The Water Log

Our Town downtown
November 20, 2006

Lonely seaside watercolors in a lonely seaside gallery

I’ve been at the office late at night, drinking Red Bull to the non-sound of sleeping computers, I’ve eaten at an Indian restaurant at 5 p.m. and been the only object of a hovering waiter’s attention, and last season I went to a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden.
But I have never felt as alone in Manhattan as I did last Tuesday afternoon, as I wandered the deserted one-room gallery at 241 Water Street, gazing at one after another lonely watercolor by renowned painter Barbara Ernst Prey.
One of Ernst’s paintings hangs in the White House, and she is the only living American painter with a work on exhibit at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. She has been called “maybe the most widely viewed painter in the world” by the New Yorker. But not here, at the Seaman’s Church Institute.
“We’re kind of off the beaten path,” says a middle-aged man who greeted me at the front desk. “If we were in SoHo…”
It is not only the three empty tables and twelve empty chairs set up for lively discussion that made me feel so eerily alone, it was the paintings themselves.
In thirty-five paintings depicting seaside life in Maine, there are only two human figures. Both are fishermen in coveralls. One, the subject of a large portrait called “The Mender,” is repairing a fishing net. His features are unformed and his eyes are obscured beneath thr brim of a baseball cap, which is covered by the hood of a sweatshirt. The other, a mere half-inch in height, is leaning away from the viewer, over the side of his fishing boat in a miniature painting maybe six by eight inches.
A theme that ties many of the paintings together is that humans are deliberately absent, a tactic that may stem from the first painting Ernst did after 9/11. Titled “Ladies in Red,” the watercolor depicts two empty red chairs overlooking the water. Their occupants would not be returning.
But this series, “Works on Water,” is not meant to be sad. In an interview with a cultural correspondent for the L.A. Times, Ernst said of her inanimate subjects: “Oftentimes I know the people. Or, if it is a house, I know the people who live inside. So for me it is a type of portrait, it’s not just the house. It’s the personal connection to the house.”
The portrait is more universal without a human image, Prey has explained. Human figures would become the focal point and, in Prey’s words, “stop the viewer.”
Still, the paintings with no people can be sad, and a little unnerving.
There is not a whole lot of difference between “Ladies in Red” and “Family Portrait,” in which six empty red chairs, and a footrest and a table, are clustered on a hilltop under a white sky. Five are facing the same direction; the sixth is askew, as if its occupant got up in a hurry and almost knocked it over. The family may be on their way back home after a playful afternoon picnic. Or – the white sky and the nearly toppled chair make it hard to avoid thinking it – their chairs may be empty for a more macabre reason.
There is not the ominous undertone in the painting “Early Risers” that can be felt in “Family Portrait,” and yet the two empty chairs half-facing each other on a front porch, where two early risers will presumably soon be sitting, comprise an isolating image. The warm yellow lights are on in the house in the foreground, and two quilts blow on a clothesline out back, so all appears to be well, but the viewer is cut off from what must be a cozy breakfast scene inside. We are not allowed even a glimpse through the lit windows.
The result is that the viewer is left with a vague kind of yearning to be connected to the people inside, to know more about them, especially what’s keeping them from occupying their places in their chairs or . The lack of personal connection makes us linger long in front of each painting, and the loneliness that it provokes stays with us long after we have left the gallery.
As I passed the suits on lunch break, and descended into the subway, my heart was still in my throat. Maybe I was still getting over the unusual feeling of having been all alone for over an hour in silence broken only by a faraway vacuum cleaner, or maybe I was still worrying over the six empty red chairs.

Posted by Tucker at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments

Reporting to you from the River Styx

Our Town downtown
October 6, 2006

It seems a strange and distant land, Staten Island. Like those big ferries disappearing across the dark river into the night might be captained by Charon and headed for Hades. The Hudson, after all, bears some similarity to the mythical River Styx, which was so foul that gods forced to drink the river’s water would lose their voice for nine years.
But with a notable exception in 2003 when the ferry operator crashed into the dock, the five ferry boats that take people away from the South Ferry Terminal in Manhattan always bring them back – 70,000 every day.
We talked to four.

5:23 p.m.
Bridget, a young woman who grew up on S.I. and got a job at the MetroTech Center in Brooklyn five months ago, is sitting on a low window ledge at the Whitehall Terminal in Manhattan near the big glass doors that will open when the ferry arrives.
Q: How long does your commute take, including the subway ride?
A: An hour and a half.
Q: So do you get up obscenely early?
A: Pretty much. Five forty-five. It sucks. I’m moving to Long Island soon. That commute’s going to suck, too.
Q: What’s annoying about the ferry?
A: Getting on and off is bad. The crowd, pushing through.
Q: Has the ferry improved since you were a kid?
A: Yeah, it’s gotten better in the last two years. [Whitehall terminal] is brighter, more supervised. I don’t feel nervous here. Before, it just wasn’t well lit or clean. Plus it just looks nicer.
Q: Do you sit inside or stand outside on the deck?
A: I sit inside. The tourist are outside, getting their photos. It’s an event for them. It’s a commute for us.
Q: Do you ever worry it’ll crash again?
A: When you hear it docking, it always makes that noise, and you never really know what’s going on.

5:36 p.m.
Anthony, wearing a leather jacket and reading the Daily News, usually takes the express bus from midtown. He’s lived on S.I. for 16 years.
Q: How come you’re taking the ferry today?
A: To avoid getting stuck in traffic. When I want to play it safe, I take this and then the train.
Q: You’re feeling safe today?
A: Well I knew I needed to get home at a certain time. This is usually pretty consistent, although on a good [traffic] day, the bus and the ferry are about the same.
Q: How long does your commute take?
A: An hour and twenty minutes.
Q: Do you find people on the ferry more willing to strike up a conversation than commuters on the subway or bus?
A: Maybe the ferry has more of a crowd of people being sociable. More tourists.
Q: When is your favorite time of year to ride the ferry?
A: In between seasons, like this, when it’s nice out.

5:40
Robert, a student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, sits by the exit so he can get off the ferry quickly and onto the Staten Island Railroad. His commute takes him two hours each way.
Q: What do you do during your two-hour commute?
A: Enjoy the scenery, listen to my CD player, read the newspaper.
Q: Do you ever talk to people?
A: I usually keep to myself. I sit toward the end, as you can see, so I can get a good spot on the train.
Q: Have you lived anywhere else in the city?
A: Brooklyn, yeah, but then my father moved to Staten Island.
Q: How does Staten Island compare?
A: I like Brooklyn better, but I guess it’s adjustable.
Q: Compared to the subway, how efficient is the ferry?
A: Well it’s direct transportation, going from one place to the next. With the subway, you have all these stops.

6:06
Mike is going from Staten Island to Manhattan to party with his friends. He’ll take the ferry back later tonight.
Q: You’re one of the few local people out on the deck.
A: I get claustrophobic. I’m inside for two minutes, I gotta come out. I’m outside, I go back in. That’s how I always was in school, too.
Q: Do you ever worry about the ferry crashing again?
A: Yeah, ever since that incident, when the ferry hit an iceberg or something… I’m thinking of the Titanic, I think. If something happened I’d probably swim about 30 yards, then I’d sink. I’d take one of those parachutes with me. Those, you know, life jackets.

Posted by Tucker at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments

Our Town downtown
October 30, 2006

Noisy and foul? Smells like a skate park

Under the Manhattan Bridge, next to the Pathmark that is Manhattan’s largest grocery store, a skeleton is rising on the waterfront. It looks like it might be a boathouse. It’s not. The city is building a storage facility where it can stockpile salt in the winter to spread on snowy streets.
Necessary? Probably. Exciting? Not at all.
The concrete scraps of land under our majestic bridges have always served as the receptacles for the things that none of us wants in our backyard.
The Brooklyn Bridge overpass is so out-of-the-way that a cache of emergency supplies from the Cold War era was found only this year inside the bridge’s foundation. Where else in Manhattan could you store water drums, paper blankets and hundreds of thousands of crackers for decades without anyone’s noticing?
Currently, much of the area under the bridge is a fenced-off parking space for city vehicles. Where the bridge comes out of the ground, it still smells like piss and graffiti adorns every surface. That’s what makes it the only possible location for the city’s most storied and influential skate spot: the Brooklyn Banks.
The Banks, near the intersection of Pearl Street and Robert Wagner Place, is about thirty percent smaller than it was in its heyday, after the Parks Department renovated the area in 2004 and took some of the land for a park – the green kind, not the skate kind. But it still draws a daily crew from high-schoolers just hitting puberty to guys in their early twenties, who roll down to the Banks on skateboards, BMX bikes and roller blades.
When the park closed for renovations in 2004, “we just terrorized the city,” says Chino, a 22-year-old “street rider” and father of two. Street riders are BMX bikers whose bikes are specially equipped to ride rails, ledges and stairs – and have no brakes.
“You’ll know the spots we been in because all the ledges are black and chipped,” says Chino. The gashes in the side of the rectangular ledge at the Banks, which the street riders like to grind, make it easy to understand why street riders are considered nuisances and terminally shooed off the streets by the police.
Riding in a park designed for them may seem like less of a rush than riding the streets, but the street riders keep it interesting with breakneck stunts, like riding forwards up the sloped brick bank and then coming down full-speed backwards (no helmets), and by making their own changes to the terrain.
“Let’s go find wood,” says one street rider to the others, who then head north and disappear. I imagine it’s some sort of street lingo. No, Chino explains, they’re actually going to look for a flat piece of plywood they can lay over the stairs to complete their homemade ramp.
What they like best about the Banks has little to do with its setup. Says Scott, a 17-year-old street rider also known as “the one-inch Korean,” the best thing about the Banks is that “nobody kicks you out.”
That’s the beauty of down-under-the-overpass. Developers who will fight tooth and nail for waterfront property on this island have not thought of looking here. Yet.
“We get kicked out of everywhere,” shrugs Max, a 17-year-old skateboarder and student at Friends Seminary. Everywhere but here, the Manhattan Bridge Skatepark that opened last summer in the cavernous, deserted underbelly of the bridge. It’s even more deserted than the Banks. There’s no one around to kick them out, no one to make sure they don’t enter after dusk through a rolled-back section of fencing.
To find the park, follow the bridge through Chinatown past hundreds of food stalls, through cobblestone alleyways and past fenced-off lots full of litter until you hear the slap of skateboards. You’re there, where Market Street would meet Monroe Street if the grid existed here.
The thundering of passing trains can get “annoying,” says Max, as can the waterfall that pours down when trains go by on rainy days, but these annoyances are less major than those at other parks. Like the basketball players at Tompkins Square or the BMX bikers at the Banks.
On a nice day, a hundred kids do ollies over the flat-top pyramid, grind the rails, or sit and watch on the concrete steps that smell like piss, in front of a backdrop of water-stained rock face maybe 150 feet high criss-crossed by bare piping and topped by the bridge. It’s colossal and industrial and straight out of a movie, but the skaters are casual about it.
“Street spots are better,” says Max, because there’s “an endless amount of it.”
The park is called “one of the worst places on the planet” on a skateboarding website.
That’s why it’s theirs.

Posted by Tucker at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments