This Land

by Dan Barry

  The supposed link between pinup and bag lady sounded too much like an O. Henry tale of Old New York, and begged too many questions.

  Who are you, really, Annie? How did you wind up here, at the fish market, receiving your boys, their taunts, the slaps of the East River winds? Where does all your money go? What is the larger meaning of your life’s arc?

  Never asked; never answered.

  Annie was just there, always, as rooted to the market as the cobblestones.

  Five years ago, when the city pried the 175-year-old fish market from Lower Manhattan and moved it to Hunts Point in the Bronx, Annie came with it, at first, often paying for a ride from her home, somewhere in Manhattan. She was in her 80s by then, and she struggled to find warmth in the new market’s chilled air. The men would sometimes see her in a corner, huddled against herself, sleeping.

  So maybe it was for the best when the city regulators at Hunts Point told Annie she could no longer hawk her best seller, her untaxed cigarettes—an order that would have been laughable in the old market’s wide-open days. Soon the raucous market chorus, of curses and price calls and forklift beeps, was missing the occasional, punctuating “Yoo-hoo.”

  Then again, maybe the market was her life’s oxygen. A few weeks ago, word spread among the fishmongers: South Street Annie, also known as Shopping Cart Annie, also known as their Annie, had died. She was 85. Her given name was Gloria Wasserman. And the larger meaning of her journey’s arc was this: Life is a wondrous gray.

  Annie at the fish market

  When someone dies, the rest of us cobble together old photographs, faint remembrances and snippets of things once said to make sense of the life lived. It is folly, but it is what we do. So here is Annie, incomplete, partially hidden still in the market’s eternal dusk cast by the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive above.

  According to one of her two daughters, Barbara Fleck, Gloria Wasserman’s parents were Polish immigrants who tried to make a living as egg farmers in rural New Jersey before settling in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The father, Pincus, found work as a tailor; the mother, Sadie, was a homemaker. Together they fretted over their only daughter.

  “She was almost too beautiful, which caused her to—well,” Ms. Fleck said. “She had a lively spirit, which was almost frightening for these poor Jewish immigrants. Very beautiful and very spunky.”

  A portrait from the mid-1940s shows Ms. Wasserman in pearls, her dark hair swept up and sculpted, her expression that of a confident starlet waiting to be discovered. “I think in her heart she would have wanted to have been an actress,” Ms. Fleck said. “She didn’t make it to the screen, but she acted in real life.”

  While working in Manhattan’s jewelry district, Ms. Wasserman met an ex-soldier named Fred Fleck, who planned to bicycle to Alaska, where he would attend college on the G.I. Bill. He suggested that she accompany him. “And she did,” Ms. Fleck said. “A free-spirited woman.”

  The front page of the Sept. 5, 1947, edition of The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner featured an article with the headline: “‘Bike-Hikers’ Reach City 83 Days Out of New York.”

  “Clad in clean white duck slacks, faded colored wool shirts and moccasins, the young couple, deeply tanned, looked as though they had been on an afternoon’s jaunt. Gloria’s nut-brown shoulder-length hair glistened in the sun…. Glowing with enthusiasm, Gloria left her job as a manufacturer’s model and amateur entertainer, bought a bicycle, and came along. She plans to get a job in Fairbanks, possibly as an entertainer.”

  She was 22.

  After that, details get blurry. Ms. Wasserman married Mr. Fleck, gave birth to Barbara in 1950, and broke up with Mr. Fleck. She lived a bicoastal life, it seems, working in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest—running a bar, then a record store—but returning to New York often to visit and provide financial support for her widowed mother, who by now was raising Barbara.

  “She had a knack,” Ms. Fleck said. “She could make money.”

  Ms. Wasserman married a second time, to a man named Grinols, and gave birth to two sons. Then, after this marriage broke down, she had a relationship that produced another daughter, Robin, in 1964. During these years, and in the many that followed, Ms. Fleck often had no idea what her mother did for a living.

  “I don’t know how you could put it nicely,” said Ms. Fleck, who lives in Los Angeles. “But she had a flamboyant life.”

  At some point, Ms. Wasserman returned to New York for good. And, at some point, she assumed the role of Annie and began appearing at the Fulton Fish Market, selling her wares and, her close friends at the market gently say, herself. Exactly when is lost to time, but far enough in the past that it seemed as though she was as permanent as the skyscrapers, as permanent as the river, calling out to the late-night fishmongers and early-morning Wall Street suits. When Frank Minio, an erudite, reflective man, joined the market in 1978, she was already a fixture.

  No matter the weather, he said, “She was always there.”

  What a brutal way to live. She cleaned the market’s offices and locker rooms and bathrooms. She collected the men’s “fish clothes” on Friday and had them washed and ready for Monday. She ran errands for Mr. DeLuca, known as Stevie Coffee Truck, hustling to Chinatown to pick up, say, some ginseng tea. She accepted the early-morning delivery of bagels. She tried to anticipate the men’s needs—towels, bandannas, candy—and had these items available for sale.

  “If the Brooklyn Bridge could fit in her shopping cart, she would have sold it,” Ms. Fleck said.

  Since all this hustling meant carrying around a lot of cash, she tucked away wads of bills in those deep-pocketed pants and other hiding places, including her brassiere. “She tried to look shabby so people wouldn’t give her a hard time” when she left the market, recalled one of her protectors, Joe Centrone, better known as Joe Tuna. “But she was regularly robbed.”

  Away from the market, Annie lived as Gloria Wasserman, in the East Village, in a city-owned apartment building that later became part of the Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association. She found joy in her family—a grandson, Travis, in California, and a granddaughter, Chelsea, in New Hampshire—but also sorrow. One of her sons, Kenneth Grinols, died in a fire while squatting in a building in the city. The other, Karl Grinols, struggling with drugs, moved into her apartment at one point, while she slept in a room at the market—“between the mackerel and the salmon,” Ms. Fleck said. But he died young, too, hit by a car in the East Village.

  All the while, Annie kept working, rarely missing a day, and gave nearly everything she had to others.

  Barbara Grinols, Karl’s ex-wife, who lives in New Hampshire, said that Ms. Wasserman often sent as much as $4,000 a month, usually through money orders, to her relations on both coasts. She also routinely sent along boxes of used clothing that she had culled from places like the Catholic Worker’s Mary House, on East Third Street, where she was known as that rare visitor who searched for items that fit others, and who had a gift for using humor and kindness to deflate the tensions arising from hardship.

  “She became like a grandmother to dozens of women on the street who had nobody,” said Felton Davis, a full-time Catholic Worker volunteer. Sensing the lack of esteem in a woman beside her, he said, “She would say: ‘I have just the shirt that you need. I’ll get it for you.’”

  Meanwhile, up in New Hampshire, the clothes kept coming. “The boxes would be opened, and it would be like: ‘Who wants this T-shirt?’ ‘Who wants this sweatshirt?’” Ms. Grinols recalled. “So many people in this area got gifts from her.”

  In 1999, Ms. Wasserman decided to retire as Annie, telling the men at the fish market that she had health problems—circulation problems in her legs, Ms. Fleck said, related to years of working in the wet and cold. Joe Tuna and Stevie Coffee Truck raised $3,000 for her by hitting up all the hardened fishmongers. Off she went, to live with her daughter Robin in California, and then with Ms. Grinols and Chelsea in New Hampshire. After nine months in the country, though, Annie wa
s back at the market, calling yoo-hoo and forcing Joe Tuna and Stevie Coffee Truck to do some explaining.

  With the money she earned by working in all weather, in the hours when the rest of us slept, Annie bought Chelsea a used Toyota Tercel. She paid for Chelsea’s tuition at the University of New Hampshire, and provided financial support to a ballet school in Los Angeles. Whatever money she took in, she sent out, while owning little more than a bed and a radio. Her relatives, in turn, regularly visited her in New York, where she would always tell them, “If we see anyone, I’m Annie.” They called her often, sent her gifts that she probably gave away, and constantly begged her to retire from a job whose parameters were left vague, but whose pull for her was undeniable. “She would always say, ‘We’ll see,’” Chelsea recalled. “She never wanted to leave New York and stop doing what she was doing.”

  About 10 years ago, Joe Tuna and Stevie Coffee Truck heard that Annie had been hospitalized. They went to New York Downtown Hospital and asked to see—actually, they didn’t know whom to ask for. “Annie?” they volunteered. “Shopping Cart Annie?”

  “Gloria Wasserman,” the clerk said, and directed them to her room, where their tough, tough Annie now seemed so vulnerable.

  “That was the first time I ever saw her with her hair down,” Joe Tuna said. “You could see the remnants of a beautiful woman.”

  Then Annie got out of the hospital, and went back to work. She continued to flash her breasts, more for the shock and a laugh than for anything else. She sold her goods, ripped into those who owed her money, accepted a hot cup of coffee when offered, and slipped away now and then to read from one of the books she always carried, like a stage actress resting between scenes.

  She also continued her other life, as Gloria Wasserman, traveling to New Hampshire to attend Chelsea’s wedding, in 2006. There she is in the photographs, smiling with the bride and groom, a proud, beloved grandmother.

  For the last year of her life, the reluctantly retired Gloria Wasserman spent her days charming the East Village and her nights sharing dinner at Mary House. In spirit, she remained defiantly independent. In truth, she needed help: with her hygiene, with her apartment, with climbing the stairs.

  She suffered a stroke in the brutal August heat and was admitted to Bellevue Hospital Center, where Mr. Davis, from the Catholic Worker, visited nearly every day. She was released after a month, spent a couple of weeks in New Hampshire, and then a couple more in California, with her daughter Barbara. But she refused to eat or to take her medication, and died in her sleep, 2,800 miles from the fish market.

  “New York was her life,” her daughter said. “Work was her life.”

  Word of Annie’s death gave pause to the fish men. Mr. Minio reflected on that space between black and white where all of us reside. And Joe Tuna has discovered that whenever someone in a crowd calls out, “Yoo-hoo,” his head jerks up and he is instantly back on South Street, amid the beds of glassine ice, and the dead-eyed fish, and here she comes.

  The impressions and old photographs that Ms. Wasserman left behind are, in the end, only impressions and old photographs. In fact, whenever reporters, including this one, referred to her in a news story, she would always complain that they had failed to capture her “essence”—which may, again, be true.

  A Bypassed Small Town Makes a Visual Statement: Here We Are

  HOOPER, NEB.—DECEMBER 8, 2010

  A few years ago, the Nebraska Department of Roads rolled out a highway bypass to hasten the already-hurried everyday pace. Motorists rushing north to Norfolk, or south to Omaha, no longer had to slow to 40 miles an hour through a blink-and-miss-it place called Hooper.

  No longer did travelers have to pass the Hooper ice cream parlor, or the Hooper grain elevator, or the ancient railroad cars sitting on discontinued tracks, or the decades-old neon marquee, long past glowing, that welcomed travelers to a downtown from the late 19th century.

  The people of Hooper—population 827, more or less—knew what this meant. The small green sign planted beside the new highway barely whispered their town’s name. And in the flat terrain of rural Nebraska, the eye can see far into the distance, yet miss so much. They feared being missed. Bypassed.

  Another community might have resigned itself to this subtle humiliation, enduring the slight on behalf of rural America as just one more nudge toward oblivion. But Hooper was determined to raise its collective hand somehow, and say to the busy world:

  We are still here.

  “We kind of lost our identity now that the highway didn’t go through town,” said David Hingst, 58, the general manager of Hoegemeyer Hybrids, a local seed company. “We needed our identity brought back.”

  But how?

  You pronounce Hooper not with a HOO, but with a kind of HUH. Its name derives either from an otherwise forgotten railroad official or from a man who won an uphill wagon race, and, with it, naming rights. Founded as a railroad depot in 1876, it grew to become a hub for farmers raising corn, soybeans and livestock—a point of interest along U.S. 275.

  Gone, now, are many of the businesses that once defined its Main Street: the Studebaker dealership, the furniture store, the three groceries. The Lions Club, which donated that neon marquee, no longer roars, and the Hooper Commercial Club, once thriving, is taking a protracted rest. The population is older, the children leaving once they come of age.

  “We have a hard time keeping young people,” said Joel Hargens, 59, a Hooper native who, like his father before him, runs the town’s bank, now known as the First National Bank Northeast. “This is rural America. You could go 200 miles in any direction, talk to a banker, and he’d tell you the same.”

  But Hooper is hardly asleep. It has the bank, a small market, a library, a couple of insurance offices and the office of an ancient newspaper, where printed memories sit in a vault, fragile to the touch. But you can still buy ads in the paper to thank people for remembering your 90th birthday or for providing all those 50-mile rides to doctor’s appointments in Omaha.

  You can shoot pool at the Iron Horse. You can get your hair cut at Don’s barber shop, where the Farm Journal—or is that Playboy?—is made available. And if you don’t get to The Office restaurant by 6:30 on a weekend night, you can use the long wait for prime rib to admire the Hooper memorabilia on the walls, from the signs for out-of-business businesses to the H.H.S. pennants for the long-gone high school.

  This is what was being passed by. Customers from Fremont were walking into The Office to say that they had driven all the way to Scribner, seven miles to the north, before realizing they had missed the turn-off for Hooper.

  So, when some local people created the Hooper Area Community Foundation two years ago, its first order of business was to address the real and psychic impact of the bypass. True, the bypass had its benefits; at least now, with old Highway 275 suddenly quiet, you could cross the road without fear for life.

  Still.

  “Hooper was just missed completely,” Mr. Hargens said. “Unnoticed. Unknown. We just felt we had to make a statement.”

  The foundation’s handful of members—Mr. Hingst and Mr. Hargens, a dentist, a housewife, a feed salesman and a couple of others—began meeting in the bank’s small conference room. There, under the gaze of a mounted white-tailed deer and a few University of Nebraska toy animals, they resolved to erect a sign beside the bypass to remind people of Hooper. Not just a sign, but a SIGN.

  They took road trips to photograph and study the signs of other towns. Then they asked a contractor, Ronnie Fauss, to sketch out a few designs for their consideration.

  Mr. Fauss, 76, was a good choice. He grew up in town, and remembers when it had a blacksmith and a harness shop. At 4:30 every morning, he takes a two-mile meditative walk through the dark and quiet, passing houses that evoke certain surnames. He knows Hooper.

  Mr. Fauss came back with several sketches, the foundation asked for a few tweaks, and, finally, two designs were chosen: one horizontal, one vertical. The foundation display
ed these options at the front of Mr. Hargens’s bank—next to the popcorn machine that pops on Fridays—and asked people to write their preference on pieces of paper.

  “It was almost split in half,” said Mr. Hargens, the foundation’s vice president.

  “But there were no hanging chads,” said Mr. Hingst, its president.

  The foundation made the final pick: a tapered, 24-foot tower that would spell “Hooper” in 18-inch-high letters down two of its three sides. This way, the sign would rise above the fertile flatness.

  Fund-raising letters went out in the fall of 2009. Quickly, the foundation surpassed its $18,000 goal, thanks to several thousand dollars from the old Commercial Club and to the many, many checks written out for amounts closer to $25.

  Mr. Fauss arranged to buy a small corner of a cornfield from a cousin who happened to own land at the intersection of the new U.S. 275 and a county road leading into town. But wet weather in the spring delayed the project, as did some business commitments that Mr. Fauss simply had to meet.

  Finally, right about harvest season, a brick-and-concrete base was built upon a concrete foundation. Then the three precast concrete sides were raised and secured to form the tapered tower, on top of which was placed a cap adorned with a large concrete ball.

  Some finishing touches were still needed. The police chief, Matt Schott, used his excavator to dig a shallow trench for a retaining wall, after which a landscaping firm came in to plant some shrubs and make the ground look like an inviting garden, planted in a cornfield.

  The project’s completion prompted no fanfare. The foundation’s members doubted that many people would gather beside a highway to celebrate a concrete tower. Besides, the sign was its own celebration.

  Now, as the endless horizon along U.S. 275 surrenders to the wintry dusk, the beams of two spotlights sprout from the ground to illuminate the name of a place you might otherwise miss. A place where people say thank you through the newspaper, where the restaurant has prime rib on weekends, and where a white-haired native son takes predawn walks, taking it all in.