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High Tide on the Hudson

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This week has turned out to be a blend of some work combined with a supremely enjoyable Manhattan stay-cation. Yesterday, my wife and I got to swim at a neighborhood pool we’d never been to before, as the tweet above shows. Then today, with the temps in the mid-70s, we rode our bikes up along the Hudson to our favorite beauty spot, Hudson Beach, and then a few blocks further up-river to the Little Red Lighthouse, which nestles under the Great Gray Bridge, aka the George Washington Bridge. 7 Lighthouse & Bridge

Like other great rivers such as the Chesapeake and the Columbia, the Hudson is a tidal body, flowing in to and out of the vast harbor of New York and what’s known as the Upper Bay. The tides make the Hudson ever-changing, one of the reasons it’s never boring to ride along its shore or study its contours. In moments of low tide, the shoreline will be exposed, leaving artifacts of NYC’s maritime past visible to the eye. Thus, times of low tide have made for very special rides in recent days and weeks. However, our ride today came at a time of high tide, as the pictures below will show. Moments of high tide make for a well-nigh overwhelming feeling of fullness, almost as if the river were in your lap as you gaze at it from the shore. High tide also brings a sense of the river’s prodigious power, as if one could practically be swept up in to it and borne away by its swells. That was the feeling we had today, almost as if we had made a visit to an ocean beach. Add to that feeling the fact that we rode more than nine miles in moderate temps under full sunshine amid brisk winds. The result was one of the best days of the whole summer 2013. Please click here to view all photos.

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Exploring the Little Red Lighthouse, a Manhattan Gem

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As readers of this blog will know, I admire the Great Gray Bridge, aka the George Washington Bridge–finding in it something like my own “beau motif (beautiful motif),” the words Cezanne used to describe Mont Sainte-Victoire, the Provencal peak he made the subject of at least 60 paintings. Not to liken my picture-taking or creativity to the work of the French master, but as I imagine MS-V was for him, the bridge is for me the ideal of an inexhaustible image. Much as my visual appetite thrives on it, I must add that I also admire its fated companion, the Little Red Lighthouse, an image of which from the time I began this blog I placed at the lower right corner on every page of the site. On the right-hand rail of the blog, under the heading “Foundational Posts” is a post I wrote early on called How This Blog Its Name, about these twinned NY landmarks.

If you’ve never had a close-up view of the two structures and aren’t certain where they are or how to see them for yourself, we’re talking about upper Manhattan on the island’s west side roughly level with what would be West 178th Street and the Hudson River. I get there on my bike, pedaling on good pavement along the river most of the way from my neighborhood around West 100th Street. The area can also be reached from Washington Heights, near 181st Street, and in both cases it’s accessible to walkers as well as cyclists. The forty-foot tall lighthouse–whose exterior is dotted with porthole windows and decked out in bright red enameled paint with a white cone and clear glass at the top–sits below the lower deck of the bridge, close to the monumental steel foot of the span’s eastern arch. According to a NYC Parks Dept web page, the two structures became most indelibly linked in the public imagination in the early 1940s, and even earlier in the city’s maritime history.15 LVD Roadway Here’s a lightly edited version of the Parks Dept. article:

“In the early 20th century, barge captains carrying goods up and down the Hudson demanded a brighter beacon. The [lighthouse] had been erected on Sandy Hook, New Jersey in 1880, where it used a 1,000 pound fog signal and flashing red light to guide ships through the night. It became obsolete and was dismantled [but not destroyed or discarded] in 1917. In 1921, the U.S. Coast Guard reconstructed this lighthouse on Jeffrey’s Hook [future site of the George Washington Bridge] in an attempt to improve navigational aids on the Hudson River. Run by a part-time keeper and furnished with a battery-powered lamp and a fog bell, the lighthouse, then known as Jeffrey’s Hook Lighthouse [the name since the early 1800s for the shelf of Manhattan schist that juts out in to the river right there], was an important guide to river travelers for ten years. The George Washington Bridge opened in 1931, and the brighter lights of the bridge again made the lighthouse obsolete. In 1948, the Coast Guard decommissioned the lighthouse, and its lamp was extinguished.

“The Coast Guard planned to auction off the lighthouse, but an outpouring of support for the beacon helped save it. The outcry from the public was prompted by the children’s book, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge, written by Hildegarde Swift and Lynd Ward in 1942. In the popular book, the Little Red Lighthouse is happy and content until a great bridge is built over it. In the end, the lighthouse learns that it still has an important job to do and that there is still a place in the world for an old lighthouse. The classic tale captured the imaginations of children and adults, many of whom wrote letters and sent money to help save the icon from the auction block.”

The Parks’ web page adds that in 1951 the Coast Guard gave the lighthouse and grounds to the City, and in 1979 the Little Red Lighthouse was officially added to the National Register of Historic Places. Refurbishments took place in 1986, when on the 65th anniversary the concrete foundation was restored, and in 2000 when it was repainted, true to its original shade of red.

In a real sense, the persistence of the lighthouse on the Manhattan shoreline is a product of one of the first episodes of “historic preservation” in the modern history of New York City. Too often, the city and posterity have been the loser in those battles, such as what ocurred in 1963, when–unaccountably to current-day New Yorkers–the old Penn Station was torn down. More recently, fixtures of the city’s industrial and maritime past other than the Little Red Lighthouse have been preserved, such as the old railroad car transfer at 60th Street and the Hudson, which I wrote about and photographed just a couple of days ago.

With all this as prologue, imagine my surprise yesterday when, on one of my bike rides up the Hudson to the bridge, on what turned out to be one of the most stupendously gorgeous days so far this summer, I suddenly spied people walking in and out of the lighthouse doorway–something I had never seen before! Seeing my surprise, a New York City Parks employee explained that in the warmer months, on the second Saturday of each month, they open the lighthouse to visitors. As I let down the kickstand on my old Trek and prepared to enter this maritime abode for the first time, another ranger in uniform greeted me and showed me and a second visitor a burnished brass key that she explained was for a long time used to open the lighthouse’s door. It was a chunky thing with big notches and looked like it weighed nearly a pound. In my eagerness, I neglected to take a picture of it, though I hope to do that the next time I visit, perhaps next month. Entering through the oval-topped door I found a nearly-dark chamber that looked like the lower decks of a ship or a submarine, with panels of thick riveted steel plates making up the walls. As I hope the pictures below help to show, the visitor encounters three spiral staircases with sturdy metal treads underfoot and a curved railing to help you climb up them. Between each flight of stairs, you can peer out the portholes that look south, toward lower Manhattan and Jersey City, and north, up-river toward Yonkers and the upper reaches of Palisade Park in New Jersey. Now, I’ll leave the rest of the storytelling to the photos I took and the captions I write for them.  I invite you to visit the little red lighthouse and the great gray bridge for yourself. They are vibrant links to our not so-remote industrial and maritime past.   Please click here to see the full photo gallery.

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Windy Day Podcast from Winter 2012

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I’m beginning to add podcasts to The Great Gray Bridge, using audio clips I create myself. Perhaps later I’ll begin interviewing people and/or using audio sourced from elsewhere. My friend and Web guru Harry Candelario, designer of this whole website, has helped me set this up with Audacity software and a site called InternetArchive.org, where I created an account to turn sound files from my IPod Touch–such as this 2-minute tape made during a bike ride last year on the day before Christmas, on what felt like the windiest day of the season. I earlier  covered the experience at this post with the photos I took and show it below in a screenshot–in to podcasts. I hope you enjoy this first one.Windiest day post

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Rainy Day Hudson River Bike Ride

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5 Hudson Gray BridgeKyle and I went for a nice bike ride late afternoon on Friday. It had been gray all day, and it rained a bit during our ride. That suited us fine as the light downpour made the bike paths in Riverside Park along the Hudson mostly empty. When we got out on the pier that projects out in to the river about even with 60th Street we stopped to look at the choppy water and took a few pictures.

The one above shows the Great Gray Bridge looking northward in to the distant mist. The looming black structure behind me in a couple of the shots below is the old transfer station that was for many decades used to convey railroad cars that had first been barged from the New Jersey shore over to Manhattan and then on to the tracks of the old Penn Central or New York Central Railroad. At one time, a lot of the goods required by Manhattanites were brought on to the island this way. The transfer station has drawn our eye and lens for years, and we appreciate that it’s even still standing. At one point, odious Donald Trump, who was developing the apartment houses also seen in these shots, wanted to banish it from the river, but wiser heads prevailed, preserving a key link to our not so-remote industrial and maritime past.
Please click here to view all photos in this post.

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A Hot & Sunny Day in Manhattan, 1939

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On Facebook longtime friend Martha Moran has shared this timeless film of a Manhattan tour from 1939, remastered in bright, vibrant color by the excellent Romano-Archives. You can view the 3-minute film below, or via this link posted by Eric Larson at mashable.com, @_ericlarson on Twitter. For this post I’ve made two screenshots of favorite images from it. One shows a theater marquee in Harlem where they were evidently screening W.C. Fields’ “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man,” my favorite movie comic. Oddly, it anticipates the compressed spellings mandated by today’s social media, as the narrow marquee reads, “U Can’t Cheat a Honest Man.” It reads like a tweet. The second screenshot is of the #5 bus, a route I still use regularly in Manhattan. I consider it my personal “scenic drive” as for part of its route it cruises along Riverside Drive, affording splendid views of the Hudson River. It must have been glorious in 1939, when it was a double-decker bus with an elegant curving stairway that conveyed passengers to the upper deck!I suggest that at the very end you notice all the big ships docked at piers on the west side of Manhattan. This reminds me of a line in one of my favorite S.J. Perelman humor sketches, where a woman tells the narrator she’s waiting to pay him a debt “until my ship comes in,” whereupon he retorts with, “I’ll be watching the shipping news,” a reference to the ubiquitous maritime tables that newspapers used to print every day. Thanks for this to Martha Moran.
Fields film# 5 bus

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Some Early Spring Hudson River Views

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Looking northward to the GGBFollowing many days of late winter gloom and cold winds off the Hudson River where I regularly ride my bike things brightened up a bit today. With temps edging over 50 degrees and light to moderate winds, I wasn’t forced to don the usual gear I’ve been wearing on my rides since the fall. More lightly clad than usual, I pedaled north along the river, stopping for a break about even with 140th Street. Perched atop an old picnic table I read my current book, Heretics: Adventures With the Enemies of Science by British journalist Will Storr; phoned my sister to wish her a happy Passover; and took these pics of the Hudson and the Jersey side of the river. Even with the noticeable warming, there were still a lot gray, glowering clouds hanging low in the sky, but maybe now we’re in for a spell of fair weather. Please click here to see all photos from my bike ride.

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NYC Sandhog Trapped in Quicksand Rescued from Treacherous 2nd Avenue Subway Tunnel

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MTA photoFirefighters and emergency workers went to extraordinary lengths to rescue the construction worker I tweeted about earlier, mired as he was in a veritable pool of quicksand 100 feet under Second Avenue and 95th Street in Manhattan. In addition to the NY Times article by reporters Matt Flegenheimer and Marc Santora, the latter also appears in a video at the Times site discussing the incident, and there’s a graphic (below) that shows the unusual configuration below ground that led to the peril for the worker. From the article:

[Joseph Barone] became trapped midway between two entrance points used by construction workers, a distance of about 150 feet.
The situation was complicated by the fact that Mr. Barone was pinned at an awkward angle beneath plywood that had sunk into the mud with him. While some stretches of tunnel south of 96th Street have been poured over with concrete, according to the authority, the area where the worker lost his footing remains muck-filled.
Above him were two heavy bars used to brace the walls of the tunnel.
“The first units who got there were concerned about him slipping down more, so they got him roped up,” Chief Hayde said.
With the ropes slung over the struts, initial attempts to simply pull Mr. Barone out of the muck failed.
“There was a tremendous amount of suction pulling him down,” Chief Hayde said. . . .
Rescue workers considered using a cofferdam—essentially a plywood box, which would be constructed around Mr. Barone—but decided that in order to do so, they would have to detach him from the ropes, which they feared could result in his sinking entirely.
So firefighters also dug by hand, trying to scoop out two handfuls of muck for each one that seeped back in.
All the while, Lieutenant Goyenechea tried to keep Mr. Barone talking. He asked about his family, his favorite sports team and how he had come to be stuck.
Mr. Barone said he had simply lost his footing, and once his leg was trapped, there was little he could do.
The Rev. Stephen Harding, a chaplain with the Fire Department, said he was summoned to the scene to provide support to the emergency workers. But after spending over three hours above ground, he said, he asked to be escorted into the tunnel.
There were scores of emergency personnel, he said, covered in grime as they struggled to free Mr. Barone in the dim light. Mr. Harding approached, carefully, and extended his hand to grasp Mr. Barone’s. He could barely make out the worker’s face, which was caked in mud, he said. But a voice emerged.
“He said, ‘I’m hanging in,’ ” Mr. Harding recalled. “And I just held his hand.”
Subway graphic

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Two NYC Mayors, Falsely Lionized/Part II

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Since last October when I wrote about what I view as the false lionization of New York City mayors Bloomberg and Giuliani by much of the national media, I’ve kept an eye out for stories of their conduct in office that underscores the points I made in that post last fall, when I wrote this paragraph:

“As mayor, Rudolph Giuliani was a daily irritant in the city, continually choosing confrontation over conciliation, seldom missing a chance to stoke the embers of urban enmity–between the police and the people; black and white citizens; between Manhattanites and residents in the other boroughs. On and on it went, year after year. When Abner Louima was sodomized by members of the NYPD, a word of apology never crossed that mayor’s lips. The same was true when Amadou Diallo was shot by police. Giuliani picked fights with museums and routinely showed contempt for free speech and free expression. It was like being trapped in a room with an unremittingly argumentative neighbor.”

I go on to say that after 9/11 it was as if national reporters hadn’t ever read one of the reams of story on Rudy’s meanness and divisiveness. Please note, it was often different for many hometown NY-based reporters, who tended to cover his high drama hijinks more honestly. So I perked right up today, when I saw this tweet from NY Times reporter Michael Powell::


 

I’ve now read that story, co-bylined with reporter Ross Buettner, headlined “In Matters Big and Small, Crossing Giuliani Had a Price,” in which they reported on the mayor’s vindictiveness in striking back at people he considered his enemies. As stated in the tweet, one of the people against whom Giuliani unleashed one of his many vendettas was Richard Murphy, whose recent death, marked this week by a NYT obituary, probably prompted Powell to tweet about the still pertinent article, a litany of abuse of power and petty payback in which Giuliani administration officials painted Mr. Murphy–formerly a youth services advocate in the administration of Mayor Dinkins, preceding Guliani–as corrupt, though there was no basis for this insinuation. They even bad-mouthed him to a prospective employer in California, a job he then wasn’t offered. From the 2008 article:

“I was soiled merchandise—the taint just lingers,’ Mr. Murphy said in a recent interview. Not long after, a major foundation recruited Mr. Murphy to work on the West Coast. The group wanted him to replicate his much-honored concept of opening schools at night as community centers. A senior Giuliani official called the foundation—a move a former mayoral official confirmed on the condition of anonymity for fear of embarrassing the organization—and the prospective job disappeared. ‘He goes to people and makes them complicit in his revenge,’ Mr. Murphy said.”

As for Mayor Bloomberg, even while supporting some of his initiatives, such as his advocacy of stricter gun regulations and the installation of more bike lanes around the city, his anti-democratic hubris in arranging city law to permit himself a third term continues to place him under a cloud. His State of the City address last week was a model of Bloombergian megalomania, with the Brooklyn Nets cheerleaders dancing before he took to the podium, where pennants and balloons festooned the Barclays Center. The colossally nervy message of his speech, according to this Feb. 13 NYT article, was that after he leaves his office, the city may be taken over by special interests, as if we’ve been free of them the past decade he’s held office.

“In an unabashed and relentless tribute to his own municipal stewardship, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Thursday declared victory over 12 years of ‘obstructionists’ and ‘naysayers’ who sought to block his vision for New York City, and warned that an era of political independence might leave City Hall when he did. From the floor of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn—itself a monument to his ambitious and controversial development agenda—Mr. Bloomberg delivered his final State of the City address with a vow not to retreat into a state of ribbon-cutting resignation. . . . ‘The special interests and campaign donors have never had less power than they’ve had over the past 11 years,’ he said, alluding to his ability, because of his personal wealth, to refuse campaign donations. ‘And this year, we’re going to show them just how true that is . . . . ‘Given all the politics and special interests, if we don’t do it this year, it may never get done,’ he said of his proposed rezoning plan for the area around Grand Central Terminal, intended to encourage the construction of modern towers.”

So, a mayor who’s been a ceaseless proponent of ever-more development and an ally of to real estate interests, claims the city may suffer once his stewardship ends. To this malarkey, I echo these comments, quoted in the story on the Barclays Center extravaganz:

“’He still doesn’t understand that the city was here before him and will be here after he leaves,’ said Bill de Blasio, the public advocate and a Democratic candidate for mayor. ‘I heard a lot of creating temples to his greatness.’”

While I believe that the media have often contributed to the false lionization of these mayors, I am grateful to reporters Powell and Buettner, and the Timesmen who wrote the story on the State of the City speech, Michael M. Grynbaum and Michael Barbaro.

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