The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  Still, my recollection of that night is as sharp as if it were just last week. The building looked as much like a cathedral on the inside as outside. The lobby was shaped like a great cross, its stained-glass ceiling bordered by dimly lit bulbs, its walls made of churchily carved marble and fringed with bronze filigree.

  Dad strolled up to a pair of elevators. He tapped the button and waited, whistling absentmindedly, as if this were his place of business and today just another day at the office.

  “Oh,” he said. “C’mere. You should see this.”

  He pulled from his duffel what looked to be a homemade miner’s headlamp, a powerful light attached to a stripey Björn Borg headband. Holding it in his palm, he directed its brightness toward a small stone bracket supporting a ceiling beam. Into the bracket was carved the hunched caricature of a bespectacled oldster with a mustache and a handful of coins.

  “That’s Frank Woolworth,” Dad said with a chuckle. “Counting his nickels.” He swung the lamp to another funny-looking figure, carved on the bracket directly opposite. “And over here is Cass Gilbert himself.”

  Gilbert was clutching a model of the Woolworth Building. His mustache was droopier than his employer’s, his round glasses a bit more owlish. Both men were depicted with bulging superhero biceps.

  The elevator arrived with a chime, and we stepped into a sumptuous, oaky compartment whose name, according to a curlicue inscription, was Otis.

  Dad grinned. “This is an express, and you’ve gotta think about what this felt like back in 1913—a straight shot, seven hundred feet a minute, right up to the fifty-third floor. This, my boy, was one hell of a ride.”

  After rising less than a minute, during which time my ears popped, the elevator chimed open and deposited us in an empty hallway. Quickly, almost hastily, the elevator closed its doors behind us and hurried away, taking its light with it and leaving me, here in the darkness beside Dad at the top of the city, with a sudden burden of loneliness that caught me by surprise. I didn’t know why I was here. The grandeur of the hallway’s decorations, its little Gothic doodads and fastidious attention to beauty, struck me as desperately pointless.

  Up here in the tower, the skyscraper was skinnier than in the lobby, the corridors shorter. Dad followed a trail of filthy boot prints down a construction-paper pathway to the end of the hall, past a clouded-glass door marked FULMER & ASSOCIATES, then left to two side-by-side windows in the middle of the building’s western wall. The right window of the pair was not even latched; it slid open easily. We bowed our heads and stepped through the window, out into a gutter just a foot and a half wide and bounded by a little parapet that didn’t even come up to my knee. The air chilled my cheeks.

  I took a sudden step back in self-protection, my shoulder blades against the window frame. I couldn’t tell what I was seeing. The sky downtown was striped in a thoroughly disorienting way: two huge black vertical columns with a lighter one in between. Not until I looked up and saw the blinking red airplane-warning lights atop the two outer columns did I realize I was looking at the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, a vertical band of night in between. They were the highest buildings in the world, just as the Woolworth had once been. I wondered how anything that tall could possibly stand by itself, wondered if they planned to fortify the pair by conjoining them with a bridge like the one over on Staple Street.

  Dad was shaking his head ruefully in the darkness.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Oh, nothing really.” A defeated breath escaped him. “It just kind of hit me all at once, what a crazy amount of destruction the gargoyles up here have seen.”

  I scanned the West Side, where he was pointing. I didn’t see any destruction. What I saw was construction. The Twin Towers, as every kid in town knew, had been officially dedicated with a big old ceremony just last year. And here they were now, robust and looming, only a couple of blocks downtown. At the foot of the southern tower, another, much smaller building was on the rise. I could just make out the latticework shadows of its steel skeleton and the ungainly crane beside it.

  I asked what destruction he was talking about.

  “Well, this wasn’t a cornfield, you know. Anytime anything goes up in New York, especially anything big, you can be sure something went down to make way for it. That entire area, the neighborhood around Washington Market all the way up to Hubert Street, was cleared to make space for the World Trade towers and a community college and a bunch of other ugly stuff. More than sixty acres.”

  “Huh,” I said, trying to sound thoughtful. I had no clue how big an acre was.

  “You know how I told you I used to sit on my studio roof on Murray Street with my binoculars,” Dad said, “how I used to watch the gargoyles up here?”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah, well, even then, I think I always knew they’d outlast me. I watched them watching me, craning their necks to get a really good look—and then one day I was gone, evicted along with the rest of the neighborhood, and the gargoyles watched that, too. Watched me get forced out of that remarkable building.”

  “Your old studio? What was so special about it?”

  Dad laughed mirthlessly. “Everything.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, for starters, it was pretty much the only place in New York I’ve ever felt at home—and actually, if you want to know the truth, you yourself were conceived there.” He looked at me with sudden interest. “Why don’t I show it to you sometime?”

  “You mean where it used to be.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. Don’t tell me what I mean.”

  I hesitated. “I thought you said they cleared the whole neighborhood. They didn’t tear your studio down?”

  “Yeah, they did. Every scrap of it.”

  “So how can you show it to me?”

  He looked at me thoughtfully, as if considering just how far into his life he really wanted to admit me.

  “Never mind,” he said quietly.

  Over the years I’ve wondered if there was something I should have said at that moment, something that might have settled him down enough to prevent what happened next. My father so often talked like he wasn’t waiting for a response, wasn’t interested in one, but now I’m not so sure if that’s what was really going on. Kids, even sensitive ones, have a way of focusing mostly on themselves. Maybe there was something useful I could have given him then, had I been thinking less of my own unease and more about what sort of outraged loneliness would drive a man up here to the wind-battered roof of the old city in the middle of the night.

  Dad pushed away the memory of his eviction and headed right, along the narrow gutter. All business now. Tentatively, I followed. The low parapet keeping us from tumbling off the building was fringed with terra-cotta frippery, pointy protuberances I grabbed onto every time I thought I might fall; it felt like clambering around atop a colossal wedding cake. Up ahead, at the tower’s northwest corner, stood a tourelle, completely encircled by pipe-frame scaffolding. Close up like this, the tourelle looked a lot like a big white asparagus spear: a narrow upright shaft with a pointy top. As we approached it, our gutter narrowed treacherously until it was no more than one sneaker wide. Normally, there would have been a two-foot gap between the building and the tourelle. But fortunately for us, this gap was bridged by the scaffolding, which rose, like the tourelle itself, from a landing a few stories below.

  Dad was already climbing up when I reached the tourelle; I stayed put and watched him swing up to the first level of scaffold planking above me.

  “No!” he cried out. “They didn’t dare!” There was real anguish in his voice, mixed with indignation. “What could they be thinking?”

  Then he was swinging down beside me—“C’mon! C’mon!”—and charging back along the gutter in the direction we’d just come from. He seemed oblivious to the precipitous drop just to our right.

  “This can’t be!” he was yelling when I reached the second tourelle. The dark knot of his body mo
ved about in the crosshatch of scaffolding above me. “This just can’t be! How could anyone in the restoration business possibly be this destructive?”

  I craned my neck. “What is it? What did they do?”

  A weak, strangled sound emerged from his throat.

  He tried again: “They stripped the whole…the whole goddamn thing! Both tourelles. Even the gargoyles!”

  Before I could work up the nerve to climb up and see what a missing gargoyle looked like, Dad was already jumping down beside me.

  “Maybe we’re not too late,” he murmured as he raced along the south-side gutter to the third tourelle, the more downtown of the two that overlooked Broadway. “Maybe they’re not done yet.” He was running much too fast, too carelessly. He lost his footing, started to go down—but steadied himself at the last moment on a decorative bric-a-brac protrusion. Unfazed by this stumble, he kept moving.

  This time he must have expected the bad news that awaited him. No cries of anguish came to me from the tourelle above, no cursing. Using the skinny ladder built into the scaffolding, I climbed up and joined Dad on the first level of scaffold planking.

  He was on his haunches, peering at the violently scarred surface of the tourelle.

  “But why?” he was muttering. “See, they haven’t actually taken all the terra cotta off—not all the way to the brick underlayer, anyway, like you’d think they would. They’ve just hacked off all the ornament that projected more than an inch or two.” He pressed his palm against an open wound in the tourelle’s eggshell-white skin. “What are they up to? What are you up to, you cynical shitheads?”

  He climbed down quickly and hurried along the gutter to the fourth and last tourelle, the open-topped one that had once been a chimney. I followed, slowly and carefully, stopping halfway to look at the black ribbon of river and the Brooklyn Bridge, whose harp-strung spans sparkled with white lights.

  Another groan, almost more animal than human, came to me from up ahead.

  “What is it?” I asked, scrambling along the gutter to reach Dad, who was standing on a makeshift bridge—a few planks laid across steel beams—that connected the building to the tourelle.

  There was no scaffolding on the inside portion of this tourelle, making its asparagus-spear shape easier to discern, and when I got up close, I recognized right away that something very strange was going on with the skin of its shaft. Unlike the rough, scarred surface of the tourelle we’d just come from, the surface of this one looked smooth and modern and brand-spanking-new, almost fake. Dad shone the beam of his headlamp across its surface. It was metal—flat metal—with very simplified lines, all painted in tacky golds and browns, like a Disneyland or Vegas version of the real thing.

  “What a disgusting thing to do!” Dad cried.

  I reached out my hand. The surface of the tourelle was cold to the touch, its textureless expanse unbroken except by the slight bump of screwheads at regular intervals.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “That’s because it’s incomprehensible!” Dad roared. “These vandals couldn’t even be bothered to replicate the terra-cotta ornament up here in concrete. No, even concrete knockoffs would be showing too much respect for New Yorkers’ architectural patrimony. So what are they doing? The philistines have decided to just strip off hundreds of square feet of our skyline’s most exquisite terra cotta and replace it with fucking aluminum siding!”

  It was hideous, no question. “But it can’t really be aluminum siding, can it?”

  “That’s exactly what it is! It’s a mock-up, don’t you see? They mocked up the inside surface of this tourelle to show their bosses at Woolworth, just this section the workers could reach from this plank bridge here without any scaffolding. So then they marched the Woolworth suits up here and got them to sign off on this approach for all the tourelles, told them how they’d save a fortune on maintenance for the next thirty years—all that sort of horseshit. And as soon as they had that okay, they began throwing up scaffolding around all four tourelles and hacking off all the projecting ornament. See, the siding gets installed right on top of the terra cotta, so they have to tear off any protruding elements that’ll get in the way.”

  At the top of the tourelle’s aluminum-clad shaft, right where it met its asparagus-tip top section, two matching beige aluminum things jutted out horizontally from the wall, several feet apart. They looked like giant toothpicks.

  “What are those supposed to be?”

  Dad gave another groan. “That’s where the gargoyles used to live! I guess instead of just doing away with that projecting visual element altogether, the architects at D.D.&M. wanted to suggest the gargoyles’ long-necked forms from a distance, so when you look up here from the street you won’t get the feeling that something’s missing.” He spat, barely avoiding his own boot. “But you will. I guarantee you will. Architecture is intuitive. People will look up and sense, without knowing quite why, that something is wrong. At least for a while. Then, after a few years, it’ll all come to seem normal. This city has no memory, and after a time the skyline will sort of close up its wound until nobody even remembers anymore how much has been lost.”

  Dad put on the headlamp and stood on his tiptoes, peering first around one side of the tourelle and then the other. But without any scaffolding here, there was no way for him to get far enough out.

  “Can’t see a damn thing,” he muttered. “Do me a favor. Go climb the scaffolding on that other tourelle there, the first one we looked at. Lean out as far as you can, and tell me if you see…” But I guess I didn’t look like I was in any hurry to do any climbing. I rubbed my nose, which still had a souvenir bump on it from its encounter with the souvenir bat. “Oh, Christ,” Dad said. “Never mind. I’ll do it myself.”

  It amazed me how comfortable he seemed, swinging his body around on those wobbly scaffolds. From my safe spot at the base of the northeast tourelle, I watched him make his way up the northwest one, the blue pipe-frame shuddering and swaying as he hung off the outside to get a better view. I must have been feeling his every movement as if it were my own, because when he let loose a sudden caw of exultation, I was so startled that I grabbed hold of the edge of the aluminum siding to steady myself.

  “There’s still one left!” he told me breathlessly when he rejoined me, gripping me by the shoulders and trying to shake me into sharing his excitement. “There’s one gargoyle they haven’t butchered yet! One! Out on the farthest corner, above Broadway!”

  The top twenty-five feet or so of the tourelle—ten feet of shaft topped by about fifteen feet of conical tip—rose above the fifty-third floor here. But only the shaft could be easily accessed with ladders. This meant that the uppermost fifteen feet—the conical open grillwork of the chimney top—was left untouched by the demo workers, as were the ornate terra-cotta “pinnacles” that poked upward from the top of the shaft every few feet around its perimeter. But below those pinnacles, the workers had been merciless in stripping off as much of that tourelle’s projecting ornament as they could reach, up to and including the gargoyles.

  The catch, of course, was that they couldn’t get to the outside of the building without scaffolding, so they had only been able to cut off seven of that tourelle’s eight gargoyles; the eighth and final gargoyle remained out of reach, perched on the tourelle’s most distant corner, where it leered across City Hall Park at the twin-domed, copper-corniced Park Row Building.

  But that was all going to change, and soon. Over the past week, the demo contractors had been brutally efficient in erecting scaffolding around the other three tourelles, building upward from the forty-ninth-story setback and then quickly stripping off all of those tourelles’ projecting terra cotta, including their gargoyles. This northeast tourelle was the last to receive its scaffolding.

  “At quitting time today, they’d reached the fifty-first or fifty-second story,” Dad said. He went to the low wall and pointed down. “Right there.”

  “Okay, so as long as you and Zev
and everybody get up here Sunday night—”

  “No, Sunday’s too late. In another half day, they’ll have the scaffolding up to the top and they’ll be stripping the rest of the tourelle.” He was bouncing in place on his toes again, trying to burn off some of his nervous energy. But his eyes never strayed from mine. “We have to get that gargoyle now. Tonight.”

  My throat felt like it was stuffed with a balled-up tube sock. I wanted to back Dad down with the power of my reasoning, the flash flood of my language, the way I sometimes could with kids at school. But just standing beside Dad, the force of him, so often rendered me inarticulate. His imminent disapproval was a weight I could never quite stop trying to push off me.

  In the end, all I could manage was a small, quiet question: “But how do you know they won’t save the gargoyle? The workers, I mean.”

  Dad made a clucking noise with his tongue. “How do I know?” He seemed amused by the question. “Because, son, demolition contractors are not subtle men. Demolish things is what they do.” He was on his knees by his duffel now, pulling out a nicked-up power saw of a size and shape I’d never seen before; it had a curved trigger and a very long blade with fierce teeth.

  “You know,” he told me, “the first terra-cotta casting I ever saved was a woman’s face some demo goons had half destroyed by hurling it down from a tenement in Yorkville; it’s the one I caught you monkeying with in my basement studio in the brownstone. And the second piece I rescued was an ox head I got off one of the most exquisite terra-cotta civic buildings ever put up in the city: the Produce Exchange, down by Bowling Green. They were repairing some of the open mortar joints or something, and the Exchange was all conveniently scaffolded, so I just moseyed on up there with some tools after dark one Saturday and pried that ox head right off. Brought it home on the subway in your sister’s stroller.”

  He blew some air through the space between his front teeth, a whistling sigh. “The fifth floor of that building was festooned with these absolutely stunning terra-cotta animal heads, and a couple years after I was up there, they tore the whole thing down and destroyed every last one of them. I never forgave myself for not rescuing more of them.”