side, we might stop for a moment and think about all the Lung Blocks that used to populate the site.

Ernest Poole, the journalist and novelist of The Harbor whom I discussed earlier, wrote journalistic exposés about the Lung Block, which had the highest tuberculosis incidence of any street in the city. Poole was part of a circle of idealistic young reformers (including Isaac N. Phelps-Stokes, who later wrote the monumental study, The Iconography of Manhattan Island) trying to raise a moral outcry about housing conditions in the Lower East Side. In The Bridge, his 1940 memoirs, he describes how he went down to the Lower East Side in 1902:

“The Lung Block, as I named it then, was far down on the East Side near the river. In early years, when that quarter was a center of fashion in our town, many of the buildings had been great handsome private homes, but long ago they had been turned into grimy rookeries, the spacious rooms divided into little cell-like chambers, many only stifling closets with no outer light or air. I can still smell the odors there. In what had been large yards behind, cheap rear tenements had been built, leaving between front and rear buildings only deep dank filthy courts. Nearly four thousand people lived on the block and, in rooms, halls, on stairways, in courts and out on fire escapes, were scattered some four hundred babies. Homes and people, good and bad, had only thin partitions between them. A thousand families struggled on, while many sank and polluted the others. The Lung Block had eight thriving barrooms and five houses of ill fame. And with drunkenness, foul air, darkness and filth to feed upon, the living germs of the Great White Plague [tuberculosis], coughed up and spat on floors and walls, had done a thriving business for years.”

Poole vividly described a young, tubercular Jew, near death, crying out for more air. The paradoxical proximity of the Lung Block to the expansive, world-connecting river was also noted: “There was a huge Danish woman too, on the Lung Block, who became my friend. Sailors came and stayed with her, ‘deep-water’ sailors, by which I mean that they shipped on voyages around the Horn to Singapore and Shanghai and other fascinating ports. As gifts or loans when they sailed away, they had left a lively marmoset, a scarlet parrot, heathen idols, painted shells and other things that pulled my thoughts out of the stinking rooms near by and sent them careering far off over the Seven Seas. I sometimes felt the Wanderlust and, in those lovely days of spring, wandered along the East River piers where lay the last of the ships with sails, listening for ‘chanteys’ of their crews as they heaved on the ropes and slowly, slowly the big ships moved out on the river, bound by the sea. But from such whiffs of the ocean world back I would dive into the Lung Block, all the more bitter that human beings should be choked to death in such foul holes, when there was so much fresh air and health and sunlight so close by.”

Poole went to work, writing up the horrors in strong muckraking fashion. A radical friend, scoffing at the notion that the pen was mightier than the sword, told him: “What the Lung Block needs is the ax.” (Later, Robert Moses would similarly remark: “when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.”) Undaunted, Poole shouldered on: “My report was featured in the press. Reporters came to write up the block. I took them around, with photographers. Hearings were held up at Albany. I gave my testimony there. So we raised hell with the politicians, and at twenty-three I thought that our campaign would succeed. I was wrong. For the landlords on the Lung Block had many influential friends. So came delays, delays, delays, until in the papers the story grew cold. It took thirty-two years to bring the ax. It came at last, under the New Deal. The rotten old block was razed to the ground and in its place you may see today the airy sunny apartment houses of Knickerbocker Village.”

Fred C. French, the same developer who had built Tudor City a few years earlier (1925-31), put together Knickerbocker Village, which, completed in 1933, housed 4000 persons on five acres in twelve-story blocks around inner courts. During the Depression, the federal government had made available a small pot of funds for private developers nationwide to clear slums and construct housing developments in their stead, based on a set of guidelines regarding building standards and occupational density. French had to travel to Washington over fifty times, hat in hand, to get an $8 million loan from the federal government’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation for the housing development. The sticking-point was the government’s objection that the complex had a density at least double that recommended by federal guidelines, but which the developer argued was needed for a satisfactory investment. In the end, the government agreed. French, who was both public-spirited and profit-minded, (French told some impressed Princeton students in 1934: “Our company, strangely enough, was the first business organization to recognize that profits could be earned negatively as well as positively in New York real estate–not only by constructing new buildings but by destroying, at the same time, whole areas of disgraceful and disgusting sores.” [Quoted in Max Page's The Creative Destruction of Manhattan] ) helped offset the costs for buying the land and developing Knickerbocker Village in two ways: first, by raising the density of land use through taller apartment towers, and second, by replacing low-income tenants with middle-income households. (This same strategy would be followed later by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which tore down another chunk of the Lower East Side along the river to build Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village).

There is certainly an argument to be made for the state helping middle class, white-collar workers in urban areas defray housing costs. Less valid was the argument employed that by subsidizing new housing for the middle class, you would then free up thousands of units for rental by low-income tenants. The trickle-down theory, applied to housing, proved as faulty as elsewhere, since rents in the vacated apartments were still beyond the reach of the poor. The effect of slum clearance on its inhabitants was thus to push them into new slums, as Anthony Jackson showed in his study of Manhattan low-cost housing, A Place Called Home. “When 386, mostly Italian, families had been forced to leave the old ‘Lung Block’…to make way for Knickerbocker Village, four-fifths of them moved into other nearby tenements. At Stuyvesant Town, a survey showed that roughly three-quarters of the 3000 displaced families would move into other slums.”

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

In one of the best New York waterfront movies, Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953), a number of key scenes were set a stone’s-throw away from the Rosenberg’s apartment, on a South Street pier. Coincidentally, it revolved around a plot by Communist spies to steal government secrets. “If you don’t cooperate,” the FBI agent tells the cynical hero, “you’ll be as guilty as those traitors who gave Stalin the A-bomb.”

Our hero, or anti-hero (played by Richard Widmark) is a pickpocket who hides out in an abandoned bait shack, perched on pilings in the East River, and reached only by a flimsy catwalk. The atmospheric night scenes prove again that the waterfront and film noir make an irresistible combination. Through the shack window we glimpse the Manhattan Bridge, and a dependably passing tugboat or barge (courtesy of rear view projection, since the film was really shot, for the most part, in California ).

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

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

*

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

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

“It’s beautiful.”

“You should see the courtyard.”

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

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

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

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

“It’s getting cold.”

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

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

“You’ll be okay.”

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

**

Excerpted from Waterfront by Phillip Lopate, to be published by Crown. Copyright (c) 2003 by Phillip Lopate. All rights reserved.

Click here for more information about this excellent book.

-Ackerman, Cornelius – suicide by drowning, b. New York, age 29 (6 Feb. 1826)
-Ackerman, Duke – drowning while going on board sloop Lowell (27 Oct. 1835) )
-Baptist, Isaac – drowning when he fell from the wharf (21 Aug. 1836) )
-Barcelo, James – suffocation from charcoal fumes on board the brig Merced, b. Spain, Age c. 33 (6 Feb. 1826) )
-Berry, Nelson – hemmorhage of the lungs, b. on the ocean, a rigger by occupation, a sailor all his life, age 35. He has been married to his wife Sarah for 7 years. He has no children. (26 Aug. 1839) )
-Birrckenbeck, Benjamin – fall from the gangway of ship Panthea, age c. 45 (10 Mar. 1841) )
-Boise, Jacob – blowing up of flagship Fulton at the Navy Yard (4 June 1829) -Bundy, Edward (colored) – accidentally knocked from main deck to the lower hold of the ship Silver de Grace by a tierce of rice (12 Jan. 1836) )

A simple notation of “drowning” was as frequently entered as any explanation for decease. Wrote Kenneth Scott, in his Introduction to Coroners’ Reports, New York City, 1823-1842: “Inasmuch as New York was a port, drowning was an extremely common form of death. Many, especially when intoxicated, lost their lives when trying to board a vessel or go ashore.” Alcohol blurred the line between accidental and intentional self-destruction. Perhaps it was this pattern of “border crossings” that eventually led the municipal authorities to place the river’s edge off-limits to its citizens.

There is a scene in Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) that makes you realize the degree to which access to the water’s edge means, in part, the freedom to commit suicide. On a simple river-walk, below a bridge or elevated promenade, a soused millionaire is getting ready to drown himself with a rope and a heavy stone. Charlie the Tramp waddles blithely down the staircase attached to the bridge and takes up a river-walk bench for the night, when he notices the would-be suicide’s preparations. He tries to convince the man that life is worth living (“Tomorrow the birds will sing”), in the process entangling himself with the rope and the wealthy self-destructive sot, so that both keep landing in the drink and having to pull themselves out. A fine bit of physical comedy; but what strikes me is how easy it was in yesterday’s cities to do away with oneself by drowning.

A century ago, “the river” had a fateful ring. It connoted suicide, especially for destitute women or prostitutes overtaken by despair. Such women were often said to end up “in the river.” Beyond the actual incidence of such tragedies, the realist school had a penchant for drowning denouements, a residual romanticism that popped up in “fallen women” narratives worldwide, from Vienna to Tokyo, around the turn of the twentieth century: the victim of social forces was shown poised on the bridge, ready to jump.

In Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), the author describes the moments preceding his heroine’s death through the invocation of ominous waterfront imagery: “The girl went into the gloomy districts near the river, where the tall black factories shut in the street and only occasional broad beams of light fell across the pavements from saloons….When almost to the river the girl saw a great figure. On going forward she perceived it to be a huge fat man in torn and greasy garments. His grey hair straggled down over his forehead. His small, bleared eyes, sparkling from amidst great rolls of red fat, swept eagerly over the girl’s upturned face….Chuckling and leering, he followed the girl of the crimson legions. At their feet the river appeared a deathly black hue.”

The customers as well would sometimes end underwater. James McCabe, nineteenth-century chronicler of New York’s secrets, wrote of men enticed by “prostitutes, connected with professional thieves and assassins…. More than one has found his grave in the Hudson, dragged there in the darkness of the night, after being drugged by poisonous liquors and robbed of his valuables.”

The river was also the repository of another sad human cargo. In 1858, a committee, established to investigate the treatment of abandoned children, reported: “our own Hudson and the East River carry with them to the Atlantic, with the returning tide, the dead bodies of infants cast out by unfeeling mothers.”

That New York rivers continue to serve as a mortuary for suicides and homicides may be seen by the bodies fished out each year, around mid-April, by the harbor police, during what has come to be called “Floaters Week.” But the river is no longer morbidly connected in the public’s mind with the fate of fallen women—not because street-walkers’ lives have so improved, but because narrative tropes exhaust themselves.

**

Excerpted from Waterfront by Phillip Lopate, to be published by Crown. Copyright (c) 2003 by Phillip Lopate. All rights reserved.

Click here for more information about this excellent book.

This whole neighborhood, along the western spine of Manhatan, has always been mysterious to me, with its deserted steamship offices that look like flaking venetian facades, and its imperturbable warehouses where no one can ever go in or out. A few blocks east are skyscrapers, but between those skyscrapers and the waterfront lie empty lots where my imagination has more than enough room to turn frightened. Emily parked the car, and we heeled our shoes cautiously on the tractionless ice.

The fire had been a week a ago. It had been so close to zero the night of the blaze, and ever since, that the water from the fire hoses had frozen. Sheets of white ice hung down the collapsed timbers, which were charred black and leaning diagonally against each other. Looking at the warehouse was like staring into an unfinished cathedral of snow. Smoke continued to pour up, apparently from the warehouse basement where the fire was still alive, incredibly enough, in all this ice.

The smoke burned the eyes so that we didn’t get any closer to the ruins than across the street. The smoke floated up between the webs of ice and out of the roof and across the street to our side, to some railroad tracks lifted on a raised plaform, with iron railings, behind which were stalled maroon-brown freight cars. Everything began to swim together in a delicate chalky light that was uncanny, no matter where I looked.The bones of ice, the boxcars, the ruined warehouse, the half-moon. It was like an overhead shot in a wonderful suspense movie when something horrible is about to happen; the filigree of the train railings had a trembling clarity, a rib of aquamarine seen through the smoke, as though in a grisaille painting.

But these comparisons with art only understate the rareness of the spectacle. We all realized we might never see its like again. Emily began taking pictures. The watchmen from the fire department returned, and Emily, who is good at striking up conversations with policean or museum guards, left us and started talking with them.

Kay and I were shivering; it was too much of a good thing. I wanted to get in the warm car and go to the party. I signaled to Emily with a yank of my head (she ignored me, of course); then I headed for her fire-engine-red Volkswagen to wait by the hood. At this farther distance and angle, the warehouse did not look so special. What if the poetry had already drained from the scene? It was a matter of getting that grey green to line up with the white again.

I was debating whether to clatter back to a closer vantage point, when Emily wandered over to us, explaining as she opened her car door: “I just wanted to find out if the night watchmen felt too jaded to enjoy it.”

“Were they?”

“I said to them, “I find this very beautiful – do you?” and one guy said, “It’s tremendous! I can’t get enough of looking at it.”

We were pleased with his answer, suddenly feeling warm affection, probably condescending, for the watchman who shared our aesthetic excitement. So, apparently everyone thought this was an extraordinary sight. The knowledge of its universal appeal reassured me, even as it spoiled the pleasure slightly.

In any case, we were probably the only people at the party we were going to who had seen it.

1980

Indeed, looking down Sackett Street toward the river on that infamously sunny day, I did see a plume of grayish black cloud at the end of my block. My first response was So what? Planes do crash. I went inside, the phone rang and it was my mother-in-law, telling me to turn on the television. My mother-in-law is something of TV addict, especially if bad weather threatens; she’ll keep the tube on day and night to track a rainstorm.

I had been looking forward to writing all day, now that my seven-year-old daughter Lily was back in school, and so I said rather testily that I couldn’t turn the television on now, and hung up.

But something urgent in her voice disturbed me, and so, against my practice, I did put on the television, and saw the footage of the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Now I was gripped, shocked, queasy, realized something unprecedented was happening. Still, I wandered by habit over to my desktop computer, and tried to punch in a few sentences for my book about the New York waterfront. Maybe because I have been so fixated on this subject, I began to think this horrifying event was directly connected to the geography of the waterfront: Manhattan’s slender, lozenge shape, surrounded by rivers, made it easier for the hijacking pilots to hug the shore and spot the towers. My concentration, needless to say, was poor, but I resisted giving myself up entirely to this (so it yet seemed) public event. I am the kind of person who can write, and does, as a consoling escape from anxiety, in the midst of carpenters or other distractions. Around 10:30 I had the television turned on in my office when my wife Cheryl called me from Lily’s Montessori class and said she was sticking around the school, in case they decided to close it. I replied–the resolve had suddenly formed in me, I needed to be out in the streets–that I was going for a walk down by the waterfront, to see what I could. “Why don’t you stop by the school afterwards, and look in on us?” she asked. I said I doubted I would, not adding that suddenly I felt a sharp urge to be alone.

The tragedy had registered on me, exactly the same way as after my mother had died: a pain in the gut, the urge to walk and walk through the city, and a don’t-touch-me reflex, noli me tangere. I made my way down to Columbia Street, which feeds into the Brooklyn Promenade: the closer I got to the waterfront, the harder it was to breathe. The smoke was blowing directly across the East River, into Brooklyn. There were not many people on Columbia Street, but most of those I passed had surgical masks on (I wondered if they got them from nearby Long island Community Hospital). I was choking, without a mask. Cinders and poisonous-smelling smoke thickened the air, and ash fell like snowflakes on the parked cars and on one’s clothing, constantly.

It was exactly what I had imagined war to be like. An Arabic-looking delivery man had pulled over and was talking worriedly into a cell-phone. It was two hours after the attack, and you could no longer make out the Manhattan skyline, all you could see was a billowing black cloud. Later, my wife told me she had actually glimpsed the top of one of the Twin Towers in flames. I found myself envying everyone who had actually witnessed the buildings on fire or collapsing. Of course I had no one to blame but myself, having secreted myself indoors for the first few hours. I can’t imagine running into Manhattan to get a closer look, but I should have gone up to my roof and looked. At the moment it didn’t occur to me; I was terrified. Now I saw thousands of people on foot crossing over the bridges into downtown Brooklyn. When I reached Atlantic Avenue I turned east, away from the water, and began to encounter hordes of office workers, released early from their jobs. Not all of them seemed upset; there was a sort of holiday mood, in patches, of unexpected free time. Some younger people behind me, two men and a woman in their twenties, were even laughing as they recounted to each other the morning’s events, how they had been stopped on their way out of the subway. The middle-aged and elderly, on the other hand, seemed profoundly disturbed. They had not expected anything so terrible as an attack on America to happen in the last quarter of their lives. Just as there is something unseemly when a young person dies, so the natural order of things seems wronged when the elderly, braced for their own diminishment, illness and death, must absorb the bitter, shocking knowledge of how vulnerable and perishable their society is–the world they had expected to outlast them. I myself felt, at only fifty-eight, that the attack was a personal affront to one’s proper autobiographical arc, as though a messy and unnecessarily complicated subplot had been introduced too late in the narrative.

I went by the Arab shops and cafes on Atlantic Avenue, wondering foolishly if I would detect any mood of celebration. In fact, many of the Arab-owned stores had taken the precaution to close for the day; in several of the shops left open, the proprietors had retreated to the back room. To the degree that expressions among the Brooklyn-Islamic community could be made out, they looked grim, no one was wreathed in smiles, though I did not rule out the possibility that some were rejoicing inwardly. All at once, I wanted to be with my family. My cocoa-colored shirt was flecked with white ash, like residual bird shit, when I turned into the Brooklyn Heights Montessori School. The lobby was crowded with parents, many picking up their children to take them home. School seemed as safe a place for Lily to be as our house; I saw no reason to take her out prematurely. My wife, Cheryl, was standing by the door of the multi-purpose room, waiting for Lily to exit with her class. They were on their way to or from dance. Lily seemed happily surprised to see me in mid-day; I hugged her. She trooped off to her next activity. Cheryl milled around with the mothers and some of the fathers returning from the financial district; they were all comparing accounts, and engaging in that compulsively repetitious dialogue by which an enormity is made real.

A few days later, my wife reproached me for having shown up with ash-laden clothing, the shirttails left outside my pants; she said I could have frightened the children. I said I did not think anyone noticed me. But on some level, her reproach was justified: I was indulging the fantasy that I was invisible, not being a team player. Some sort of communal bonding was taking place, foreign to me, beautiful in many respects, scary in others.

My wife and I both felt anguished all week, but it was an anguish we could not share. The fault was mine: selfishly, I wanted to nurse my grief at what had been done to my city. I mistrusted any attempt to co-opt me into group-think, even conjugal-think.

Later that day, I went with two friends to give blood. These two gentlemen, Kent Jones and James Harvey, both fine film critics who live in my neighborhood, met me on the corner of Sackett and Henry Streets and we walked toward the hospital together. James Harvey is in his seventies, a veteran of World War II, and I expected him to have a special insight into the attack, to compare it to Pearl Harbor, say, but he just shook his head and said this was different. When we arrived at the blood donor station we were turned away; apparently so many people had volunteered that the medical technicians had run out of blood bags. (As the city learned in the days that followed, we had been optimistic in thinking that that many wounded could be pulled from the wreckage and would need transfusions.) Kent, James and I repaired to the Harvest Café, which was unusually crowded with diners. The owner and waiters seemed harried, forgetting to give us silverware. The TV was on, the volume turned so loud that it was difficult to talk. Normally, when these friends and I get together, the conversation flows, we have endless things to say; but this time we could derive no nourishment from each other’s company.

Our language had dried up. Embarrassed, being writers, to say the obvious, we said little. Kent kept consulting his cell phone. James held his head and stared at the floor. I turned around and looked up at the self-same television which I resented being on in the first place, yet was hypnotized by.

When I got home, my wife was glued to the television. Uneasy about joining her in this electronic vigil, yet feeling I had no choice, nothing else mattered, I joined her. Our daughter said, “Why do you keep watching that? They just keep saying the same things. We know that already. Two planes crashed into the building.” Blasé, not at all traumatized, Lily, the customary center of our universe, was annoyed that her parents were not paying attention to her. She was right: there was something punitive about the same information, the same pictures, over and over. I realize that this has become our modern therapy in catastrophic events, the hope that by immersing ourselves in the news media, its thoughtful anchor-persons and interviews with pundits, by the numbing effect of repetition if nothing else, we will work through our grief. But for me it doesn’t work: I get a kind of sugar buzz and feel nauseous afterwards.

The first day there was a bit more unexpected quality, especially shots of people running away from the explosion, stampeding, the camera flailing about. The footage’s amateurism seemed to signal its authenticity. In succeeding days, I felt sickened by the slick, unending interviews with relatives of missing persons and back-stories about the victims, the same technique used for coverage of the Olympics, now applied to this Olympics of Thanatos. We must not forget the politicians’ parade, their eloquence and competence inversely proportionate to their office. Most impressive was the local mayor, Rudy Giuliani, who seemed always to know what he was talking about; then came New York State’s Governor Pataki, who graciously deferred to the mayor; Senator Hilary Clinton, who blustered unconvincingly, all the way up to President Bush, whose bellicosity and syntactical tentativeness embarrassed all educated liberals like myself. Most incredible were the efforts of the President to say kind things about New York, a city which he and the country at large have so often mistrusted and disliked.

That this was primarily an attack on New York I had no doubt. I feel so identified with my native city that it took a mental wrenching to understand all of America considered itself a target. I knew the Pentagon had been hit as well, but the attack on a low-rise, suburban military complex did not seem as significant, as humanly interesting. Urbanism, density, verticality, secular humanism, skepticism, popular culture, mass transit, commerce, these were the threatened values, in my view. The American flags that started appearing everywhere seemed to me entirely fitting, especially if they were taken to honor the heroic local firemen and police who died trying to rescue victims. But if they were a nationalistic statement about America as the greatest nation, then, no, I could not join that sentiment. The only banner I wanted to fly from our brownstone window was the orange, green and white flag of New York City, with its clumsy Dutchman and beaver.

All the talk in the media that we were attacked because we were a free nation, and the terrorists who went after us hated freedom, frankly disgusted me. Why could we not accept that an awful thing had happened to us, without patting ourselves on the back and asserting it was a sign of our superior virtue? Awful things happened in the Iran-Iraq war, terrorist attacks, germ warfare, and neither county was a beacon of freedom. Awful things happened to Afghanistan.

It was quickly established that the plane hijackings had been done by Osama bin Laden’s followers, and were intended in part as chastisement for the United States’ support of Israel. As a Jew, I felt hot, exposed, implicated, frightened by the re-approach of anti-Semitism; I felt angry at the fundamentalist Muslim terrorists, even as I knew the majority of Moslems would condemn the slaughter; I felt angry at the Israeli government for all their past rigidities and missed opportunities, and especially at the Sharon-Netanyahu faction for having the audacity to gloat, “Now you know the pain we live under;” I felt angry at Arafat and the Palestinian people for not having accepted the concessions offered by Ehud Barat, however inadequate, and gone on to build something better from there; and I felt angry at the United States for having supported and grown bin Laden, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein as anti-Communist forces. Confused and chagrined as my thinking was, the one thing I felt sure, with thousands of innocent people blown apart, was that I did not want to hear the old argument of my radical Left friends: “When you are an oppressed people fighting a hegemonic power like the United States, you have to use the means at your disposal, and ‘terrorism’ is merely a label the American Empire applies to its opponents.”

To be honest, we did not hear that argument, though one of my friends smugly quoted Malcolm X: “The chickens have come home to roost.” People claim that New York will be changed forever by this attack. It is easy to say that, less easy to understand exactly how. A few days after September 11th, I noticed subway riders being unnaturally polite to each other, whether out of greater communal solidarity and respect for human life, or more wariness of the Other’s potential rage, I am unable to say. No New Yorker expects the rest of America’s warm feelings toward the city to last very long; it is like getting licked by a large, forgetful St. Bernard dog.

Meanwhile, the towers that had anchored lower Manhattan are gone, pfft. I ask myself how I will be changed personally. On the morning of September 12th I awoke and remembered immediately what had happened, like a murderer returning to the horror of his altered moral life. I sensed I would never be the same. I have never bought the idea that suffering ennobles people. Rather, I expect that this dreadful experience will add to the scar tissue left by other atrocities of life, like the death of one’s parents, the illness of one’s children, or the shame of one’s nation (My Lai), sorrows over which one has no control but that cause, for all that, the deepest regrets.

Donald Judd sculptures: their only decorative adornments were those aluminum Y’s, provoking you by their tight-lipped abstraction, like the curved curlicues in a mosque screen, or like a series of why’s. Were they clones derived from the DNA of some Platonic ideal? Were they emblematic of containerization, which had destroyed the Port of New York: the container being that standard, infinitely replicable rectangle, everywhere the same height, length and depth? Shining like aluminum altars, 1,350 feet tall, the Twin Towers were our Stonehenge. Their architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was asked why he made two of them, side by side, instead of one gigantic structure, and he is said to have replied (the story may be apocryphal, but it’s a good one anyhow) that double the height would have destroyed human scale.

I never found them offensive or overbearing, neither did I love them; they didn’t invite dislike, they were too polite, eight-hundred pound gorillas in tuxes, having no need to beat their chests. (When they replaced the Empire State Building in the remake of King Kong, they offered the creature a too smooth, unvaried façade to convey precarious perching.) They were at once the most dominant and least assuming facet of the New York skyline: Don’t mind me, they said.

It took seven years and a billion dollars to build them. Putting together the deal required immense muscle, supplied by David Rockefeller at the Chase Manhattan Bank, his brother Nelson, then Governor of New York (who stocked one tower with state workers when the building failed to attract tenants), and the considerable resources of the Port Authority of New York-New Jersey. Austin Tobin, then head of the Port Authority, kept up the masquerade that the spanking new towers were somehow going to be given over to trade and port functions. “How did the Port Authority–chartered to safeguard the economic health of New York’s regional maritime commerce–become the agent, a half century later, of the port’s displacement and decline. And what caused America’s most venerable planning and development agency–once imbued with the high-minded public service doctrines of Woodrow Wilson–to transform itself into the world’s biggest real estate speculator?” demanded Eric Darton, in his book about the World Trade Center, “Divided We Stand.” While I don’t think the agency could have done much to keep the port in Manhattan, it does take gall to present to the public a real estate speculation as a consolidation of port services, at the very moment that these functions were being transferred to New Jersey. We were led to envision the twin towers as the vertical equivalent of all those shipping companies and counting-houses that once lined the docks, of all the shipbuilders, importers, commission merchants, marine insurance companies, brokers and lawyers whose Whitehall Street offices had overlooked the harbor.

Still, you have to hand it to them: the World Trade Center went from being a white elephant, when they began opening in 1972, to near-full occupancy of ten-million square feet of office space. Not only did it initiate the resurgence of Lower Manhattan, but its dug-out foundation stones were re-used as landfill to make Battery Park City, the true center of that revival. By 2001, the World Trade Center was valued at $1.2 billion, and the Port Authority had managed to lease the buildings for ninety-nine years to a consortium led by Larry A. Silverstein for $3.2 billion. The city and the agency were licking their chops, contemplating how they would spend the huge profits resulting from that privatization. The electronics shopkeepers of Radio Row whose district had originally stood in the World Trade Center’s path were long forgotten. But then, on September 11, 2001, the towers joined the palimpsest of multiple erasures, like a child’s magic slate, which is New York.

Now that they are gone, their absence reasserts how much they climaxed the southern tip of Manhattan. Their silvered profiles ashimmer against a blue sky, like matching cigarette cases, or at night, when they became moody and noirish, were poetic postcard effects achieved only at a distance; up close, they seemed blandly off-putting, and oppressive at street level, like most 65 mph architecture built in that era.

To the rest of the world–though, curiously, I would maintain, not to native New Yorkers, like myself, who would always regard the twin towers as parvenus, compared to the Empire State Building, the Chrysler or the Woolworth–the World Trade Center symbolized the Big Apple, and beyond that, the might of America, the Great Satan. Certainly the twins had the richest and most imaginative of meanings, a mystic temptation one can only speculate on, to the suicide terrorists of the Islamic jihad who attacked them not once but twice. The first time, in 1993, despite the tragic loss of life and damage to the buildings, the towers remained standing, seemingly impregnable. The structural design had called for each tower’s skin to be its main strength, through light glass-and-steel facing threaded by steel columns. These columns gave the buildings their stiffness, while a cluster of central columns and steel trusses helped hold up each concrete floor. “Redundancy,” the engineers call that structural backup that ensures a building’s resilience, even if damaged–a word that also fit the WTC aesthetically and, now, historically. The twin towers were very strong, nothing compromised in the way of construction, an engineering tour de force; but no building, as we discovered, is meant to take the brunt of a jetliner, gorged with jet fuel, shearing through its midsection. When they collapsed, they fell straight down, not forward. Like the good soldiers they were.