Thursday, April 19, 2007

The 5-Ton Underdog


Our Town downtown

April 23, 2007

For two days, a baby whale stuck in the Gowanus Canal was New York’s Rudy
I wander past the DO NOT ENTER signs into Sunset Industrial Park in Brooklyn as Tuesday fades into evening, just in time to miss all the action.
A small truck, property of the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research & Preservation, is pulling out. A woman in a red windbreaker who looks like she was born to save whales rolls down the window in response to my knock. She fields my questions in the pauses of her cell phone conversation, hands me a brochure for the Riverhead Foundation, says she’ll be back at first light tomorrow and we part ways.
I don’t know where I’m going, exactly. The guys at the lumberyard a few blocks away, where I first trespassed, told me that yes, they had seen the whale earlier, and yes, he was still popping up every now and again, and yes, there was a way to get out onto the pier, but that the entrance was probably closed at this hour.
But Sunset Industrial Park, at 20th Street and the Gowanus Canal, never really closes, which is disturbing when you think of it from a national security perspective but lucky if you want to see a whale.
A Hasidic Jew is walking aggressively, talis flying out behind him, on a path that will intersect mine.
“Where is the whale?” he wants to know. “My neighbor tells me I have to come out and I will really see something.”
Around the corner? I pick up my pace so we can walk together.
We pass Pepsi trucks and SoBe trucks and trucks that carry either shredders or shredded office documents, and find ourselves on the end of the pier, with a clear view of the concrete-carrying tanker I recognize from television footage shot earlier that day.
There’s a young guy there, shuffling his feet and talking to his editor on his cell phone. This is Jimmy, the unofficial whale tour guide of the evening, a.k.a. a reporter from the Daily News.
He’s gotten good at giving the breakdown: Minke whale, 15 feet, probably disoriented, possibly by the storm, last sighting was over there, but he hasn’t surfaced in a good 45 minutes; earlier in the day there were divers, news copters, the whole nine yards.
As curious carfulls start rolling in after the evening news, Jimmy begins thanking people for coming, apologizing that the whale seems to have disappeared, offering cigarettes. The Hasidic Jew takes one; I take a drag of Jimmy’s.
“Thanks for having us,” laughs a real estate broker, then drives off.
Wednesday, I return to the pier around noon to find a man in a welding mask producing lots of sparks with a blowtorch. Save for that guy, the pier is deserted. The elusive whale has moved! – but only a few blocks north.
There’s a crowd gathered there at the sea wall, of warehouse workers and TV news crews and marine biologists and, on the far shore, tugboat operators – one still in his long underwear – to observe the first whale ever to brave the Gowanus Canal. Comparatively speaking, he’s a little guy (or she’s a little lady), whose back has been scratched up pretty bad. He or she is not making any noise – a hydrophone picked up nothing – but that is neither a good nor bad sign. Whales, unlike dolphins, are not particularly talkative.
There are quasi scientific where-will-the-whale-breach-next games being played and a feeling of camaraderie that extends even to the policemen on the police boat that is coaxing the whale southward, toward the harbor (but without much result since the whale can easily just swim around the boat).
The crowd migrates south as the whale circles back to the spot near the cement tanker where it was first spotted. Then the group settles down, some sitting Indian style on massive cement blocks, others with legs hanging over the edge of the pier. Cameras hang around necks. There’s not much to take pictures of. Everyone has gotten pretty used to the sight of our friend’s grayish-black hump and fin. The pace of this waiting game reminds me of baseball.
The senior biologist from the Riverhead Foundation, Robert Di Giovanni Jr., says that eventually they might try to be more forceful about herding the young whale out of the canal by creating a “wall of sound,” but that would require more boats and high tech equipment and permission from the National Marine Fisheries Service.
“We need to give it a couple more tide cycles before we do anything,” says Giovanni.
I take off around 3:30, looking forward to tomorrow: the fact that the whale made an absolute total of zero progress between yesterday and this afternoon suggests this show could go on indefinitely.
That night, John Quadrozzi, Jr. sends me an email. Quadrozzi – whose sweet demeanor is not what one would expect from the owner of a cement importing company – is the guy who first spotted the whale from his cement tanker, and he has been returning regularly in his black SUV to check on it. He also happened to be the one who first spotted the seal in 2003 that would be named Gowanda.
“It is with much regret that I am informing you, our Minke whale friend passed away this evening. He/she beached itself on some rocks along the Hess Terminal and died shortly thereafter.
“Unlike Gowanda who also paid us a visit back in 2003, was rescued and then set free, the Minke’s fate leaves us on a less positive note. However with all the bad news of the past few days… we can all look back and some day recall, in the midst of it all the little Minke whale who came to the Gowanus Bay, made us all smile and laugh a bit.”

Posted by Tucker at 2:23 PM | | Comments

Girl in a Lion’s Den

Our Town downtown
April 16, 2007


A young photographer spent four years amongst mobsters and ex-con fishmongers. What was she thinking?

Barbara Mensch is a mother now. If she had had a child back in 1979 when she moved into her loft on Water Street, there’s no way in hell she would have done what she did.
“South Street Story,” a recently released collection of Mensch’s photographs and accompanying text, is the fruit of the four frightening, lonely, frustrating years she spent wandering the docks with her camera, back when the Fulton Fish Market was the biggest wholesale fish market in the country.
Among the book’s opening photos is a series taken inside the Paris Bar, an all-night establishment frequented by waterfront workers. In one photo a white-bearded man is staring at the camera with a look that seems to be saying: Are you fucking kidding me? It was a look Mensch would get used to.
The first time Mensch went down to “the old Paris” it was 4 a.m. on a winter night. (Mensch would also get used to going out at that hour, the fish market’s equivalent of noon.)
She writes: “I could make out faces of the toughest-looking men I had ever seen. They were leaning over the bar, drinking and eating. The group sported heavy jackets; most wore pea caps or wool hats. Metal grappling hooks dangled from their worn jackets, and some of the men leaning over the bar wore blood-encrusted aprons… Suddenly, a large man stepped forward and advanced within an inch of my face. Fixing me with an icy stare, he said, ‘Get the fuck out.’”
Most people would have taken that as a standing order, but Mensch doesn’t set much store by orders. That characteristic of hers became evident as we were looking for a quiet place to do our interview at the seaport. She unhooked a chain and we walked past the DO NOT ENTER sign onto the gangway leading to the Circle Line dock. It was quiet here – no tourists – until the yacht’s intercom made us jump: “One, two! One, two,” and a few minutes later: “Good afternoon, everyone! Welcome aboard the Zephyr, and welcome aboard our first harbor cruise of the day!”
Mensch laughed, a little bitterly, at yet another example of how the seaport had turned into “Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.”
Back when this was the workplace of the hopeless and criminal, Mensch acted with the same disregard for convention. So she wasn’t wanted at the Paris – well that was too damn bad, because that’s where the pictures were. “The following night, I couldn’t sleep and decided to go back to the Paris,” she writes. This persistence in the face of disdain is what allowed Mensch to get her pictures even when she was getting the cold shoulder, and eventually, to earn a little trust from men who didn’t like having women, or cameras, around.
But that would take awhile. For a long hard year or so, she was shut out.
“I couldn’t go there. I couldn’t do it. It was off limits,” she recalls. “It was a man’s world. It was like the minute I walked into… I called it the Lion’s Den, I had to have eyes behind my back. I had to have my guard up, be totally alert.”
Being a woman meant not only that Mensch was afraid for her physical safety, but also that she was seen as a sexual play thing.
“I had to bundle myself up so they couldn’t see what I looked like. All those clothes, so they couldn’t see my figure.”
Sometimes, she would play the game, like when she bribed a boatful of men to pose for a picture by offering to do a strip tease (which she never did). But the game never ended. “You had to prove yourself, and keep proving yourself… If they decided to allow a man into that world, I don’t think they would have given him half the bullshit they gave me.”
“It’s hard for me to express,” she says as we walk back to the Water Street loft where she still lives. She is frustrated at the limitations of speech; how to convey the courage it took to walk down this street that now looks like it belongs in Universal Studios? “The men, their arms… You’ve never seen such big arms! You,” she gestures at me, “you couldn’t walk down the street here, no way. You’d be gobbled up.”
Suddenly, she is coming at me, leaning in, arms raised in what would be an intimidating posture if she weren’t slighter and shorter than me. “You gotta camera?” she says, imitating a heavy Italian accent. Her face is not an inch from my face. “Lemme see that camera.” I can’t help but laugh, but she’s not joking.
“How often did you feel fear?” I ask her.
“Fear, fear…” she says aloud, turning the word over. “All the time.”
In the early phase of her project, Mensch felt invincible, like she could do this with or without the men’s cooperation or consent.
“As the sun rose over the Brooklyn Bridge, I came face to face with a group of grizzled-looking men smoking cigarettes while standing next to their hand trucks. Looking like a pride of lions, they huddled around flames rising from large oil cans,” she writes.
“Still feeling triumphant from my victory in the Paris Bar, I started to take pictures. At that moment a chunk of ice about the size of a baseball hit my face.”
She had been warned.
Many of the photos that portray the “hate” half of Mensch’s love-hate relationship with the seaport – backs turned to the camera, paranoid stares – were edited out in favor of more commercially appealing shots. As a result, the book is more picturesque and less tough than the world in which Mensch actually lived.
But that story is there, if you look for it – especially in the early photos, like the one of the white-bearded man at the Paris.
What drove the young photographer to keep coming back? She’s fiercely competitive, for one. “I wanted to show these tough guys I could do something,” she says. But it’s not easy for Mensch to put herself back in her younger shoes. That self almost puzzles her now.
“I was just obsessed. And maybe you have to be obsessed to do something. I just could not get any peace until I got this story.”

Posted by Tucker at 2:19 PM | | Comments

The Crappiest Footbridge











Our Town downtown
April 9, 2007

10th Street FDR overpass is a dog poop landmine

A big puddle with a McDonald’s cup floating in it defends the entrance to the footbridge at East 10th Street like a moat. If you want to get onto the bridge without soaking your shoes, you have to climb over the railing. So the bridge that leads over the FDR into East River Park is deserted on a rainy weekday morning – but there is ample evidence of recent passers-over.
On the morning of April 4th, there are no fewer than fifteen masses of dog crap dotting the overpass.
I’m going with the word “mass” because some of the piles of crap had softened and separated in the rain, and in other cases puddles of diarrhea had spread out, clinging to grains of the sidewalk and treads of sneakers and bike tires. So neither “pile” nor “mound” would adequately describe every fecal mass.
There is a pile that had somehow been deposited on top of a low railing a foot above the ground. Protected from the rain and elements, it had become desiccated until it was the consistency of a dry crumbly cookie, then it appeared to have petrified. Another mass looked like it might still be warm. And someone had been feeding their pooch corn.
There are four clear garbage bags tied at regular intervals to the link fence that encloses the bridge, but they’re mostly filled with rain water, empty forties, plastic bottles and wrappers, an empty carton of OJ, coffee cups and the like. Ostensibly, the bags are meant to be receptacles whose convenient location would encourage dog owners to actually pick up after their dogs, but for some reason, the majority of dog crap on this particular bridge never makes it into those orphan garbage bags that belong to no garbage can. It ends up right where it lands.
Anyone who uses the park regularly knows not to be eating or thinking about eating while crossing that bridge. “It’s always here, always here,” says a sweaty red-haired man in a knit cap, walking over the bridge with ear buds in his ears as he cools down from his jog. “It’s disgusting.”
The problem is not an unusual one, especially in and around parks. The Department of Sanitation is planning a “spring offensive against those people who don’t pick up after their dogs,” says spokeswoman Kathy Dawkins, that will include an ad blitz to raise public awareness and potentially raising the fine for not picking up behind your dog from $100 to $250.
But it’s unusually bad here. The 1951 footbridge’s long-held casual status as the shittiest of the footbridges leading to East River Park is now semi-official. I did a tally.
On the 6th Street footbridge, there were remnants of a broken glass bottle, one garbage bag, and only four fecal masses, which may seem like a lot when you’re jogging a slalom course around them, but coming from the 10th Street bridge changes your perspective entirely.
I could practically have eaten off of the Delancey Street overpass, on which nary a piece of litter was to be found. One garbage bag containing one water bottle hung on the fence at its western base. The order that reigns here might be attributable to the security shack at the foot of the bridge, where a guard watches over the parking lot adjacent to a housing development. The bridge’s only blight is a misspelled Parks Department sign that proclaims this is the “Delancy St. Foot Bridge.”
All three foot bridges lead from housing projects to the park. They’ve all got signs announcing that they are part of the Greenway system. So why is one so much grosser than the others?
No one in any official capacity seems to know. “I haven’t heard anything about this. I have not,” says Edwin Chan, a community associate for Community Board 3.
“I have no idea about that because the footbridges are not part of the Department of Sanitation. It’s Parks or D.E.C.,” says Dawkins, of the Sanitation Department.
“I’m pretty sure that’s D.O.T., so check with them,” says a Parks Department spokesman.
A D.O.T. spokesman said he’d call right back, then didn’t.
A young woman watching her red-nosed Pit Bull, Dynasty, roam around a grassy space in front of the Riis Houses adjacent to the 10th Street foot bridge had a hypothesis. “A lot of people run their dogs over the bridge,” she says. “And when they’re running, the dogs can’t hold it in.”
But why, I ask, is there more shit on this bridge than, say, on the 6th Street bridge just four blocks south of here?She thinks there might be more dog owners living at the Riis Houses, at 10th Street, than at the Wald Houses, at 6th Street. There certainly are a lot of pit bulls around.

Posted by Tucker at 2:11 PM | | Comments

To the Faraway Land of Tottenville

Our Town downtown
April 2, 2007

Lettie G. Howard heads to the shipyard for her pre-season makeover

Jonathan Kabak woke up every hour on Tuesday night. He wasn’t exactly sure why. His subconscious might have been worried he’d be late.
He had to be at the seaport by 6:30 a.m. – high tide.
His schooner, the 125-foot Lettie G. Howard, draws 11 feet of water. Jonathan was slightly concerned that she would scrape the bottom of the harbor if they set off after the tide had started to ebb. He’d heard from the ship’s previous captain that there was a shallow section – a mud bar of sorts – and he didn’t want to take any chances.
Jonathan is not really used to uncertainty. He’s been sailing in and around South Street Seaport since he was 18, and he’s been captaining ships for ten years now, but Wednesday morning the Lettie G. Howard would travel a route Jonathan had only navigated a couple times before: for her first voyage of the season she’d shove off from a spot between the hulking Ambrose lightship and the Water Taxi dock, motor through the Kill Van Kull and the Arthur Kill and haul out at the shipyard in Tottenville, Staten Island, for her paint job and mandatory bi-yearly check-up.
If Jonathan is at all impatient as the minutes tick by on Wednesday morning and we are still waiting for two late passengers, you’d never know it. He walks around at a leisurely pace with his arms crossed, directing eager volunteers to his first mate, Denise Meagher, when they ask how they can help. Denise is running around untying lines, hauling big steel coffee thermoses and groceries, directing the lifting and lowering of the life boat that doubles as a tugboat.
“Wow, there are a lot of people watching you,” Jonathan says wryly as Denise struggles to start the lifeboat’s little outboard engine. It’s true. There are a bunch of us onboard – friends, seaport volunteers, me – who don’t really know what the hell we’re doing but feel awkward doing nothing at all when it’s very clear there is lots to be done. We’ve just helped lift the lifeboat and lower it into the water, and now a knot of us is standing there observing as Denise pulls and pulls, and chokes the engine, and pulls some more. “I’ll be one of the people who isn’t watching you,” Jonathan says and walks off.
The sun is peeking just under the Williamsburg Bridge by the time we start out on our southbound journey. Once we’re well underway, Jonathan offers the helm to anyone who wants to steer, then sings some Jimmy Buffet song and points out occasional points of interest. The third mate, David Gunn, shows a few of the non-crew aboard how to check the bilges to make sure we’re not taking on water, which, he explains, is particularly important on the first trip of the season. He shows us where the flashlights are and has us each practice checking. He says someone on the crew will ask us to do a boat check every fifteen minutes.
But then the sun comes out from behind a cloud and it turns into a glorious day, and the scenery – the smokestacks and gigantic oil steamers and tug boats and, best of all, the graveyard where old tugboats and ferries are abandoned to rot and sink – is right out of some Armageddon movie and is not to be missed. We do a grand total of zero boat checks. I think David did them all himself.
Unfortunately, we make very good time. The currents are with us most of the way, and we cover the twenty-plus miles in four hours and arrive at the boatyard almost an hour before we’re expected.
“Big Red,” the little red lifeboat, is dispatched carrying two emissaries to confer with the boatyard guys. They come back an hour later bearing what is ostensibly bad news, but it makes me happy because I’d rather be here than in the office. We can’t dock, according to the boatyard guy; the tide has begun to ebb and the water level is too low.
“What kind of crack is he smoking?” Jonathan asks, going over tide charts.
Shortly thereafter a compromise is hit upon, and we end up tying up to a tugboat on the periphery of the boatyard. Now that we’re attached to land, I feel I should get back to the office. I ignore that feeling, and settle down to a buffet of sandwich meats and cheese and soda and fruit, and bagels and lox leftover from breakfast.
On the long, hot train ride to the city, a couple people doze off. Jonathan looks ready to, but he’s got a couple legs of his journey in front of him.
He’s headed to the seaport to pick up his car, then home to Brooklyn to have dinner with his wife, then back to Tottenville to bring his ship into the boatyard at high tide the next morning – 7 a.m.

Posted by Tucker at 2:06 PM | | Comments