Waterways

Because I am old I am riding the ferry across the Hudson River from Hoboken to Battery Park for no special reason.  It is mid-May, the day, slightly raw, but not entirely unpleasant, the view clear on either bank and the Statute of Liberty peeps out from around the south. My day is my own, but the river carries more than water, boats and marine life. The river carries memory. I look out the window to where the Twin Towers used to stand. Why had I not considered when I boarded the visual details of the trip. I imagine the river filled with the ferries and barges and pleasure boats who carried the lucky downtown survivors away from the conflagration and safely home.[1] I thought of my friend, Howard, and all the others who died that day, and how, had he lived, he would be old now, like me. I shook off the visions as the afternoon sun tried to peek through and walked down the bouncing gangplank to the dock and riverfront park.

When I was a young child, my grandparents would take me to Battery Park. Though downtown looks very different now, all landscaped and lovely, with bicycles and playgrounds and signage for tourists. We would sit on the concrete benches and feed the pigeons, ride the Staten Island ferry back and forth and head to the Automat for lunch. Putting the nickels in the slots opening the glass door then watching the next sandwich or slice of pie slide into place was more exciting than anything we might have been eating. That was the Battery Park where I wanted to be, the one that lives only in my memory, with my grandparents. I adored them.

This is the river, after all, where US Airways flight 1549 landed on January 15, 2009, and its cool captain, with the marvelously alliterative name, Sully Sullenberger, managed that water landing with no casualties. Of course a movie, followed and of course Tom Hanks starred.[2]

So many poems about rivers, Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Li Bai, “The River Merchant’s Wife.” Poems about Manhattan’s rivers in particular, Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” makes me weep. I cannot be the only one with this experience. Part of me is hopelessly sentimental. I would quote the entire poem here, line by line. Almost 200 years later the poem contemporary, says what I wish I had.  All right, just the first section, where he thinks about all of us, today, and those who come after us:

1

Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!

Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you also face to face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.[3]

As with all natural objects the river is a metaphor so deep in the cultural psyche that it would be impossible, if I had even the remotest interest in doing so, to determine its first use. So too is the ferry and the ferryman. Of the five rivers of the Greek underworld, it’s curious to me that the seemingly most referenced is Lethe, the river of forgetfulness; common enough to be referenced by the commentators  of the King James Bible.[4] The boats the rescued that 9/11 survivors brought them to safety, not to the underworld, more like crossing the Red Sea or the Jordan. There are safe crossings and dangerous crossings.

The Hudson is my river and most of my life has been spent on one side of it or the other. Though these days I often find myself crossing the Delaware. One of the few memories I have of my father’s father is his recounting that he and my father walked across the George Washington Bridge when it opened in 1931. Decades later, my father drove us across the Verrazzano Bridge on its opening day in 1964.

I turn and look back at Hoboken as I exit the ferry. The Maxwell House coffee facility that permeated the air with the smell of roasting coffee whenever the wind was blowing the right way is gone along with Wonder Bread and other factories. My nostalgia is not for processed food or the difficulties of manual labor, but for a geography in which I situated myself when everything seems promising and mysterious, a feeling that takes extraordinary effort to capture today. Today the view of Hoboken and Jersey City is one of non-descript new condos and apartment buildings. The view of Manhattan from the Jersey side is more felicitous, a mixture of old and new, varied shapes and sizes, and cleaner and better maintained than in my childhood.

Farther north, the midtown view of Manhattan from Jersey is more jarring. Odd, skinny, tall buildings compete with the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building destroying the iconic skyline. Now, it’s nothing special, looks like any other big city. The Jersey side is just as wrong. Gone is Palisades Amusement Park.[5] The roller coaster and Ferris wheel that were clearly visible from the West Side Highway, gone. Who can forget the song “Palisades Park” written by Chuck Barris who might have been the whackiest guy in popular culture. Besides, I can’t help but think that the TV show, Barry, was modeled on Barris or the persona Barris created for himself. I’m not going to footnote here. You want to do your own Google dive into the man who created the Dating Game, the Gong Show and was a self-asserted hit-man for the CIA.

Right near Palisades Park my friend Judy’s dad used to have a roofing and sheet metal shop in Edgewater. That’s gone too.Boring high-rises everywhere. It’s still beautiful to drive north along the Hudson though, meander through the old towns, spend a day in Albany. During the Revolutionary War the Americans placed chains across the Hudson, the largest at West Point, to prevent British ships from travelling North. You will remember from grade school that Benedict Arnold provided this information to the British who, it turns out, never actually tried to run the river. Arnold, a decorated war hero, was more interested in the purse than in principle, and readily sold information in exchange for cash.[6]  I will avoid suggesting any obvious parallels here. Instead I will note that my dad took us to visit all these sites and others less military, and they form a lovely block of childhood memories. I wish I remembered more.

From the ferry terminal it’s a short walk north, away from Ground Zero, to the new location of the Whitney Museum. I will be a heretic here and say I preferred the old building. The new one has fantastic views of the Hudson, but the exhibit space is lackluster, the stairs difficult to navigate. The river views, I reiterate are amazing, and the location offers a delightful anchor to the south end of the impossibly crowded High Line, but it’s the Edward Hopper collection that makes going to the Whitney worth the trip. It’s the largest collection of Hopper’s in the world. The Hudson, it goes without saying, is one subjects. Hopper, one of my favorites.

It's unusual for me to take the ferry to Manhattan although I visit often. Sometimes I drive, more often I take the train, occasionally the bus.[7] The ferry is more fun. The boat rocks soothingly. The sun beats down, or there is a bracing breeze. If it rains, or it’s a bit choppy, sit inside. The ferry makes easy to see where you have been and where you are going. I wish I had done it more often, churns the mind, let’s me see things in new ways, different ways, brings back memories. Memories are my most precious possessions.

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[1] [T]he 9/11 boat lift—the largest water evacuation in history and one of the uplifiting, if lesser-known, episodes of that terrible day when terrorists flew two passenger jets into the iconic Twin Towers—part of a multipronged attack on America A makeshift armada of about 150 commercial vessels of various types—tugboats, ferries, charter boats—would transport an estimated 500,000 people out of the disaster zone of lower Manhattan to safety in New Jersey and Brooklyn. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/911-flotilla-boats-evacuated-500000-new-yorkers-safety-180978614/

[2] Air travel raises so many concerns. I just can’t… Maybe it’s the Icarus story over and over again. Maybe it’s damn Reagan firing the air traffic controllers. Fossil fuels. Greed. And yet I fly. I fly.

[3] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45470/crossing-brooklyn-ferry  Read the whole thing. Seriously!

[4] https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Ezekiel-20-43_meaning/. I really went down a rabbi hole with this one reading about the different rivers in Greek mythology, from there to biblical commentary, etc. I am easily sidetracked.

[5] Larry wrote about the Rosenthal brothers who operated Palisades Amusement Park until it closed in 1971 in an issue of Judayo, the cessation of which I much lament, in the old Jewish Currents. https://jewishcurrents.org/june-26-the-cyclone

[6] https://www.historynet.com/west-point-chain/ There are many articles about this if you are interested.

[7] Following the pandemic, DeCamp bus which for half a century had provided commuter and weekend service from Essex County, NJ, communities stopped providing service. NJ Transit has only partially filled the gap. A planned new rail tunnel from NY to NJ was scuttled by then Governor Chris Christie. Though the project was later revived, any completion is far in the future. Public transportation within New Jersey and to and from adjacent states is woefully inadequate.