Except for development along the Brooklyn and Queens shores, things don’t change much on the river. It’s not unusual for a tug boat to pass the ferry pulling a barge upstream past the East River Generating Station and the United Nations Headquarters complex in Manhattan’s Turtle Bay neighborhood. My daughter—because the UN is in view, I will call her Olga Maximovna—waves at the boat. Who knows if anyone waves back. But I tell her that the skipper, no doubt bearded and well-seasoned by the salty air, has raised a tin mug of boiled coffee to her, in kind. And like clock work, as we’re just about at the 34th Street landing—and NYU’s Langone Medical Center—the ferry must give way to the good ship Red Hook, the Department of Environmental Protection’s newly commissioned sludge vessel, dedicated to transporting over two million gallons of river sludge per day—but to where? “To Who Knows Where, Olya,” I tell Olga Maximovna, addressing my daughter in the affectionate diminutive.

We take the ferry to Langone’s Rusk Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine, which is literally right across the river from where we live, for Olga Maximovna’s physical therapy sessions. But I tell her that one day, when all the therapy is finished and she can walk all by herself, we will take this same ferry to 34th Street and walk up, in the opposite direction, to the United Nations, and take the tour. After all, the ferry isn’t just for going to see the doctor. “And this time, Olya, Mommy will join us!” I always tell her how much her mother admires the design of the building—the so-called International style and it’s charmingly dated interior--even the tin ashtrays scattered throughout the facility from the cafeterias to the General Assembly Hall, where, in 1960, then Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe on his desk in response to a speech critical of the Soviet Union (not that it didn’t deserve it), and probably rattling more than a few ashtrays in the bargain. But I add that she’s got to hurry and finish with her therapy for good, because they’re renovating the whole complex, and I’m sure the ashtrays were already the first to go. Her mother is even wistful about the ashtrays. So am I. “But, ashtrays or not, you, Olga Maximovna, must bang your shoe, one you just walked through the door wearing, in the General Assembly room.” I address my daughter formally to underscore the significance I assign to this objective.

One day while crossing the river to the Manhattan side, I tell Olga Maximovna about the U.N.’s art collection, comprising gifts of goodwill from member countries. There are, among others, the tapestry of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, displayed at the entrance to the Security Council chamber; the Sword into Plowshares statue from Italy; the Japanese Peace Ball, rung but twice a year: on the first day of Spring and on every opening day in September of the annual sessions of the General Assembly; a magnificent stained glass window by Marc Chagall with its many symbols representing love and peace; a pair of Léger murals installed in the General Assembly Hall; and, of course, the Gun Tied in a Knot sculpture out in front of the complex. All these things and more, I tell Olga Maximovna, I want her to see, so she better hurry up with the therapy and learn to walk already.

Another day on the river, I tell Olga Maximovna about my own first trip to the United Nations when I was in junior high school. Then, in 1980, I had to take a bus from Newport, Rhode Island, with my classmates because I didn’t live in Brooklyn yet. I tell her about walking through the halls, seeing the art, and learning about the organization’s history and how, on the way back to Newport, the bus driver, who had been listening to Howard Cosell announce a football game, pulled over to the side of the road and made a serious announcement. Though we were children, he addressed us formally: “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please. They killed John Lennon of The Beatles. John Lennon is dead.” I tell her how he had let the second sentence—“John Lennon is dead”—just hang there so that it would sink into our 12-year-old heads. And how it really didn’t sink in. Maybe we had heard of The Beatles, but we didn’t know John Lennon from Adam. The driver, clearly distraught, shook his head and slapped an overhead luggage compartment in disappointment as he went back to his seat to resume the trip home to Newport. I tell Olga Maximovna that while I was too young to understand the significance that the bus driver had assigned to the death of John Lennon, I did see how sad Madame C—, our French teacher, looked when she heard the news—and how her mouth opened slightly and just stayed that way as she turned to Mr. C—, her husband - but not Monsieur C—, who taught social studies.

Looking upriver on another ferry ride, I tell Olga Maximovna how one year, before I had even met her mother, I had marched up the streets just a few blocks from where she gets her therapy to protest the impending war in Iraq. Thousands and thousands of people were holding signs and shouting in protest against the war as they made their way uptown to the United Nations Headquarters, before being turned away by police. I told her about how cold it was, but how it sometimes felt warmer because of all the people marching side by side, and how, somewhere in the big crowd, her mother was there, too, even though we didn’t know each other then. Nothing so dramatic as Roger LaPorte, the young seminary student who, in 1965, had set himself on fire at the United Nations to protest the Vietnam War—but he didn’t stop the war either. Speaking to Olga Maximovna then, I used the term “self-immolation” rather than “set himself on fire,” figuring that there was less of a chance of the former haunting her young dreams than the latter.

To change the subject, I tell her that the United Nations is located in a neighborhood called Turtle Bay, but that there are no turtles there. It was named that in the 17th century because it was a safe place to land and to build ships. Maybe there were turtles there back then, but it is no longer a safe place for them to lay their eggs.

During the Civil War, I tell Olga Maximovna, after the first Conscription Act was passed, the Army set up an enrollment center there, and men had to sign up to go to fight their brothers. On July 13, 1863, an angry mob burned the office to the ground and rioted all through Turtle Bay, destroying entire blocks—maybe that’s when the turtles had left. The riots went on for three days before troops managed to put down the mob, which had burned and looted much of the city. I assure Olga Maximovna that her mother and father had only chanted slogans as we marched through Turtle Bay about 150 years later.

On still another ferry ride, I tell Olga Maximovna about how Muammar Gaddafi, who they had killed just the day before, once tried to pitch his tent on the grounds of the United Nations, just blocks from where she gets her therapy, but they wouldn’t let him. They wouldn’t let him put it up in Central Park either, or in New Jersey, even. So he had to rent property outside the city from Donald Trump. He always slept in that tent, except, apparently, one night in 1986 when Ronald Reagan bombed his compound in Tripoli. Despite plans by Oliver North to lure Ghaddafi into the compound on the night of the bombing, he wasn’t there. Someone had tipped him off. So they only ended up killing his daughter instead (I regretted telling Olga Maximovna this last detail. Just a year earlier, Nancy Reagan had given a mosaic to the United Nations to celebrate the organization's 40th anniversary. The Golden Rule mosaic was based on a painting by Norman Rockwell. Depicting people of all races, religion, and creeds, the mosaic tells everyone “to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

I go on to tell Olga Maximovna, the murky waters so gray and thick as to appear like the ferry is cutting through something solid, about how in another military operation, President Obama had killed Osama Bin Laden, though unlike Ronald Reagan, he didn’t bomb his compound, instead using specially trained men to sneak into his house and shoot him. That night, everyone in New York was out in the streets celebrating the killing of the man who had ordered that two airplanes be crashed into the World Trade Center (For context, I gestured downriver to the empty piece of the skyline where the Twin Towers once stood before the two planes had crashed into them.). That is, everyone except us. That night, I was struggling to feed Olga Maximovna while her mother was sleeping in the bedroom, herself exhausted from an earlier failed feeding. Still, had the circumstances been different, I’m sure we wouldn’t have joined in the party. “It’s a strange thing to cheer about, don’t you think, Olya?” I ask my skinny, red-haired daughter. It’s not like it made the river any safer for a little girl to go to physical therapy.

Even just a few weeks ago at 34th Street landing while waiting for the ferry to take us back across to the Brooklyn side, I saw that on our part of the East River there was a small Coast Guard boat with a mounted machine gun pointed in our direction, bobbing gently in the wake of the good sludge ship Red Hook. A machine gun pointed in the direction of little Olga Maximovna and the hospital she rides a ferry to twice a week for help learning to walk. Thankfully, she was napping, exhausted from a tough session.

This year’s General Assembly meeting started at the United Nations only this morning. They must have rung the Japanese Peace Bell just a few hours ago, I wonder aloud to the sleeping Olga Maximovna if the tug boat skipper had heard it sounding over the river as he made his way past Turtle Bay, pulling a barge full of who knows what to who knows where among the river folk.

Kevin Kinsella is a writer and critic. Most recently his work has appeared in/on The Believer magazine and Bomb magazine's Web site. He is the translator (from Russian) of Sasha Chernyi's "Poems from Children's Island" (Lightful Press) and Osip Mandelshtam's "Tristia" (Green Integer).

“Feed me some vocab,” I whispered.

He started, turned to look at me. Blue eyes.

“Vocabulary,” I said.

“There’s no more port wine left,” he whispered back.

I looked at him.

“Port, left,” he said, looking down at his left hand, palm up. “Starboard, right.” His right hand held an invisible plate next to the first.

“I’m really good at physical stuff,” I said. “Work. I mean, farms. And sports.” I gestured over his palms, indicating winds and oceans and the muscle memory it took to move safely through both. “I learn fast.”

I left orientation early to make an apartment interview in Brooklyn. My brother was moving to the city in a week. The apartment had bars on the windows, but the sublettee had cat-eye glasses and a tiny ponytail.

“Jessie,” she said with one downward handshake. She apologized that her roommates weren’t home but assured me they were the greatest, bestest friends from art school in the south. I am from Kentucky. Her voice rang with sensible but persistent joy, and really, my only responsibility was to ensure the place wasn’t a crack den.

“Above and beyond,” I said, reaching for the deposit.

A week later my family arrived to shuttle their second child from landlocked horse farm to concrete island. My mom and I stood outside my Park Slope apartment, the base camp, loading the Subaru with boxes. She was taking pictures because she believes her children will find home here. A memorialized beginning supplies faith in what follows; you insist it is, in fact, a beginning. I was posing on the sidewalk when the guy, the sailor, Mr. Vocabulary, exited the building directly across the street. He mounted a red vintage motorcycle, kicked it into gear, and drove past us, uphill, into the morning.

“Oh my God,” I said.

Right after orientation, I had emailed my new boss to apologize for the tardy arrival. He had replied, saying all fine, but how much sailing experience do you actually have? We struck a deal involving the company’s adult sail camp and blitzkrieg training. I bought a book and a length of practice rope. I read the book and started calling the rope ‘line.’ Class started the Saturday after the Subaru’s departure. My sailor was my instructor.

“You’ll never guess,” I said. “Red motorcycle, 8 AM, Tuesday, Twelfth Street?”

“My girlfriend lives there,” he said toward the boathouse. He followed his voice inside and deep into a tide book

To his triangle back, I said softly, “I live there.”

On the water, somewhere around the cross-town canyon of 42nd Street, he taught me the choreography of the bowline with a rhyme about rabbits. Lessons and landmarks disappeared. We swapped the basic details, then stories. We echoed each other. We both had studied photography; he had taken it much further and was completing an MFA. Both our mothers were forgiving Catholics who had shopped for our school clothes at Goodwill. For a glossy magazine, he had photographed the southern horse show circuit.

“Oh, my brother just moved in with some southern artist types,” I said. “Shitty block, very happy people.”

“Where?” he said.

“Off the G,” I said. “Gates.”

He looked at me like he had during vocabulary lessons.

“Where exactly?”

“Oh, a good walk, Gates-and-something,” I said. The sun filled everything. The wind moved us toward the Statue of Liberty.

“Did he take Jessie’s room?”
“What?” I said. “Jessie Sears?” She had such a tiny ponytail.

He laughed the way you do when a miracle shakes your shoulders. “Chris,” he said. “Your brother, Chris. He lives in my house. Your brother is Chris.” I wanted to hold his grin in my hands. I or that girlfriend, one of us was sunk.

On charters for the forty-two foot Beneteau, there is a captain and a mate. When you work a sail, you captain or you mate that sail. My boss paired my sailor and I together for a few real jobs, trial runs. After that, when Mr. Vocab agreed to captain, he called to see if I wanted to mate. Yes, sure, absolutely. We captained and mated all summer.

Late June is proposal season, so every sunset job is a guy with a diamond and a woman with ready hands. The breathless couples invited us to weddings, included us in their engagements photos, confided the Statue of Liberty was their self-imposed deadline, asked us if everyone did this, left us in the cockpit while they made out on the bow, left us with the last of their champagne so we could toast the night after we docked. They all wanted to believe we were together. An older couple even assured us we would have kind, beautiful children. Blue eyes! I wanted to shout.

Aside from sharing his motorcycle downtown for tacos, we still hadn’t touched each other when we stole the dinghy for a midnight tour of the Jersey coast. And still not when we drove two hours upstate to buy orchard apples in the rain. I had memorialized our beginning, though, and maybe this was the wrong time, but this was definitely the start of something, meant for some time.

When I returned to Kentucky for Christmas, he was driving cross-country. He stopped for a night. Finally, finally. One night would turn to three. As we settled beneath the blankets, I imagined my mother in the morning, with a grin of conspiracy, whisking pancakes, something she did not do for other boyfriends.

Some six hours later, sooner than I imagined, she shouted, “Kate?” Then, immediately panicking, “Kate?”

“Oh boy,” I said into his chest.

“Chris?” she called. “Kate? Chris?” She was near the top of her register.

“Okay, okay,” I said, pulling on yesterday’s clothes.

I arrived to the kitchen as my brother streaked through, literally, with a soup pot full of water. The water sloshed onto his boxers. The back yard billowed black smoke.

Mom rushed after him, extending two saucepans awkwardly in front of her. “The compost was frozen shut. I dumped the fireplace ashes in the trashcan.” She shouldered open the storm door. “Leaves inside. It was leaning against the shed.”

The shed was, indeed, in flames. My bedmate appeared.

“What’s going on up here?” he said.

“Mom lit the shed on fire. Apparently the hose is frozen.” I revved, reached for the decorative tin pail above the fridge. As I filled the pail in the tub upstairs, I heard him opening and closing cabinets below. When I exited the backdoor with my full bucket, I was following him across the yard. Thinking he had nothing to offer, I scooted in front and pitched my water onto the almost-under-control flames. He sprayed something from a red cylinder until the something and the flames died completely. A fire extinguisher.

“Melinda,” he said, handing the extinguisher to my mom. “You’ll want to get that recharged.”

“Where did you get that?” I said. My heart awoke all over again.

“Always under the sink.”

My brother rolled his eyes. My mom beamed exactly like I had imagined. We were half-clothed around a melted trashcan, breaking the grass’s frost in borrowed shoes. I wanted to high-five the clouds.

Back in New York, in our winter lives, things were not the same. Things were horrible. We spent months in an indecisive dance. He was moving in the summer, at the completion of his MFA, and we had a hard time talking when there wasn’t a physical task to talk around and through. We had communicated in lessons and word games and stories of miraculous similarity. In the sloppy cold, walking to an unremarkable movie, how were we to believe where—or whether— we were going? We were at the stage that takes work, and we were overbundled in unflattering coats.

When the cold broke, our friendship—much less any sort of relationship—was a mess, but he asked me to sail with him, the first sail of the season. The charter was two middle-aged French women who didn’t speak a lick of English or boats. The winds were fifty miles an hour. The Beneteau would never tip completely, but the French women wanted to float lazy-river style, so we scrabbled to keep the boat from heeling deep into the Hudson.

“You’re wrapping the wrong way,” he said over the jib’s luffing.

“Yeah, yeah, okay.” I snapped the sheet to wrap clockwise.

The poor women could only understand the tone of our voices, which said something was capsizing. Not you, us, I wanted to tell them.

“It’s really fine,” he said to the two women, who had moved near the life vests. “Just wind,” he waved his hand in the air. “Wind.”

“Remember stealing the dinghy?” I said.

“I steal that dinghy like it’s my job,” he countered.

I persevered. “Do you remember how we met? Do you remember exactly?”

“You took a sailing lesson.” He lunged into trimming the main.

We finished the tack. The French women hugged each other. Instead of hanging behind him on a shroud, like usual, I joined him at the wheel. We bounced over wake. Steadying myself, I reminded him of the typed orientation packets and my frazzled rush down the dock. The sound of the fenders against the wall, my bad haircut, the springtime smell of wet polyurethane. I reminded him there’s no more port wine left. My litany of details was a plea, next time, to risk. At the very least, pay attention. Two people only get one beginning.

Kate grew up in Kentucky and now lives in Brooklyn. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Press and The Accidental Extremist.

Sometimes I sleep on a second-floor terrace just one story above the Brighton Beach boardwalk, where my friend Susan, her parents, two corpulent brothers, and a German Shepherd squeeze into a two bedroom apartment. The dining alcove has been converted into her “bedroom,” but we much prefer bunking out on her tiny terrace, the closest we will come to camping in the mountains—or anywhere. We listen to the pummeling waves after we run out of conversation around 3 A.M., and we don’t mind when the bright sunshine wakes us a few hours later.

Time for the beach! Towel to towel, blanket to blanket, we etch out our patch of sand, lathering ourselves with baby oil because no one yet warns about UV rays and Ozone holes. We swim out just a bit farther than our courage allows, convinced that the whistle-blowing lifeguards will never spot any sharks in these waters, just as we believe jellyfish have migrated south to Florida.

I don’t realize how fortunate I am to live so close to the beach, unlike millions of sweating Americans in land-locked states like Iowa who never see an ocean let alone walk to one. “Lazy,” my mother reprimands when I ask for carfare to ride the bus less than a mile to the ocean. And my accountant father teaches me a short lesson in finance: “If you save fifteen cents on the bus, you can buy a knish for lunch.”

I do, sometimes two, at Mrs. Stahl’s, where the salt air mingles with the sweetness of cherry cheese. Across the street looms Brighton Beach Baths, a private pool club where I believe the idle rich hobnob. I don’t yet know that real jet setters are sunbathing topless on the Côte d’Azur—and not playing gin rummy for ten cents a game or lounging around an over chlorinated cement-decked pool where toes don’t get sullied in the sand.

We never cross Ocean Parkway, the boulevard some compare, with une peu d’imagination, to the Champs Elysees. Ocean Parkway divides the familiarity of Brighton Beach with the uncertain terrain of Coney Island. Only once a year on my summer birthday, my Orthodox grandmother gives my older brother five dollars and says, “Spend the day together in Coney Island.” Six feet tall, he is my escort and protector. Five dollars buys more giddying rides than we can handle, with money left over for lunch at Nathan’s—someplace my kosher grandmother would never enter.

I don’t go to camp when the beach is near enough that interlopers park in front of our house and trudge their chairs and umbrellas a mile to nirvana. Weekdays are quieter, after my father rides a stifling D train for an hour to work in what’s now called Tribeca. Our camp is the street. The gutter, actually. My brothers’ friends put mesh goal posts on either end of East 7th Street, setting up a tar hockey field. When the occasional car beeps its way through, the pick-up teams remove the goal posts until the coast is clear.

Every Tuesday night we walk to Shore Parkway, where long ago, it seems, we sledded down Suicide Hill, aptly named because if you don’t steer your sled correctly you’d end up in the service road of the parkway. We climb the ramp on the overpass above the highway. The noise of cars whizzing behind us fades when the weekly fireworks explode from a barge in Lower New York Bay. Our entire neighborhood—Italians and Jews, immigrants and holocaust survivors, first generation professionals and 1950’s housewives, children who have never been west of New Jersey—cluster above the highway for a partial, but adequate, view. The fireworks are rudimentary compared to today’s rock and celebrity-studded celebrations. Yet we all harmonize a collective “Oooooh!” and “Ahhhhh!” to exult every boom.

If there is a breeze anywhere in this borough, it’s atop this highway. After the last blast, we descend slowly. If our behavior has been worthy this past week, our parents might reward us with chocolate ices on the way home. It will give us all a few more minutes outside…before meandering reluctantly back to our stuffy houses.

A few years ago, I went to the New York Historical Society library to find out who had lived on Pearl Street a century ago as the search for the missing couple sent me back in time and forward in geography. Fortunately the New-York Directory of 1812 has a cross reference so you can look up the street and then find the people who lived there. There were two who caught my attention, James Armory, whip maker at 244 Pearl Street, and Sarah Wood, bonnet maker, at 357 Pearl Street. I wondered if they had known each other and, more importantly, had they fallen in love. I think it was the opposite nature of their professions, one, the maker of whips, the other of bonnets, that made a romance seem so exciting.

Over the years I would think about Mr. Armory and Ms. Wood often, not as much as the missing couple but a lot. I decided to find out more about them and what they made. I tried researching whip makers on the Internet because I wanted to know what Mr. Armory’s whips and shop would have looked like. Too many Western style whips came up. When I emailed my questions to a prominent whip maker, he wrote, “Buy my book” which I thought was rather harsh. I was not sure if his book would have addressed the matter of East Coast whips.

It turns out that there was a town in the east called “Whip City,” aka Westfield, Massachusetts, because most of the town's residents in the late l9th century worked in the whip industry. There is one factory left but the factory was closed for a few days. I could not wait to find out about east coast whips so I went back to the Historical Society Library, so calming with the red carpet, the white Ionic columns, and the milk glass, lamp shades. Joseph, the librarian, knew exactly where to find a clue --- The Arts and Crafts in New York l800 -04 by Rita S. Gottesman published in 1965. The late Ms. Gottesman, who also wrote two earlier volumes, was a hero. She reprinted all kinds of ads, under headings such as: Clocks and Watches, Fashion and Beauty, even Balloons. There, in the index, was “whip makers.” On the whip maker page was Mr. Armory.

The ad reprinted from The New-York Gazette, January 1, 1800-1804, for Mr. Armory read: “…He has on hand an extensive assortment of ready made horse whips of every description….In addition...he has entered into….neat double and single barrel Guns ….an elegant assortment of sword dart canes…a few Bird nets... “ Then another of his ads went on about having 2000 bundles of rattan for plaiting whips.

When I showed Joseph, the librarian, my findings, he said, “You know, whips were not just for horses. There were slaves then.”

While reading the 1812 Gazette to get the best sense of Mr. Armory and Ms Wood’s world on Pearl Street, I saw many advertisements for boys: “For sale, a Negro Boy, 14 years of age….he is smart and active. Apply 51 South Street.” Another was “.…about l6, apply corner of Broad & Beaver Streets.” There was an ad for a wench.

I became swept away reading about Malaga Raisins, Spermacetti Oil, and Spy Glaffes [they still used “f” for “s” back then] “A very handfome affortment, confifting of Day and Night, Adromatic, Camp, and Perfpective Glaffes….Fuited to the pocket. For Sale at No. 128 Pearl-Street.” And of course, bombazeens and Elephant and Sea-Horse Teeth…” I did not find advertisements for Sarah Wood and her bonnets but I did see that “S.Frifkney – Milliner… Has juft received by the Fair American from London, a very elegant affortment of made and unmade MILLINERY confiffting of all the moft fafhionable Caps, Cloaks, straw and velvet Bonnets ---like wife leather girdles….” So that gave a sense of the millinery world.

Pearl Street, and the surrounding streets, in those days was quite a hub of commerce. It is entirely likely that Mr. Armory and Miss Wood had been in the same spot, either knowingly or unknowingly, on one or on many occasions, buying groceries or Madeira or red lead.

“How are you today, Miss Wood? “

“I am just fine, Mr. Armory.”

“Are you buying oranges, lemons, or citrons, Miss Wood?”

“No, I was considering the deer.”

But all the same, I was sure there had been convergence between them.

And they might have met at the play on June 8 “…performed, for the first time in America…the comedy of THE KISS.”

Ms. Wood may have looked up at Mr. Armory --- when I think about her, she is always wearing a short-waisted muslin dress and a gingham or straw bonnet tied with a ribbon to the side though, if it were the evening, the bonnet might be velvet. I say that she “looked up at” because I sensed that she was shorter than he was and he, being a whip maker --- it seemed he would be tall --- but then there are enforcing types of all sizes. She would have long, eyelashes and he would be wearing a fitted waistcoat. He might have been married though he could have been a confirmed bachelor. But I concluded that, because Miss Wood worked, she may have been alone with little children to care for, or she lived with a sister. But as I was figuring this out, I came upon another advertisement:

“NOW OR NEVER. Just arrived, a female ELEPHANT, to be SEEN at No 324 Bway near the head of Pearl-street from Thurs to Sat. Those who wish to gratify their curiosity by viewing this wonderful animal, will do well to call previous to that time, as it will positively be removed the next morning. Perhaps the present generation may never have an opportunity of seeing an Elephant again…”

That is where they met, I concluded. They were both starring at the Elephant. Though my mind would change

on my next trip to Pearl Street. Then, of course, other things would happen.

[To be continued…]

___

Toni Schlesinger is a New York-based author, journalist, fiction writer, and theater artist who is writing the non-fiction book, “The Mystery of Pearl Street.” Her “Five Flights Up” book (Princeton Architectural Press) is a collection of her award-wining Village Voice “Shelter” columns about New York. Her most recent original play in which she also performed was “The Palace” (2010) at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. www.tonischlesinger.com

We were speeding south on the New Jersey Turnpike, and it was a sunny day in early June 2004. McAdams, then the director of the New York Audubon Society, had invited my companion, Alexis Rockman, and me to join him, and an ornithologist, Paul Kurlinger, on a survey of black crown night herons at an 80-acre refuge known as Prall’s Island.  

One of three islands wedged into the slender estuary known as Arthur Kill, which winds between western New Jersey and the eastern shore of Staten Island, Prall’s Island had once been a thriving bird sanctuary, boasting healthy populations of nesting egrets and herons. But then a spill in 1990 leaked 567,000 gallons of heating oil into the estuary. With their food supply contaminated, an estimated 700 wading birds had died. Since then, according to McAdams, nesting activity along Arthur Kill had been, at best, erratic.

McAdams gave his name at the security booth of a Conoco Philips-Bayway refinery in Linden, before introducing us to a heavyset communications coordinator, who ushered us down to a dock crowded with towering oil storage tanks.

It struck me as odd that we were embarking on a birding expedition from the headquarters of an oil refinery, especially since the refinery’s previous owner, Exxon, had been responsible for the calamitous 1990 spill. But when I asked McAdams about this, he brushed me off. Of the Conoco folks, he said, “They may be the bad guys, but they’ve been very nice to us. And they always let us use their boat.”

The ride across the Kill usually took ten minutes, but when Conoco’s captain suggested a tour of Prall’s periphery, we were happy to oblige. The Kill was calm, albeit filthy. While McAdams and Kurlinger discussed their plans for counting nests, Alexis, a painter, enthused about our first-hand encounter with what he called “toxic real estate.” Spotting a motorboat with a NYC Department of Parks and Recreation logo, McAdams explained that Prall’s belonged to the parks department, but a 30-year lease gave the Audubon limited access in the name of science and education.

Prall’s Island was originally called Dongan’s Island, after a New York Governor Thomas Dongan, who took office in 1688. Toward the mid-1700’s the island, a former center for cultivating feed for livestock, was renamed Prall’s, in reference either to its former Dutch-born owner, or a prominent Staten Island farmer, according to the Parks’ website. When business in New York harbor boomed more than a century later, Arthur Kills became an industrial hub with more shipping traffic than the Panama Canal. Prall’s Island, by contrast, slipped into neglect.

“What was amazing about Prall’s Island was that so many birds found shelter in the middle of these very, very active waterways,” said McAdams. “But everyone was so busy working that no one paid much attention.”

Proposed for a waste processing plant in 1916, Prall’s briefly assumed center stage in a political battle between the plant’s developer and Staten Island’s residents, according to an excellent book, “The Other Islands of New York City,” by Sharon Seitz and Stuart Miller. Eventually a waste processing plant was proposed elsewhere, and apart from the two World Wars, when Prall’s provided anchor for occasional military ships, it saw little human activity.

In its relative obscurity it become a haven for wading birds until the 1960’s, when the waters of the surrounding Kill became so polluted that, according to Seitz and Miller, the fish and marine life providing the waders’ nourishment could no longer survive.

The birds proved resilient. Shortly after the passing of the Clean Air act in 1972, said McAdams, wildlife conservationists once again began to see birds building nests there. In addition, hundreds of thousands of migrating birds were using Prall’s and its neighboring islands as a seasonal sanctuary. Among the many birds that once called Prall’s island home are the glossy ibis, the snowy egret, the cattle egret, the great egret, the little blue heron, and the black-crowned night heron. Although none of these birds are endangered, this rookery in New York Harbor is considered the most important in the state, according to Seitz and Miller,

As our boat nudged into soggy marshland surrounding this former idyll, Alexis and I jumped off, and immediately sank into shin-deep mud. From the bow of our boat, the captain called, “You guys all set?”

McAdams arranged a time for our pick up. Then the motorboat pulled away, leaving us in its mucky wake.

Taking the lead in our march toward solid ground, Alexis exclaimed, “I love the contradiction of a bird sanctuary in a toxic waste dump,” his gleeful disgust in direct proportion to the distance his feet sank in the dark brown ooze.

“It’s the dirtiest part of New York,” agreed McAdams, gamely, “but that’s kind of a good thing, because there’re no people.”

Due to limited access on Prall’s Island, no trails had ever been cleared there. Alexis climbed up the riverbank into a thicket. Then he reached for my hand. That was when I noticed, to my terrified astonishment, that the thicket was completely overrun with poison ivy.

“I think I mentioned, they have a little poison ivy problem,” said McAdams.

Indeed, earlier that morning we had dressed, according to McAdams’ instructions, in long pants, long sleeved windbreakers, and hiking boots. But somehow in my excitement over what had sounded like an exotic excursion in the out-of-doors, I had ignored the possible degree of the infestation. Poison ivy snaked through every plant in sight, it’s shiny red leaves dangling from every raspberry bush, bramble, tree, and nettle. In order to count nests, McAdams, Kurlinger, Alexis and I would each have to find our own path through the dense underbrush.

The others didn't appear particularly worried, but glancing up and down the shoreline, I felt suddenly lightheaded, all of the alarm bells in my body signaling danger. A horror movie starring poison ivy, as a human predator would probably look like this, I thought. I considered my choices. Waiting offshore in the mud, and having McAdams send the boat around to fetch me when the time came, sounded pathetic and boring. Also, in the company of such enthusiastic naturalists—all men—I was pretty loath to play the role of helpless damsel. So I followed Alexis inland, my body physically catapulting forward, as my mind drifted up to the treetops. From up there, at least, I was relieved to note, the poison ivy looked much smaller.

Prall’s Island is so narrow that, depending on the density of the trees and underbrush, you can sometimes see across to both coasts from the center. Kurlinger suggested that we divide into two groups, the better to maximize our total nest sightings. Sending McAdams and Alexis in one direction, he suggested that I follow him. When Alexis and McAdams disappeared into the underbrush, my heart fluttered erratically. In the canopy of leaves above, birds fluttered and squawked. Kurlinger rattled off their names—woodcocks, egrets, starlings. Whenever he spotted a heron nest I scribbled a notch in my notebook, in the hope of distracting myself. We had counted our 11th nest when it occurred to me that my pen was probably contaminated, and my notebook. The underbrush thickened. “They should make trails,” muttered Kurlinger, yanking apart the young shoots of a gray birch tree, and shimmying in between. Several steps ahead, he called out “PI at eye level.”

PI? I’d never heard it called that, but immediately I saw it, snaking like a cobra from above. With less than a foot of space to edge through sideways, I wondered, did the PI touch my hair? The underbrush was thick with nettles, and thorny vines that kept scratching my legs through my pants. If any of these branches had brushed against poison ivy, I realized, the nasty oils were probably now inside my clothes.

“How allergic are you to this stuff?” Kurlinger asked, as if my terror was finally dawning on him.

“Very.”

“Ever had any shots?”

I nodded. One winter, I told him, long before leaves were even visible, I was walking in the woods, fully dressed in a turtleneck, long pants, winter coat and boots. I caught the worst case of the poison ivy of my life. Having somehow penetrated my layers of winter gear, the nasty little plant had managed to cover my face, neck, chest, and back with a nasty rash of bumps and pustules. The rash spread under my arms, behind my knees, even into my belly button. After a month of itchy hell, it began spreading into my eyes, my mouth, and down my throat. Finally, a doctor agreed to give me a shot of some steroid considered too unhealthy for routine use.

Kurlinger had been listening intently, and for a while all I heard was the snapping of branches and the dull thud of our boots in the leaf litter.

“I see,” he said, finally. “Well. Huh.” Then he told me about someone descended from the original owners—the Dongans—whom he’d invited to Prall’s a week before. Apparently this guy Dongan hadn’t even known how to ID poison ivy. “I guess he’s okay, since he hasn’t called,” mused Kurlinger. “Then again, he doesn’t have my number.”

On several occasions we could hear Alexis and McAdams thrashing toward us. Each time, Kurlinger would instruct them to keep their distance. His motive for dividing us up, he said, had been somewhat selfish. He was hoping they would flush all of the birds in our direction. “You’re a quiet walker,” he told me.

On the forest floor, Kurlinger spotted remnants of a heron’s egg, which he said could have fallen from a nest after hatching. “Of course, it also could have been eaten by a raccoon,” he added. Further along, another shattered eggshell looked even more promising. I imagined a heron chick learning to fly. Kurlinger turned the shell over in his fingers. He believed the chick had hatched, he said. But fledglings also presented easy targets for predators.

There were fewer nesting trees than there had been, he observed, but there were also more nests than he’d seen nearly a decade. Many of the nests were old, but several were also newer, suggesting that our black crown night herons were, at least, attempting a comeback.

At a small clearing, I noticed off to our left, that the sun was much brighter. “Is the coastline through there?” I asked.

It was.

Was there poison ivy along the coastline? I wanted to know.

“Not so much,” he said. “You may have to cross a barrier of the stuff to get there. But on the other side you should be okay.”

I left Kurlinger to his nest counting and made my way toward the light.

“I’ll call out to you if I find any nests,” said Kurlinger.

Of the countless times I’d come into contact with poison ivy, I’d often managed to prevent an outbreak, by washing my hands with soap and warm water. On Prall’s Island, unfortunately, I had no soap, and the fetid water didn’t exactly encourage hand washing. A scallop-edged yellow foam ran along the length of the shoreline. Clusters of small the rocks were covered with black slime. I saw Kurlinger through the trees, more or less alongside of me.

“You think it’s alright to wash your hands in this?”

“If I were you I would. Just don’t lick your fingers after.”

I bent down and dipped my hands in the toxic filth. The only other exposed part of my body--my face--I didn’t dare let near the water.

Kurlinger disappeared toward the island’s interior, and I picked my way quietly past the garbage that littered the shoreline--empty beer cans and plastic bags. Someone called to me from the underbrush—a man, Mike who had been dropped with several others at the far end of the island. My crew had been looking for him. He asked if I wanted to join them. I said thank you, but no.

Eventually Kurlinger called to me. “Just keep heading north,” he said. I didn’t have a compass. I continued in the same direction. The boat with the Parks Department logo droned past at a distance. Not far from the tip of the island, a long wooden beam had washed up along the shore. I decided to take a break and sit down. An old apothecary bottle laid half buried in slime. I fished it out with a stick.

Eventually I heard the sound of a motor. Moments later, our boat captain waved. Alexis, McAdams, and Kurlinger were all clad in bright orange life jackets. All told, they’d counted a minimum of fifteen and a maximum of thirty nests.

Back at the oil refinery, we sat parked in a steamy van, while a Conoco official went to make a phone call. The first sign of sweat activated what I immediately recognized as my body’s response to poison ivy. My skin began to tingle. The tingling began to itch.

I needed to scrub my entire body with warm soapy water as soon as possible. But we weren’t authorized to leave until all of our permits and papers were approved and signed off on. Kurlinger said he needed to go talk to someone. My heart raced. To kill time while we waited, our driver told us a story.

In December 1989, he said, months after the disastrous spill in Valdez, Alaska, Exxon wanted to assess what the response would be if there were a spill along Arthur Kill. “All of us contractors--we had the same response,” said the driver, who declined to give his name on account of his current employment with Conoco. “We said we’d come in with one boat, maybe two, and a couple of men.”

After deeming these responses insufficient, he said, Exxon acknowledged that they were not adequately prepared for a disaster in Arthur Kill. They planned to train eight people a week for a period of about two years, he said. By the end of the first week, he admitted, “I’d learned a few things.” But then, two weeks later, on January 2nd, a spill was reported. So soon after New Years, he said, it was difficult to find contractors willing to work, making response even slower than it would have been otherwise. “I was one of the people who showed up,” he said.

The air was cooler than the water, he said, so there was fog everywhere, making visibility extremely low. When he finally saw the water, he said, he was shocked to discover that it was completely green. He described blindly motoring through the water, trying to locate the source of the leak. Then he spotted a geyser, rising like a fountain about three feet above the water. He said he and his men began skimming. “We skimmed and skimmed for days,” he said, in accordance with Exxon’s recent—but limited--training. “Turns out, oil has a pretty thin surface,” he said. “We skimmed about 6 inches deep,” then the water looked clear.

When Kurlinger returned, the driver escorted us to our car. I ran into a bathroom reserved for truckers, and scoured my face and hands with warm water and apricot scrub. The following day, after repeated showers and scrubbing, a dermatologist administered a steroid shot in my arm, in addition to prescribing a topical foam and a pill, a powerful antihistamine the better to stave off a reaction.

Now six years later, it occurs to me that my skin fared much better than the nesting herons on Prall’s island. In the spring of 2007, an infestation of Asian longhorn beetles forced Parks to reduce nesting trees on the island to their stem, according to a 2009 Audubon survey. McAdams is now an associate director of philanthropy at the New York Conservancy, because, as he said recently, “I learned at the Audubon that money was a big limiting factor. According to Susan Elbin, an ornithologist, and currently the NYC Audubon’s director of conservation, some 30,000 gray birch trees were chopped down. “Then they chipped them. Then they burned the chips,” she said.

As if this were not trouble enough, the island has since become rife with nest predators such as red-tailed hawks and raccoons she said. Although the future still holds promise for herons seeking to raise their young on Prall’s Island, their projected presence depends on several key factors, according to Ms. Elbin. “One big question mark is what will happen when the Fresh Kills Park gets up and running,” she said, referring to the 2,200 urban park scheduled to open in the next year down the channel from Arthur Kill. Predators present a second problem. “But even if you get them off,” she said, “there’s still oil embedded in the sediment, which needs to get covered over.”

Yet Susan remains optimistic. “At one time the islands in Arthur Kill were among the most productive in the whole harbor heron system,” she said. “We have great hopes of attracting birds back. We want Prall’s Island once again to be a thriving colony.”

Her words reminded me of a particular moment in my 2004 visit that I will always cherish. I had just rinsed the mud from the apothecary bottle I’d found in the Kills, when I accidentally touched my pants. Certain the fabric was contaminated with poison ivy, I waded in a little deeper into the mud to rinse my hands.

That was when I saw the birds—hundreds of them—egrets, ibises, and herons. McAdams, Alexis and Kurlinger—or maybe Mike’s group—had flushed them out. Gazing up at the sky, I watched the birds cross paths with airplanes taking off from Newark Airport. I’d gotten lost. I didn’t care. For that moment, at least, all the risks I’d taken were worth it.

Dorothy Spears is a New York-based writer and arts journalist. Her anthology, Flight Patterns: A Century of Stories About Flying, was published last year by Open City Books.

In “Here is New York” E.B. White described three New Yorks: one for those who were born here, one for those who commute here, and one for those who moved here seeking something. I live in the first one and my students in the third. The third, he wrote, is the best: the city as “final destination.” I may give the city “continuity,” but they give it “passion.” I accept its idiosyncrasies as natural, but they see it with “fresh eyes.” Sometimes, though, walking over the bridge can make me feel like both kinds of New Yorkers at once.

To walk over the bridge is to pass faux lanterns, to glimpse rough waters underneath your feet, to follow the weaving path of bolts that look like they were hammered in by hand. On the other side is aspirational Manhattan: corporate headquarters greet you as you step onto concrete. Over the winter the walk was blustery and cold. Hands in pockets, I would hunch against the wind. The bridge fit into this setting: steel gray, pale stone, the water below dark and fierce. Its arches reach up to the sky like trees, but foreshadow the buildings to come. They form two narrow doorways to the city ahead, pointing upward and dangerously high and sharp. A metaphor.

I walked rain or shine. Once I walked across with my umbrella until I realized it wasn’t really raining at all. I noticed that the bridge’s beams were really a pinkish beige like sea shells and it was the water that looked like steel. I put away my umbrella and was overwhelmed with silvery sky, wide, open vistas of air and space. Mid-semester, slumped in their seats, my students were tired of unifying imagery and hot words and endings-that-brought-their-beginnings-to-a-new-place. I told them about walking over the bridge that morning and the awe of the open sky above. “Look up!” I told them. “Look for the big picture. Bring some blue sky into your writing.” I’ll say it again.

They do look. One student wrote that in his essays White used the passing of time in nature to illuminate the passing of generations. A dragonfly still hovers over the rowboat White shares with his son, and he had once shared with his father, in “Once More to the Lake,” so that “there had been no years.” Father and son fish together, but White is not sure who is holding the rod: which father? Which son? White’s city was before me, the same and different, old and new. Who is holding this pen?

Today, the bridge exceeds any lifespan. At 125 years, it is older than my students, older than me, older than White. There will be other students, other eyes. White had nature to show how change happens –to us, through us, despite us. We New Yorkers have a bridge: a mountain of stone rooted in earth and directing our eyes upward, a web of steel reaching backwards and forwards. Right now there is another solid blue, cloudless sky over the bridge. Go look.

Victoria Olsen teaches expository writing at New York University.

First, though, one has to venture to the more wind-swept precincts of Manhattan, on the far West Side, toward the great glass Oz of the convention center. And then traverse acres of lobby–the building is composed largely of lobbies, it seems, upstairs lobbies and downstairs lobbies and upper upstairs lobbies–and you see that without any strain at all the center is also housing the annual boat show, where patrons may ogle tons of fiberglass surrounding engines that will effortlessly suck up a year’s pay in petrol and just as quickly release it as greenhouse gas. Sort of a two-fer.

When finally you locate the ticket windows assigned to relieving your pocket of seventeen dollars (for the privilege of viewing the wares of other companies whose interest is to similarly lighten your load), your brain might flash you an image of Sam’s Club. It, too, is a commercial enterprise that makes you pay them in order to be able to pay them. A singularly late-twentieth-century concept.

Lest you stand there dumbstruck by the possibilities of this notion, here comes a tide of leather-clad humanity to sweep you down the stairs and into the carpeted hall that for one weekend becomes a temple dedicated to the worship of internal combustion, in all its two-wheeled manifestations. And there are many, many.

The staff that belongs to the machines only recently unloaded from the semis parked end to end up 35th Street and down Twelfth Avenue look on with worried smiles as men and women throw legs over shining gas tanks and pull up 490 pounds of dry weight to balance it precariously between two feet. One dropped bike can mean a broken side mirror or a cracked fairing, and everything translates quickly into numbers. This is surely evidenced by the endless rows of tables full of aftermarket parts from small companies, clip-on handlebars and exhaust systems and foot pegs, saddlebags and custom seats (raising the question of why Moto Guzzi doesn’t just affix comfortable seats to their products in the first place).

One would have liked to see what Breughel would have done with the three fellows sitting by the refreshment carts, together yet alone in their silence, dourly dispatching soft pretzels and Cokes as if they were peasant reivers at lunchtime, downing their warm ale and cold mutton.

Around the corner from them one finds a contemporary example of the painter’s art, an airbrushed scene from Easy Rider, over which hover the disembodied faces of Che, Hendrix, and Jim Morrison. The wondering viewer can tease out only one possible theme: early, violent death.

Such is exuberantly celebrated in other items for sale: miles of patches showing skeletons riding motorcycles or skulls with flags, proclaiming adherence to either American nationalism or the credo of Ride Fast, Die Young; perhaps they are the same thing. The uneasy thoughts raised here are quelled farther down the aisles, where one encounters pleasantries like massaging insoles, ear plugs, wheel chocks, jackets, helmets, boots, and gloves, sunglasses, cleaning products, shining products, insurance, custom paint jobs, tires, bumper stickers, jewelry. The longing eyes of those manning the tables follow the streams of people who wander past, nearly empty plastic shopping sacks flapping from their hands. (These provided courtesy of Progressive, #1 in Motorcycle Insurance, to all comers at the entrance.) By the end, hundreds of bags will leave the show containing only glossy brochures of the 2008 model lines of the major manufacturers, no doubt because that seventeen dollars was a serious hit on the finances of many motorcyclists, who are squarely located in what was once called the working class. They have come here to dream, and dreams are free. As are brochures.

Those to whom “free” is not a concern, however, might be found at the BMW display. This is good, since a K 1200 R sportbike costs as much as many new cars. (Still, these are liberals, one feels certain; the conservatives buy American iron, and are thus to be found walking among the Harleys and Victorys.) Stand and watch a moment: like metal filings to a magnet, the literally well-heeled (see those handsome Italian loafers!) gravitate to the impressive and rugged German engineering, the bikes with the reputation for attracting riders who really ride; BMW Motorrad has cornered the market on long-distance touring and those specialists who think it amusing to ride hundreds of miles in a day, and through the night, during the aptly named Iron Butt Rally. BMW’s large, one almost wants to say gigantic, or maybe wide as a truck, enduro bike is the choice of those who dream of crossing Tibet on two wheels, or winning the Paris-Dakar.

This being the world, or a world within the world, things soon appear to fracture. The colors refracted from the crystal of a unified idea of “motorcycling” dance alone. The sensual Italian Ducatis draw to them the thrill- and the status-seeker; technology majors stare at the cutaway of a Buell, whose gas tank is not actually where you think, in that bubble that touches your stomach as you lean down and lean over to take a curve; it’s still there, but now subtly translucent plastic, as if to say “fooled ya,” and the gas is in the frame.

The factions here, as in all our worlds, are really political, financial, finally social, and in this, perhaps, ultimately biological. Here on the floor of the Javits Center is represented the tribal history of man.

Ten years ago the show was half this size, and half this complexity. Now there are so many things to buy, so many things to understand about what we build and why.

The select few have become the overwhelming many. In this, the motorcycle show reflects what is beginning to scare the visitor: a planet teeming with too many of us, and too much of the stuff we need to buy in order to differentiate ourselves because we sense we are about to disappear into the squeezing hordes. When spring does arrive, we will go out for a ride, and we will be too numerous to feel our solitariness, that which draws us together again. And next January, the motorcycle show will be bigger than ever.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson’s first book, The Perfect Vehicle, was about motorcycles. She never managed to actually live in Manhattan: she only got to look at it from both sides, Hoboken and Brooklyn, before decamping to upstate.

Two friends and I went in at about 1 am. There was no one at the door, and the place was nearly empty. The boat swayed slightly, dark and dank inside. I wandered around at a slower than usual pace, winding through the ship’s many rooms. There were only a handful of other people. They must have come aboard the same time we did, given that we, for a time, were all clustered by the bathroom. I lost track of my friends among huge rooms filled mainly with machinery, narrow passageways dotted by portholes, and then found them again and again, there, in other rooms and levels, and finally on the tin-floored bottom, smooth with wear over the years.

We followed the voices, lured down by the muted then louder sounds. At first I thought the night had yet to start, that more people would come, but I could feel the emptiness of the vessel, and knew something was somehow off.

We wound our way down, circled the floor. Idiotic voices repeated banalities, echoing what one would expect to hear on a flight, maybe tapered to a boat’s experience.

“So enjoy the cruise. Anything we can do for you…” a female’s voice bounced and landed dead in the metal.

“Welcome, welcome,” a male voice joined.

I gazed at the ground I was covering, saw “STAPLE” embossed there, and wondered how old the boat was. I temporarily lost track of what was occurring. When I noticed again, the female’s voice was repeating the same inane statement about the cruise.

I walked directly up to where they were gathered, seven or eight of them bunched together in the DJ area. “Does anyone have any music?” one of them asked over a mic.

I stepped up, and climbed around a pole. “I do.” I announced, and advanced.

Some kept intoning into microphones, pleased to hear the sound of their own voices.

“And do you know the third chorus to the Messiah?” one kid asked me.

“You guys are really asking for a lot, you know that?” I joked, as I eased the heave of my bag onto a nearby chair and began digging through it for my MP3 player. It took a while for me to figure out the wiring.

“Do you guys know this board?” I asked, flicking switches, pressing buttons.

Someone offered to help, and my two friends went off to get beer. I put on the first song, which eventually worked.

A blond, be-backpacked kid looked at me with recognition. “It’s The Cramps!” he noted, and I was glad he knew it.

Further glee came from the prototypical hip-hop kid intoning the chorus after it was sung: ‘I need a new kind of kick’, he repeated, facing offstage, although all of us were gathered upon it.

“Nice.” said the guy to my right, nodding. He perused through my collection of music, and selected Raw Power.

The scene began to loosen, we all realized we were in cahoots, it was alright, we shared a station and a source.

Below the sound board, there was a plastic container with a few stray LPs inside. I began to look through the records, slightly limp with river air, the covers extra heavy and humidity-filled. I settled on Judy Garland’s “Christmas Hits” and wondered if I could, on the fly, figure out how to transfer to the turntable. I eyed the switches and cords, and began to really consider about the implications.

This place was amazing. Was it really a sort of open, actual vessel for the taking? Could it be this easy to walk in, plug in, and begin a party? Even though, after my friends left to get beer, I knew no one there, there was still a sense of genuine camaraderie, of worthwhile collaboration. This held great promise. This was what this city should be, and, evidently, could be. Within minutes I was having wild visions of secret good times without a chaperone or supervisor.

Then we were busted.

A slightly nervous-looking guy came up to our little knot of revelry. “Did you rent this space out?” He asked us.

We were all quiet for a moment.

“No.” admitted one of the trendy Euro girls, who had previously been dancing in small circles to an Elvis song.

“You can’t just come on here. This is a rental-only space.”

“It is?” asked the blond kid.

“Yes. Only booked events are allowed in here.”

”Oh,” I spoke up. “I had no idea.”

“And you can’t smoke on the boat.” He said to me.

The group began to shift, disperse.

“Is this anyone’s record?” He asked, peering at Judy Garland on the turntable.

“Yours,” I said, approaching to retrieve my iPod. He seemed satisfied that we would vacate, and turned to leave.

“Don’t listen to him. You keep smoking.” One of the hip-hop guys said to me, nodding.

As we filed out of the boat, we thanked each other. It was, technically, as a matter of fact, Independence Day, and for a few minutes it had been true independence in action.

It was fun while it lasted. No, it was great while it lasted. Anarchy, pure and driven like hope. The idea that if you’re lucky enough to wander onto an equipped boat in the middle of Manhattan and savvy enough to figure out how to make it work, and can maintain good will, there a good time is for you. Even if only for three songs.

The Japanese of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had a word, ukiyo, for the “floating world” of courtesans, actors, rich merchants and their spoiled sons and daughters who made up the town’s most visible element. Manhattan is a floating world, too: buoyant as balsa, heavy as granite. The reason skyscrapers developed so readily on this spit of earth, I once heard, is that its foundation stone was strong enough to take any amount of drilling. You can still bruise your ego against Manhattan’s rocky cheek. Like other island states, Crete, Rhodes, Venice, or Hong Kong, it has a brash, arrogant energy far disproportionate to its size, and an uneasiness about domination by larger forces which it always tries to conceal.

Lewis Mumford has written tenderly about the approach to Manhattan from the water: “Those wonderful long ferry rides! Alas for the later generation that cannot guess how they opened the city up, or how the change of pace and place, from swift to slow, from land to water, had a specially stimulating effect upon the mind.”

Myself, I first began coming to Manhattan on foot from Brooklyn. My whole family would walk across the Williamsburg Bridge at sundown on a Saturday night, 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 such observant Jews; but, living in a Hasidic area, they adapted somewhat to their neighbor’s customs. Later, I took to walking across the bridge myself, a poeticizing adolescent mesmerized by motes in air. These motes, which only I could see, thanks to my precocious genius, floating before the solid brick housing projects that already walled off the Lower East Side’s edge from the river’s beauty, represented to me the possibility of a transcendent escape from the ghetto and the manure pile I took to be my life. Not motes but money, I came to see later, was the ticket out.

The look of Manhattan, its aesthetic destiny, was sealed in 1811 with the approval of the grid plan. This arrangement set forth “a basis for the orderly sale and development of land in Manhattan between 14th Street and Washington Heights by establishing a rectangular grid of streets and property lines without regard to topography,” notes The Encyclopedia of New York City. The prevailing wisdom today among planners and architects is that it is important to honor the land’s contours, which just goes to show how visionary New York’s city fathers were. They created an “intentional city,” like St. Petersburg, a “madly rational scheme imposed on nature.” Convinced that simple rectangular houses and lots were best, the commisioners avoided the addition of “circles, ovals, and other features” popular in European capitals, adds the encylopediast. The city fathers loved the ninety-degree angle, the forthright, manly plod of the rectangle extended indefinitely. They would have gridded the stars if given a chance.

The Manhattan grid is a mighty device, existential metaphor, Procrustean bed, call it what you will, a thing impossible to overpraise. I realize it is fashionable in left-wing academic circles to speak of the grid disparagingly as merely a capitalist scheme for real estate speculation. For instance, Richad Sennet wrote about Manhattan in his book, The Conscience of the Eye, “The grid has been used in modern times as a plan that neutralizes the environment. It is a Protestant sign for the neutral city.” This glib semiotic reading fails to account for the famous vitality of Manhattan’s streets; overlooks the power of this particular grid to generate meaning, clarity, resonance, and joy through its very repetitions; ignores the role of Broadway as a diagonal “rogue” street creating event and drama with its triangulations wherever it intersects an avenue (such as at 72nd Street, 59th Street, 42nd Street, 34th Street, 23rd Street); and omits the variations in street size within the grid, which differentiate the petite, elegantly trifling blocks of the Upper East Side, say, from the long dour treks between avenues on the Upper West Side.

“Before him, then, 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, taken from James Baldwin’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” epitomizes a whole literature about sensitive provincials from the outer boroughs or Harlem approaching midtown Manhattan with a lump in their throats. I do not propose to add my own lump. Rather, let me fast-forward through adolescence, Columbia, a premature 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 on the Upper East Side, and to search out, as an avid bachelor this time, Mannahattan, Whitman’s “City of orgies, walks and joys.”

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 as in Rome were you can cool your feet in a sidewalk cafe and stare across at a fountain. You keep moving, you feel purposeful, wary, pointed, athletic. You can gauge your progress to an appointment (a block takes roughly a minute on foot), and given the vagaries of the subway system and traffic jams, walking is often the most reliable as well most economical transportation option. Meanwhile, the grid is a reassuring compass always orienting you. It pulls your eye straight up the street, to long, unimpeded vistas; left or right, if you are anywhere near the waterfront, you can catch a peripheral glimpse of river or sunset (made more beautiful by the atmosphere’s pollutants); and so your eye keeps adjusting astigmatically between long distance and middle range. And all the time there is so much coming at you that you have to attend to the immediate surround, dodging bodies and seizing opportunities. You take in the street by layers: this guy with the hat stepping too close to your shoulder; the storefront signs and displays, prompting impulse purchases; the stone-cut ornaments just above your head (cornices, cherubs, lions) and sometimes a whole second-story tier or retail; the wall posters selling moviews, politicians, rock shows; and finally, the tops of buildings, for which the best touches are often saved – Babylonian roof gardens, green copper domes, castle turrets, greek columns, Mayan setback fantasias, and all sorts of pointy symbols for the heavenward needle of commerce.

I love the ability of Manhattan’s public spaces to absord without fuss a mix of classes, races, ethnicities, sexual orientations. For the moment, at least, everyone in the pedestrian swirl is assigned the same human value: You are either in my way or not.

Here I begin to appreciate the performance art of pedestrianism. Each New Yorker is like a minor character actor who has honed his or her persona into a sharp, three-second cameo. I would have only an instant to catch the passer-by’s unique gesture or telltale accessory: a cough, an insouciant drawing on a cigarette, hair primped, a nubby scarf, some words muttered under the breath, an eyebrow squinched in doubt, the sigh-filled lifting of the shopping cart. Diane Arbus used to say that in split-second she looked for the flaw. I would say I look for the self-dramatizing element. On the one hand, the streets bring out a pure solipsism in New yorkers, a self-absorption unembarrassed by myriad witnesses; on the other hand, their furrowed brows bespeak a secret religious conviction that they are being watched by higher powers, and their anxious eyes all seem to ask: My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?

It so happens that I was then under the tutelage of a Jungian shrink who tried to get me to attend the present momen – a hopeless proposition, in the long run; but for awhile, I schooled myself to the concrete (the opposite of motes), to the one-thing-after-another world of the streets. A therapist alone, could not have gotten me attend to the present, but this was also a general recipe among poets, and I wanted to be a poet. I had in mind writing a proudly urban verse, inspired by Frank O’hara’s Lunch Poems, which captured the ironic, jolie-laide simultaneities of Manhattan sidewalks. My other urban gurus were Jane Jacobs, with her wisdom about everyday life and mixed uses in city neighborhood; Walter Benjamin, wih his anayses of flaneurs and his approach to the city as a cabbalistic text; and Charles Reznikoff, with his eavesdropping, anecdotal poems about chance street encounters.

A few entries from my past diaries should convey the spirit of that experiment, when I told myself: “You need not seek, the streets deliver all in due time.”

In front of Carnegie Hall near the Russian Tea Room, there was 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 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 strated 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.

A New York snow turns to slush in the rain, and every pedestrian navigates to find some footing, as a river opens at each crossing. They wactch a pioneer test the snow, to see if it is good for footing or has a false crust. I see a beautiful young woman in a mouton coat and elegant reddish-brown, ringletted hairdo hesitate at the corner, then plunge in with their black leather shoes, like ballet slippers, resigned to getting wet. An old black woman seems to be remembering country skills as she attempts a crossing.

I was in Fairway Supermarket on the Upper West Side, which is always crowded like mad, and I wanted to buy a few rolls, but an elderly, well-combed woman was pausing interminably before the bagels and bialy section with the customer prongs in her hand.

“Excuse me for taking so long,” she said. ” My eyes aren’t good, I have cataracts.”

I nodded. We all have our problems.

“I really can’t see very well, they tell me I have cataracts,” she continued, ” and I don’t want the ordinary bagels, I want the brown pumpernickel ones.”

Lady, I thought to myself, if you have cataracts maybe you shouldn’t be so picky.

She knocked her prongs through the bin a while without much conviction, then said, like someone used to ordering servants, “Could you find them for them me?”

I had lost the duel of wills. “Sure.” “You know, those pumpernickel ones with the seeds,” she added, as though I were the grocery boy. I snapped to it, just to see what it felt like, imagining myself in a white apron, all eyes on me. I must have done a realistic job, because afterwards someone came up to me to ask where she could find the tomato paste.

Today I am walking down Broadway and 72nd Street and a police car screams by. I pay it no attention. Two more police cars pull up. Must be a shootout, I think. Another squad car; cops are yelling, “Get back! Clear the streets!” Must be a big shootout; burglars trapped in a holdup? Hostages? Now I’m tempted to backtrack just to find out. Ah well ( I walk on, thinking), can’t interuppt my life for every crime. This is the exaggerated picture of New York that the rest of the world takes from Hollywood movies – police sirens running, cars converging. It’s actuality today. I ask some people what’s going on: they don’t know. Suddenly a dozen motorcycle cops roar down the streets. “It’s the President!” I hear people say around me. “It’s Carter!” The motorcycle squad is followed by one black limousine after another, bing bing bing. Which one’s the Prez? They’re driving by too fast to see. In the fifth or sixth limo I see a white hand on the bulletproof windowpane, palm up in a greeting. the crowd murmurs, That must be him! That’s all, just a little white hand. Our President.

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

In addition to spending hours each day walking and observing, I began reading more about town planning and New York hostory. I tried to understand the aesthetic secrets behind the pleasure I got from the streets. The Manhattan skyline, I came to discover, is unique in its juxtaposition of so many diaparate architectural styles and eras, unapologetically cheek by jowl – and the fact that someow they all work together. What makes them cohere visually is the Manhattan tradition of the unbroken street-wall, which democratizes every building by keeping it in its place, starting as far back from the sidewalk as its neighbors. The continuous street-wall, a by-product of the grid plan, has become as important as the grid itself in maintaining the dense, vertical look of Manhattan.

It was also Manhattan’s good fortune to have been built up, for the most part, before the present era of jumbo tower technology, with its ugly one-building-per-block sprawl. Earlier skyscrapers were more svelte; even the Empire State Building, built as the tallest in the world, had to take its place like a good citizen aongside the other edifices along 34th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

While undergoing this unsystematic education in the urban landscape, I discovered I was not alone in my preoccupation. From the late seventies onward, almost every Manhattanite seemed to be developing into an amateur urbanologist. This fad may have been triggered by a sense of impending loss attendant the city’s 1975 brush with bankruptcy. The default scare made New Yorkers acutely worried – and self-conscious – about the preservation of a way of life they had been taking for granted.

This facination with the city’s web continued in the gentrifying eighties, when we came to see how any architectural grace note from the past could be framed and exploited for maximum commercial value. The eighties’ resurgence in the city’s fortunes – a foreign investment-driven, artificial boom – paradoxically led to a housing shortage, and a sharp increase in homelessness and street begging. it was no longer easy to write humorous sketches about loonies encountered on walks, now that their plight was revealed as part of a wider socioeconomic misery.

Gentrification produced a whole generation savvy about restoration, land use, city history. This was particularly true in Manhattan, with its extremely finite boundries. Manhattan is a chessboard whereon everyone knows the value and provenance of each square. It can’t expand (except through landfill), so it cannibalizes itself and reinvents iself in place. At prime locations, such as Times Square, Columbus Circle, Batery Park, nothing new can transpire without controversy and the screaming of ghosts.

Take the example of Madison Square Garden. the first arena was built, appropraitely enough, on Madison Square, as a sucesor to P.T. Barnum’s Hippodrome. This was knocked down and replaced by a much more distinguished version – a lavish, minareted affair designed by Stanford White, of the great New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White. When the New York Life Insurance Company bought the property and decided to raze the arena to build its own headquarters, Madison Square Garden trudged off to 50th Street and Eighth Avenue. There it lumbered through countless circuses and prizefights and Knicks games, until the early eighties, when the arena was moved again, this time as an anchor to a huge speulative development on Seventh Avenue between 31st and 34th Streets, This was certainly a prime location, housing at it did that pricelss architcetural masterpiece, Pennsylvania Station, also by McKim, Mead & White. We know the rest: Penn Station was torn down, replaced by a tacky madison square Garden and a squalid underground railway juncture. The destruction of Pennsylvania Station changed the mentality of New Yorkers forever, from an amnesiac populace confidently, if blindly, embracing Progress, to a haunted band of nostalgics evicted from Eden, haunted by the corpse they could never revive.

Try telling Manhattanites about any proposed neighborhood change; they already know it. They know it because information is the plasma of New York, and because real estate ventures are well reported in the local press, and because they can see the transformations at street level. There is somethng particularly frustrating about this high degree of sophistication, combined as it is with a powerlessness to disarm evil or promote the civic good. Unless you are a “player” – a powerful developer, politician, union leader, community, activist, realty lawyer – you are reduced to the role of spectator, elegiac in advance.

I was no player, but an increasingly elegiac spectator. I walked, I walked. In cold weather I appreciated the chestnut sellers, The Christmas trees in Rockerfeller Center. Various tall buildings were suddenly competeing to illuminate their crowns; I appreciated the chalky elephant gray lighting of Radio City and the NBC Building. In hot weather I became a connoisseur of halter tops and sidewalk book vendors.

There is about this vanity of walking, in cases like mine, the insular smell of maleness unable to break out of itself: solitary, literary, onanistic, cerebral, boastful, defensive, and melancholy (like most flirtations with the infinite). I walked as though hunting for erotic adventure. Though I never actually picked up anyone on the peregrinations, they were all taken under the sign of Venus. The Manhattan street, with its ethnic variety, purveys a succesion of women whose beauty is heartstopping in different ways: this one because of her elegant legs, that one because of her eloquent, ferocious face, the next, her bright red hair, or somethng indefinably pleasing in the ensemble…I was not looking to find romance so much as to be invaded by sharp, fleeting glimpses of femine grace, to take back home with me and muse over in bitersweet solitude. It seemd to me I could achieve happiness with so many of these women, that such naive optimism was contradicted by my extensive experience as a bachelor never succeeded in rooting out the utopian dream of hedonism which the street proffered.

Then I fell in love in my late forties, and remarried. I wondered, worried, since the aesthetic response to beauty never dies, if the streets of Manhattan might pose a continuous challenge to my fidelity, mentally if not physically. Of course I still look, but the main result of mariage was that I found myself walking less. Manhatan, that mecca for singles, became less fascinating to me now that the hunt was over. It was also perhaps that, at fifty, age had finally caught up with me, wearing out the enthusiasm, driven by longing, of my earlier, street-besotted self.

These days, most of the time, I do not really see the city. I walk around Manhattan in a muted blur, taking in only what I need to navigate its streets. At times I’ll even read a book as I walk, espying only as much of the streetscape as peripheral vision around the page’s borders will allow. I resent the pressure (which I’ve put on myself – nobody asked me to! to find grace in the old gargoyles and brickwork and water towers, the physiognomies of my fellow citizens. Yes, New York is amazing, but must I always pay it homage? So often in my youth I conned myself into being programmatically astounded by this, my native city, even pretending it was someplace foreign and exotic, like Budapest or Buenos Aries or Prague, and making believe I was a tourist seeing it for the first time when I looked up at, say, the turn-of-the-century buildings in the Flatiron district. No more. If it 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 afternon and see the three o’clock sun on the facades of town houses, red brick or painted white. 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 in bloom, and I’m seeing the light filtered through and softened by erose leaves, which cast delicate shadows against the building walls. Also, theres’ a perfect correspondence in scale: one tree, one town house. An equivalence, a relationship. You can only get that in a few Manhattan neighborhoods, like the Village or parts of Chelsea, where the buildings are smaller. 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. But there really is somethig miraculous about the sun-licked facades of Federal-style town houses at that time of year. And your energy is higher, because it’s fun to walk around in the sun with a nip still in the air.

Built into literary discourse about Manhatan, it seems, is a movement from object of desire to disenchantement. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in “My Lost City,” remembers his feelings as a young man that “New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world,” and later, his dyspeptic conviction that “Whole sections of the city had grown rather poisonous…The city was bloated, glutted, stupid with cake and circuses…And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice…came crashing to the ground.” He concluded:”…I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!”

Joan Didion echoes his sentiments in her essay “Goodbye to All That.” Initially, she writes, ” New York was no mere city. It was instead an infintely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself…I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.” In the end she leaves, of course: “the golden dream was broken, and I am not that young anymore. The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired.”

American writers seem to associate New York with a good place to be young, and then blame it for the fact that it is not elixir enough for them to hold on to their youth. they project their own awareness of mortality onto it: hence, they always see New York as dying. French writers are fond of personifying Paris as faithless trollop. In a sense, Manhattan has always remained true, faithful to its nature, and it is the writers who have proved faithless. I am no exception: true, in my twenties I hardly shared the cocktail party life of new-comers like Fitzgerald and Didion, and my journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan was shorter and more mundane. But I, too, romanticized the place, falsely identitying my own youthful, Whitmanesque, lyrically colonizing energy with the island’s, then turned on it when I began to slow down.

If growing older means losing Manhattan – or the El Dorado it has sigified – that loss of innocence may be more than compensated for a by a gain in worldy stoicism. It would do well for wriers like myself to follow the advice Cavafy gives in his great poem ” The God Abandons Antony”:

say goodbye to her, the Alexandria who is leaving. Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say it was a dream, your ears deceived you: don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these. As one long prepared, and full of courage, as is right for you who were given this kind of city, go firmly to the window and listen with deep emotion, but not with the whining, the pleas of a coward; listen – your final pleasure – to the voices, to the exquisite music of the strange procession, and say goodyby to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

Meantime, I have moved back to Brooklyn.

And I had to get up and shower, leaving her in my room and I took the loofa with me because I scrub the dead skin off my body every Saturday. My father says that as a Puerto Rican he only showers once a week, on Saturday, so that’s when I scrub; my arms, back, neck, tween my breasts, above my torso. I head into the bathroom head down, rolling and bobbing. She does not smoke one of her Newports, afraid of getting hit with a lecture, afraid the plan might crash and burn.

When I come out, I feel that wierdness of being half naked. My closet is full of clothing that I am not allowed to wear, and I really can’t remember what it’s doing there, except that I have a sister at the time, and she has a job on Riverdale Avenue. I open the closet door to unwrap my body and dress behind it as if it were a screen protecting Micki and me from each other because we spend so much time together that I am uptight.

I get into my draws, top, bottom and kicks; and put a rubberband in my hair. We get outside and Micki does not light a cigarette. With stupid written across my forhead I decide to go to her crib from my crib. We go through ‘C-ROCK,’ which is like dope for delinquents. All the thugs around have climbed it and jumped off it’s erection. Diving into the river across the street from my flat has killed a few, but how many more birds or people has the Metro North taken? Obviously not nearly enough lives, if you believe in learning the hard way; with a beating.

Watching our backs, we cross the street and take a quarter block up hill, then down the steps and walk past all the commercials. At the end, getting ready to jump off the platform, onto rocks of the tracks–it makes my adrenaline rush and I feel quickly that I am ‘double zero 35771105am’ and not a wise ass, like my eee-con teacher says at City-As -School.

Micki and I will probably smoke a blunt of that cancer curing marijuana in a white owl cigar skin, maybe a DutchMaster. The coast is clear except for the people attending gym at John F. Kennedy High School outside on their football field.

We don’t see the authorities and keep moving, first quickly, then just strolling. Finally we arrive at place behind the sky blue letter C- framed in white and large for all to note, representing for Columbia University. Here is a nice safe place where we settle down, a place you cannot hear the train ah-coming and everything is peacefull.