The Ruins of New York's Industrial Past

Perhaps due to an overreaction to a recent birthday, lately I've been thinking a lot about decay. As I touched upon in an earlier post, Hollywood has given us our fair share of desolate New York City ruins. But we don't really need Hollywood; we have plenty of real-life examples of urban decay, most notably of the city's industrial past. These are, admittedly, in most cases less cataclysmic than zombie-apocalypse or sudden onset of an ice age, but they can be just as visually striking.

A few years ago, the Times ran a photo essay by Nathan Kensinger that included images of Brooklyn's industrial ruins, including an abandoned powerhouse on the Gowanus Canal known as "The Batcave" (you'll see why) and the infamous Admirals' Row in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I keep coming back to these photos; they expose the tender underbelly of New York's past -- spaces occupied now only by our city's most destitute.

On my recent visit to Staten Island, my friends and I sought out another industrial ruin: the Ship Graveyard, the site of dozens of scuttled vessels left to rust in the wetlands. Not much is known about the Ship Graveyard, I suspect it's because its the result of illegal dumping. Indeed, to reach the spot, you must pass through the neglected 18th-century Seguine family graveyard and down a steep hill overgrown with phragmites and poison ivy. But it's worth the effort.

Staten Island Ship Graveyard from Alicia West on Vimeo

Orchard Beach: A Transplanted Oceanfront

I purchased Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York in 2007 with every intention of diving right in. But all 1,246 pages of that tome have sat on a bookshelf for the past three years. I never even cracked it. That was until last week, when I eagerly foraged through its index for information on Orchard Beach in the Bronx.

Before Robert Moses got to it, the beach was a narrow pebbly sand bar that linked Rodman Neck and Hunters Island, two of the easternmost landmasses of the Bronx in Pelham Bay Park. Moses reconceived Orchard Beach by connecting Rodman Neck, Hunters Island and the Twin Islands (east of Hunters Island) using fill and white sand dredged from the Rockaways to create 115 acres of parkland and a mile-long crescent-shaped beach. The result, even seen from satellite photos, seems otherworldly.


View Larger Map
What I'm beginning to understand from Caro's book is that Moses was practically an unstoppable force. He rearranged the city with a confidence fed by brilliance and arrogance. The pebbly sand of the Long Island Sound wasn’t good enough for Moses, so he simply transported tons upon tons of white sand from oceanfront Queens. Ecosystem, shmecosystem.

This type of urban planning would never fly today, but I can’t wait to check out Orchard Beach for myself this summer.

More, I'm sure, to follow on Robert Moses....

Challenges of Embracing a Waterfront

I picked up Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate at the new Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene the other day. I am not too far into it and suspect it may be a bit outdated (published 2004), but Lopate has hit upon an interesting phenomenon: New Yorkers' mysterious hesitancy to "maximize [the city's] aqueous setting" and propensity to, instead, turn inland.

Lopate attributes this trend to several factors. He argues that the waterfront's past as an occupied industrial site deterred New Yorkers from conceptualizing it as a space open for residence and recreation, as they do Central Park and Central Park West. And, he posits, "nothing can replace the beautiful, urgent logic of felt need" that characterized the development surrounding industry (docks, warehouses, customs offices, bars, brothels and churches). While I agree that Manhattan doesn't yet adequately embrace its waterfront, I am not so sure about Lopate's argument. As noted in an earlier post, the waterfront was used as a recreational space even when that meant bathing in human and industrial waste, and, given many neighborhoods' current lack of inland park space, I would argue that there is certainly a "felt need" for public waterfront access.

Where Lopate and I do agree, is that the perimeter highways and railroad tracks in Manhattan constitute physical barriers to the waterfront. Unwelcoming and seemingly unsafe underpasses and overpasses create daunting obstacle courses that, let's face it, for many New Yorkers, is just too much of a schlep. Lopate dubs the West Side Highway and the FDR Drive "the Original Sin of Manhattan planning." To that I would add with heavy sarcasm, "thanks a lot, Robert Moses." As designs for new waterfront spaces are developed, designers continue to grapple with these obstacles to bring the public to the new amenities. My favorite proposal so far is to paint the underside of the FDR Drive a lavender color called "Mighty Aphrodite." I am not sure this will work, but I love the name!

On the Waterfront

Earlier this year, I accepted the dubious challenge of writing a historic plaque for the park at Catherine Slip in the Two Bridges neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. While trying to explain how a space that was once a docking place for boats between piers was now terra firma parkland, I was surprised to learn that much of the shoreline was filled in not only with earth, but with refuse. This tidbit didn't make it into my plaque text, but it's fascinating to me to think about how we have physically blurred the edges of our city both purposefully and through neglect and how our relationship with the waterfront has changed over time.

The shores of Manhattan once consisted sandy beaches, intertidal mudflats and salt marshes. With industrialization, the waterfront was put to work, much to the detriment of the ecosystem. Industry flourished with easy access to water transport and few regulations about waste dumping. According to Mark Kurlansky's book The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, by 1910, 600 million gallons on untreated sewage was being dumped into the waterways daily. Surprisingly, New Yorkers still used the waterways for recreation, though they would often emerge caked in filth.

Today, under the auspices of the Bloomberg Administration, the City is endeavoring to return the waterfront and waterways for safe public use. Vast swaths of the waterfront have been rezoned for public access and new parks and esplanades are under construction. Oyster and mussel beds have been reintroduced to the waterways to naturally filter the water.

Of course, there are still areas where the waterfront is completely closed to the public, notably in Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn. Here, the giant Con-Edison plant bars access to the water. I'd love to post a photo to show you how Con-Ed plant completely blocks views of the water, but a small man stepped out of a guard booth to inform me that photography was not permitted, as though I had not seen the signs.