Downtown: My Manhattan

by Pete Hamill

  If they are lucky, the new immigrants will get to know New York the way so many others did, long ago. They will discover that the easiest way to know this place is to start at the beginning. That is, to go on foot to Downtown. They will walk its streets. They will recognize its ruins and monuments. They will inhale the dust of the past. They will celebrate living in a place that is filled with people who are not, on the surface, like them. They will stroll with their children across the Brooklyn Bridge and see the spires of Oz gilded by morning sun.

  Such experiences need not be limited to the newcomers in the city. Sadly, too many third- and fourth-generation children of the old European migration don’t know much about the city that helped make their lives possible. This is as true of Denver as it is of New York. The tale is not taught in any powerful way in most public schools. The culture of television has deepened passivity, discouraging the active search for understanding. But true students, driven by simple curiosity, can still find the places where their grandparents or great-grandparents once struggled for them without even knowing their names. In New York, the student (of whatever age) can enter the surviving streets, gaze at the tenements, visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and embrace the story. In New York, most of that old narrative took place Downtown.

  So does the newer narrative. All around Downtown, the new immigrants can be seen today, literally from morning to night. They are working on the reconstruction of old buildings. They are delivering Chinese or Thai or Italian food through snowstorms. They are preparing sandwiches in Korean delicatessens. They are cooking in restaurants. They are taking their young American children to their American schools. And late on Saturday nights in summer, when so many windows are open to the cooling air, the stroller can hear familiar music in unfamiliar languages, those aching ballads of loss and regret.

  Chapter Two

  The First Downtown

  BEFORE THERE WAS a Downtown, there was the harbor. It is the reason for the city’s existence and remains the liquid heart of the city.

  The word harbor itself implies safety and welcome, what Bob Dylan once called shelter from the storm, and that is the way I always feel in its immense watery presence. On days of gray drizzle or dazzling October sun, I often wander to the Battery, to the place where all of this started not that long ago. On those visits, I’m part of a kind of international fiesta. Americans of all generations mingle with tourists from France and Germany and Japan and other nations of the world, people who believe New York is one of their treasures too.

  “Look, Jimmy,” says a woman from Minnesota to a teenage boy. “Right out there? You see that island just past the Statue of Liberty? That’s Ellis Island, Jimmy. That’s where your great-grandfather landed when he came from Germany.”

  A dozen feet away, a French couple peers across the water at the Statue of Liberty, the man with field glasses, the woman with a camera. I hear the name Bartholdi, the French sculptor who designed it. I hear the words Alsace-Lorraine, where Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi was born in 1834. The full conversation is blown away in the breeze.

  The overheard talk along the promenade always contains the same proper nouns: Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, and New York. I wander through those twenty-three acres of our grassy little Babel, and no matter what the language, the tone is one of awe and embrace. Peddlers are everywhere, with Statue of Liberty ashtrays, cheap little versions of the statue made of tin and plastic, and photographs of the statue with the twin towers in the background, along with Statue of Liberty T-shirts and jackets and pamphlets. But the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World (its full title) seems forever safe from kitsch.

  “What do you think?” I ask a bearded well-dressed man in his thirties, who turns out to be an architect from Bologna.

  He smiles. “In every modern way,” he says in excellent English, “we should laugh at it. But we don’t, because it’s beautiful. In spite of everything, it’s beautiful. Because the emotion is beautiful.”

  Before all of us lies the Upper Bay, five miles long, three miles wide, in many places fifty feet deep. It is one of the great natural harbors of the world, protected from the open sea and yet part of that sea too. The water gives off the pervasive odor of salt, for while one powerful river flushes the Upper Bay each day from the north, and smaller ones feed it from the Jersey shores, the sea also rolls in on ceaseless tides. It moves up through the Hudson for miles.

  I don’t go to the Battery with hopes for adventure. I go in search of the familiar. Like many New Yorkers, I’m a creature of habit. I usually walk directly to the railing of the Admiral George Dewey Promenade, a name that no New Yorker ever uses, and I face the harbor. Almost always, I’m alone among strangers. There are many New York places where I prefer solitude: any museum, the pedestrian ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge, and here, where my city began. Sometimes I lose myself in counting waves on days when the wind is blowing in from the west and I can hear those waves breaking with a growling whoosh upon the granite seawalls. I look up at the flocks of seabirds, urban and sly, locked in a perpetual reconnaissance, rising, swooping, forever searching. Occasionally, I even see a falcon, fresh from a nest in one of the skyscrapers, alive again in the New York sky after years of death from chemicals. Flags, on their orderly flagpoles, are slapped and flopped by the breeze. On the wide lawns, kids eat ice-cream cones. Lovers hold hands. Solitary old men sit on benches, reading newspapers or watching the young with melancholy eyes. About once a year, I try a hot dog, in hope of recovering a lost pleasure of my childhood. They are always terrible, but I’m sure it’s me, not the hot dogs. So I retreat into passive observation. The Staten Island ferry, all orange and squat, slides with surprising grace into its mooring, like a caravel on steroids. On some days I pass the hawkers of souvenirs, many of them now from Nigeria or Senegal, and think of those first Africans who arrived here in chains on the second Dutch ship in 1626.

  In some unplanned way, part of the Battery is now a necropolis. Here we can pause and remember the dead of various wars and other calamities, or we can move past them in an indifferent hurry. The largest monument to the dead is the East Coast Memorial, dedicated to the 4,601 servicemen who died in the Atlantic coastal waters during World War II, defending, among many other places, the Port of New York. Visitors stand before each of eight huge granite slabs, examining the carved lists of the names divided by branch of service. “I had an uncle in the marines, died in the Pacific,” a middle-aged woman said one afternoon. “I never knew him, but I’ve seen his pictures for years. He’s not here, I guess. The Pacific, that’s where he died. Not the Atlantic.” Then she shook her head. “It’s so damn sad.” She glanced at the names of all the dead young Americans and walked away. A marker explains that the memorial was dedicated by President John F. Kennedy on May 23, 1963. Six months later, he was dead too.

  The park holds other memorials. There’s one for the wireless operators who died doing their work, including a man who went down on the Titanic. One is a gift to the American people from the sailors and merchant mariners of Norway, who used New York as a home port while the Nazis occupied their homeland. The Hope Garden is filled with rosebushes to memorialize those who live with HIV or have died from AIDS. Down near the ferry terminal is the US Coast Guard Memorial, erected in 1947, showing two young men helping a third, who is badly wounded. The Korean War has its black obelisk with the stainless steel outline of a soldier cut into the polished granite, disembodied, faceless, epitomizing the Forgotten War. There’s even one honoring the Salvation Army.

  The most original lies thirty feet out in the water south of Pier A. This is the American Merchant Mariners Memorial by Marisol Escobar (1991), and I’ve seen nothing like it anywhere else. It’s made of bronze and stainless steel, and shows merchant seamen on the tilted deck of a sinking raft. One seaman is kneeling. A second is shouting for aid. A third is on his belly, reaching into the water for the extended hand of a drowning man. The rescuer’s hand falls short by less than an inch. At
high tide in the harbor, the drowning man vanishes below the water. The simplicity of the conception includes the repetition of the tides, coming and going day after day, traveling from the hope for life to the certainty of death. Sometimes, Escobar says, there are no happy endings.

  The most powerful memorial, in some ways, is also the most unplanned. It is the large sphere by German sculptor Fritz Koenig that stood for almost thirty years in the plaza of the World Trade Center. It was battered, twisted, and torn on September 11, 2001, but not destroyed. The ruptured parts have been reassembled here with all of their wounds showing, while an eternal flame burns before it on a patch of earth. Hundreds of visitors pause each day before this fiercely eloquent symbol of the city’s worst calamity, the monument itself an alloy of various metals, and of past and present.

  On most days, the park is noisy with people who are indifferent to the memorials. They are too busy being young. They erupt into heart-stopping stunts on skateboards. They walk on their hands to impress girls. They smoke cigarettes. They hug each other, pet each other, and tell lies that are thousands of years old. Sometimes they even lean together on the railings and gaze out at the water.

  Walking around the Battery, I know I’m almost always on landfill. All twenty-three acres of Battery Park were placed there by human beings, starting with the seventeenth-century Dutch. Beneath the trimmed grass surface lie the granite bones of today’s park: boulders, clusters of rock, small reefs. Over the years the landfill even closed the gap with the old red sandstone fortress now called Castle Clinton. This was built in 1811 on a small man-made island a hundred yards off shore, with the sea serving as a kind of moat. At the time, tensions with the British were building toward war, and Castle Clinton was part of a system intended to defend the harbor. But the War of 1812 never came to New York. Before, during, and after that war, the Battery remained a zone of tranquillity.

  In some ways, toward the end of day, the zone also feels washed with sadness. One monument is missing down here, one that should memorialize all those nameless women who came here to deal with loss. Down here, in the age of sail, wives and lovers often came to the shore to pray for the return of their seagoing men, many of whom never came back. They waited here for men who had gone off to war. Sometimes I can feel their melancholy presence and the sadder ghosts of those women who became reluctant prostitutes. With husbands gone or dead, they were forced in a hard world to do what they felt was necessary if they were to feed and shelter their children. Charity was elusive; there was no such thing as state welfare; jobs for women were almost nonexistent. So they accepted the stigma and the shame, trusting that God would be more forgiving than self-righteous human beings, and in all weathers they moved around the trees of the Battery. Across the 117 years of the British colony, they were here, servicing British officers and soldiers and various bewigged worthies. They were here long after the triumph of the American Revolution. They should be remembered too.

  In all seasons now, tourists cluster to the simple old circular fort, picking up maps and leaflets or buying excursion tickets. The most curious visitors learn about the way this old fortress served as a clearinghouse for immigrants from 1855 to 1890, before the opening of Ellis Island, or how P. T. Barnum created a sensation in 1850 when he imported Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, to give a concert within the fort, whose name was then Castle Garden. I first saw the building in 1941, the last year of its existence as the New York Aquarium, a place filled with imprisoned squid and sharks and other ferocious creatures of the deep. That day, too, my mother held my hand.

  From certain spots along the promenade, you can see the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the last of the city’s great suspension bridges (opened in November 1964). It serves now as a kind of man-made visual border announcing to arriving vessels that they have entered the harbor of New York and to those departing that they have left the home precincts of Oz. I’ve sailed on transatlantic liners in both directions, and from the top decks, as you pass under the bridge, you feel as if you can reach out and touch it. The span passes over the mile-wide channel called the Narrows, connecting the Brooklyn end of Long Island to Staten Island, and I remember being told as a boy during the war that a steel mesh had been strung across this passage, hidden below the surface, to block any Nazi U-boats with dastardly notions of creating havoc in our harbor. Ships could pass over it, but no submarine could pass under it. That news thrilled me, as did the knowledge that we had antiaircraft guns too, in Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn and Fort Wadsworth in Staten Island, aimed out at the Atlantic, and others on rolling tracks carved into the hills above the meadows of Prospect Park. Of one thing we were certain: Hitler and Göring would never get away with attacking our harbor and the great city that it served. Nobody would. This was a harbor. All harbors were safe. Or so we believed.

  Out past the Narrows and its bridge lies the Lower Bay, another roughly one hundred square miles of water that leads from the open sea into the harbor. Both the Upper and Lower bays are part of the same system, and the Lower Bay is bounded by Sandy Hook, a curving five-mile-long sand spit seventeen miles south of the Narrows. For centuries, mariners have approached New York and seen Sandy Hook and followed its curving shape into the harbor. Even today, in the age of jetliners, the familiar channels of entry and departure are better known to some seagoing people than our streets and avenues. And the harbor itself is busy in a new way. We are an island now served by almost thirty ferry lines, like sleeker, more powerful versions of vanished craft from the nineteenth century. Pleasure craft follow the channels, seen and unseen. From the Battery I can’t see that distant Lower Bay, but I can sense its existence sometimes in the liquid shimmer of the distant Atlantic sky.

  On any given day at the Battery, I can see arriving freighters scabbed with old paint or powdery with rust. They move across the surface of the Upper Bay and turn to their left into the piers of New Jersey or continue past the tip of Manhattan into the North River, heading for Albany or Troy.

  I am part of the last New York generation that calls the lower Hudson by its older name, the North River. A man across the street from us in Brooklyn once worked at Pier 1, North River, which was already gone when I met him, and other neighbors commuted each dawn to the elite piers of the passenger liners. In those days, there were seventy-five piers jutting from the island all the way to Fifty-ninth Street; today only thirteen are left. When as a boy I first heard the North River named in the accents of Brooklyn, I thought they were talking about the Nought River and wondered why it would bear such a title. Today, with all those vanished piers, that version of the river’s true name seems fitting at last. As the plain North River, it passes all of Manhattan and doesn’t become the Hudson to old New Yorkers until it passes north of the Tappan Zee Bridge.

  I would learn later that the name connects us to the earliest years of the city. It was given to the river by the Dutch, not because it moved north to the fabled (and nonexistent) Northwest Passage to Asia, but because the early Dutch colonizers worked on two principal rivers. One was the Delaware, which they called the South River, and the other was the lordly Hudson, which was crucial to their northern settlement of New Netherland. The northern river is short by the standards of great rivers: a mere 350 miles long from its source in the Adirondacks. Still, it is a superb river. Geologists tell us that the Hudson and the North River were surely cut by a glacier through the frozen world that existed many centuries before history. The grinding power of that glacier was, of course, enormous. When the river passes Manhattan, where the glacier cut the sheer cliffs of the Palisades on the Jersey side, the depth is almost sixty feet. The ancient river channel itself moves out past the Narrows another sixty-odd miles into the Atlantic, suggesting to some geologists that it was once a longer, deeper river in a world where all oceans were much lower.

  And there was much other history, all of it younger than the tale of the river. Some of it inadvertently revealed something of the city’s later spirit. When Giovanni da Verrazzano* ar
rived at the Narrows in the middle of April 1524, after a voyage of more than fifty days, he sensed the power and surge of the underwater river and assumed that the harbor was a vast lake. He was a Florentine who sailed out of the French port of Dieppe and that year he was thirty-eight years old. As captain of the three-masted La Dauphine, he was in the employ of the French king, Francis I, who had enormous respect for Florentines, having given employment and shelter to Leonardo da Vinci in the artist-engineer’s final years (Leonardo died in 1519). The purpose of the voyage of La Dauphine was to find that elusive Northwest Passage to the silks and spices of Asia, and to claim any unclaimed lands for France. Verrazzano failed in both tasks, but he did become the first European to find the great harbor. On July 8, he wrote a report to Francis I and described what he saw:

  As we were riding at anchor in a good berth, we would not venture up in our vessel without a knowledge of the mouth. Therefore we took the boat, and entering the river, we found the country on its banks well peopled, the inhabitants . . . being dressed out with feathers from birds of different colors. They came toward us with evident delight, raising loud shouts of admiration.

  The Indians were almost certainly Lenape. In the following year, another visitor came through the Narrows from the world beyond the horizon. His name was Esteban Gomez, a black Portuguese sea captain who was searching for gold and silver or that elusive Northwest Passage. He returned the hospitality of the Indians by taking fifty-seven of them as slaves and hurrying off to peddle them in the slave markets of Lisbon. Then for a long time there were no recorded visits from strangers. A few shipwrecked sailors might have reached Lenape country, or the odd fur trader, or confused travelers headed north or south. But essentially, for more than eighty years after the Gomez visit there was no news of any kind. Then, on September 12, 1609, an English seaman named Henry Hudson sailed a Dutch ship called the Halve Maen (Half Moon) into the harbor. Again, the local Indians were reasonably friendly. But Hudson kidnapped two of them for display back in Amsterdam, and when he reached Albany and the river narrowed and he knew there was no Northwest Passage, he turned back. One of the Indian prisoners died, the other escaped, and word spread on the island known as Manna-hata that these white people could not be trusted. Hudson departed swiftly under a shower of angry arrows.