The Water Log

Our Town downtown
January 29, 2007

Sewage dumped in the East River meanders with the tide

Sometimes people tell me that the East River is not technically a river. Or they write East “River,” then in parentheses, explain why that’s actually a misnomer. (It is in fact a tidal strait connecting New York Bay and Long Island Sound). It always gets to me. It’s a narrow body of moving water, it’s got “River” in its name, for God’s sake. Why split hairs?

Then one night last week I took a bike ride along my favorite tidal strait. The water was undulating slowly like thick cookie batter that’s almost too much for the egg beater, but I couldn’t focus on any one ripple because the swells were gliding by at a pretty good clip. And they were moving… north. I’m awful at geography, easily turned around, but it seemed to me that the river should not be rushing away from the harbor. (Similarly, at low tide in the Hudson, the ocean rushes in and pushes north. The Hudson is not your average river, either, but a tidal estuary, where salty sea water meets fresh water.)

Suddenly that tidal strait business made sense. The East River isn’t fed by freshwater streams, like a normal river. It’s connected to the Atlantic Ocean at both ends; on the north, through the Long Island Sound, and on the south, through New York Harbor. So it’s open at both ends to tidal influences. In other words, it flows both ways.

The East River’s un-river-like behavior is not news, but a hundred years ago it was. In the first decade of the 20^th century, when New Yorkers were getting typhoid from swimming in the increasingly polluted rivers and eating locally farmed oysters, the Metropolitan Sewerage Commission – composed of a handful of engineers and a physician – was formed to figure out what was happening to the raw sewage being dumped into the rivers.

At first, the commission was optimistic that the sewage would eventually flush into the ocean. “It may possibly be found that we are fortunate enough to have a harbor that flushes itself,” the president of the commission, Dr. George Soper, told the New York Times in 1909. “There are two outlets to the ocean, and the high tide at the Narrows does not correspond with the high tide at Hell Gate. It may be proved that there is a slight excess movement of the current south, and careful observations are now being made to verify this surmise.”

Over the next few years, the commission conducted experiments that included releasing floats – some say the floats were barrels – from different points, following them on a launch, and mapping their progress.

One float was dropped in the water three miles north of where the Harlem River meets the Long Island Sound. Over the course of three and a half days it floated 108 miles, traveling down to the Brooklyn Bridge, then back. It was picked up within a mile of its starting place.

A Times reporter in 1910 described the maps of the floats’ progress as “prints on which were traced zig-zag lines resembling more than anything else the erratic movements of an undecided crab. There were many of the prints and not one of them bore a straight line, as if the float had made up his mind not to go any way in particular.”

Like the floats, the commission determined that “in most cases the sewage that flows into the two rivers at the upper part of Manhattan drifts down to the Battery or a little below, then turns and goes back again.”

Headlines became increasingly panicky: “Typhoid and Outbreaks of Other Diseases Traced to Evil Conditions in the Rivers and Harbor”; “Metropolitan Commission Gives Warning That Remedial Action is Imperative”; “Menace to Public Health; “HARBOR WATER POLLUTED; Sewage Commission Suggests Reforms and Abolition of River Bathe.”

The commission’s gloomy final report was a far cry from Dr. Soper’s blithe hypothesis. “It has been proved that, contrary to popular belief, the tidal currents do not flush out the harbor satisfactorily, but cause the sewage to oscillate back and forth near its points of origin.”

Today, the East River remains mysterious, and contaminated. And ninety-some-odd years after it was thought up, variations of Dr. Soper’s experiment are still being done to map the river’s idiosyncrasies. In lieu of barrels, researchers now inject sulfur hexafluoride “tracers” into the river to dye the water, but even now they follow the meandering path of their tracers the old fashioned way: they zigzag alongside in their boat.

Posted by Tucker at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments

Our Town downtown

November 20 2006

A six-person office maintains Stuyvesant Cove Park and educates the public

There is a 20-foot by 40-foot shack just south of the Gulf gas station at 23^rd Street and the East River, in the middle of an otherwise empty lot. The little structure, with one car parked out front, seems out of place against the industrial skyline of Queens, like it was just plopped down here between the river and the FDR. Indeed, it was.

This building, a model of eco-friendly construction with its steeply slanted roof covered by photovoltaic panels and waterless urinal, was on display at the 2000 Earth Day Fair in Battery Park City. It was taken apart and put into storage until 2003, when it was put back together just north of the newly created Stuyvesant Cove Park.

It doesn’t seem big enough to hold its own here, on what used to be the site of a concrete factory and underground gasoline storage facility. Particularly this day, when fashionable fall coats have been replaced by big winter parkas with fur-lined hoods, the stand-alone shack looks defenseless against the elements.

But it’s toasty inside, which is particularly surprising when I learn that the heat is not on. The walls, it turns out, are insulated by thick foam, and the single large room – creatively divided into office space for six full-time employees and classroom space for environmental classes that are free to the public – is warmed by the sun reflecting off the East River and streaming in through the big south-facing windows.

This is Solar One, the headquarters for the maintenance of Stuyvesant Cove Park, a 1.9-acre riverfront tract between 18^th and 23^rd Streets with a winding walkway that was converted from a brownfield in 2003. Half the annual cost of planting and maintaining the park, or $100,000, is provided by the city’s Economic Development Corporation. Solar One must raise the other half, as part of the terms of its lease. Much of Solar One’s portion comes from volunteer hours, which they can write off for the value of minimum wage. The park is primarily maintained by a core of 40 volunteers, plus high school students and trade union groups. Only one of the six full-time employees at Solar One, the park manager, is actually responsible for park maintenance.

The others are focused on administration, public outreach and the giant project that will put this little company on the map: Solar 2.

Solar 2 will generate more energy than it actually uses, making it the first “net-zero” building of its size and kind anywhere in the northeast. The two-story structure, designed by green architects Kiss + Cathcart, will stand where Solar One now stands and serve as a environmental classroom and an example of what’s possible in green urban engineering. It will rise to the height of the FDR overpass, but no higher, and the first story will be mostly open space, so the building will not piss off Stuyvesant Town residents by restricting their views of the river. It will fill the empty blacktop with a new café (which will make Solar 2 the only place you can buy non-gas station food east of the FDR), a play area for kids, and a bigger stage than the one currently used by Solar One for performances like concerts that use solar-powered amps.

The second floor will have an “eco-apartment,” which will look like a typical New York City studio apartment, complete with its own balcony, and completely outfitted with green products, including a water-collection system and fluorescent light bulbs (they’re not that bad anymore, insists Solar One’s executive director, Chris Collins), and a see-through floor that will allow you to see what happens when you flick on a light or turn on a faucet.

The Solar One team has raised $1.2 million to date for the building that will be its new office. Money has come from the Manhattan delegation of the City Council, Councilman Dan Garodnick and Speaker Christine Quinn, Borough President Scott Stringer, the Kresge Foundation’s green building initiative, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Collins hopes to have raised the full $12.5 million price tag by 2008 so they can start building by 2009.

But for now, there’s a lot of outreach yet to be done, because most people still don’t know there’s anything there on the other side of the FDR, between the Gulf gas station and the Con Ed plant.

Posted by Tucker at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments

Our Town downtown
December 18, 2006


Second death on Hudson River bike path means first was no freak accident

It hit home when I read that Eric Ng, a 22-year-old NYU graduate who’d been biking home from a concert at the Knitting Factory, was mowed down by a guy who was so drunk he had failed to realize he was driving not on the highway, but on the bike path.

Six months ago, when I heard about the first death to take place on the Hudson River bike path, I filed it away as a statistic and hopped on my bike to ride to work. This time, the news sunk deeper.

I am starting to feel, when I’m on my bike, like a deer in Westchester. The ghost bikes memorializing dead cyclists that increasingly occupy our intersections remind me of road kill.

The Hudson River bike path, supposed to be one of the few places in Manhattan safe enough even for kids on training wheels, is now home to two ghost bikes.

The first death in the four-year history of the path seemed like it might have been a freak accident. Carl Nacht, a 56-year old doctor – my dad’s doctor, in fact – was biking with his wife when an NYPD tow truck turned from the highway into the tow pound at 38^th Street and struck Nacht, throwing him onto the hood of another tow truck. After three days in intensive care, Nacht died of head injuries.

Freak accidents happen all the time in this city. When a crane falls off a building and crushes a taxi, when a man is attacked by a crazy guy with a chainsaw in the subway, we don’t cross the street to avoid walking under a crane, and we certainly don’t stop riding the subway.

But Ng’s death makes clear that Nacht’s was not a one in a million thing. Once two cranes fall, once two people get attacked with chainsaws, that’s when people start looking up, taking cabs.

And there’s another reason, too, why Ng’s death has stayed with me – to the point where I’ve started making excuses not to ride my bike to work (it’s cold, I don’t want to be sweaty, I want to relax and drink my coffee… it’s all only half-true. The other half is, I think, I don’t want to become a vegetable today.) It’s that Ng reminds me of me.

Dr. Carl Nacht was not my age, not someone I would have known well. No matter that he was a marathoner and an experienced cyclist, something deep-seated in my cocky unconscious swept the accident aside with the rationale that I, being younger and quicker, would have seen the tow truck turning and hit the brakes in time. How many close calls have left me pumped up on adrenaline, a little shaken, but ultimately reassured of my indestructibility?

But Ng was twenty-two (could have been me). He was on his way from the Knitting Factory to a party in the East Village (could have been me). He must have been cocksure, too, because he wasn’t wearing a helmet (could have been me) – not that it would have mattered, given how fast the car was moving when it hit him. (Nacht wasn’t wearing a helmet, either, but I didn’t take much notice of the circumstances surrounding his death).

What, I wondered, were other cyclists thinking? Maybe I was being a drama queen about the whole thing. Maybe I’d stopped riding to work because I was just getting lazy. It’s hard to pin down our own motivations.

So thirteen days after Ng’s death, I biked down to his memorial ghost bike, chained to a signpost just north of Clarkson Street on the Hudson River bike path. Flies buzzed around wilting flowers stuck through the spokes of the white bike. I read the notes – the ones that weren’t sealed – that were tucked in with the flowers and between the rocks piled into a cairn.

A Chinese delivery man headed south on his bike stopped to watch. He said something to me in Chinese, which he kept repeating. I couldn’t tell if it was a question (Did you know him?) or a statement. He clucked his tongue and shook his head, then biked off.

Amy Madden, her dog running alongside her bike, stopped, somber. “I think about getting hit by a car every single time I get on a bike,” she said. “It’s deplorable. The one place they’ve set aside for us to ride, and they can’t keep us safe.”

Ezra Caldwell, on a stripped-down road bike, dismounted to take a picture of the memorial, which he will post alongside photos of Nacht’s ghost bike on his Flickr page. He had just had an altercation with a city bus driver who had pulled right across the bike path in front of Caldwell. Caldwell rode after the driver and yelled at him – right in front of a cop car. The cops paid no attention.

Caldwell has been a courier for fifteen years, and while Ng’s death pisses him off, it doesn’t scare him.

“You learn to look up the road,” he said. “I’m a pretty defensive rider, I really pay attention.”

But two deaths, in six months, on this path alone? (Between 1996 and 2005, only one of the city’s 225 cyclist fatalities occurred when the cyclist was riding in a marked bike lane, according to a report by the city.)

“I find that freaky,” Caldwell said.

Posted by Tucker at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments

Our Town downtown
December 25, 2006

Those piles on the waterfront, we see them but we don't

Manhattan’s terrain changes each year as winter approaches. Usually flat, our landscape sprouts a few hills along forgotten stretches of waterfront while we’re not looking.

The hills are made of salt – the salt that will be used to combat the snow that may or may not visit us this winter and make our streets impassable.

The salt hill that first caught my attention was in the Red Hook Recreational Area in Brooklyn. It sits there in its grayness all year round, gradually flattening out, occasionally providing a teenage boy with a diversion (climbing it) or a way to show off (sliding back down). But when I went to the park a few weeks ago, the hill had been transformed. From a distance it looked as if the gigantic mountain was covering all the playing fields. It was massive to the point of drawing laughs, it looked so ridiculous. A mountain in the industrial heart of Red Hook! What was it? It had been sitting there all year in its reduced form, and no one had ever stopped to think about what it was made out of or why it was there. Now we would have had to morons not to guess it (although it took awhile). Salt!

I contacted the Department of Sanitation. Could someone talk to me about the salt stockpiles downtown? They were busy, preparing for the holidays (and probably tidying up the salt mountains), and couldn’t talk on the phone, but Keith Mellis, executive officer of the community affairs department, found a few minutes to indulge my curiosity over e-mail.

His answers are perhaps a little sparse, but you won’t find any of this information on Google. So enjoy.

The rock salt comes from South America (holy crap!), and is transported to New York City by truck (that’s a long drive). The Department of Sanitation begins its snow season with a minimum of 200,000 tons of rock salt (I assume that covers all five boroughs), and can order additional salt if necessary. They are already fully stocked.

You’re curious, I bet, about whether they order the same amount of salt each year, or if they have some idea of how much it’s supposed to snow. That would be difficult, since weather.com can only project a week ahead, but, it turns out, it can be done. The Department of Sanitation uses not one but three private weather forecasters: Metro Weather, Weather Data Net, and Compu-Weather, “and we find this system to be accurate,” writes Mellis.

Last year, there were 160,000 tons of rock salt left over at the end of the snow season. (I assume that’s because they ordered more than the minimum of 200,000 tons, since last winter was very snowy. We had over forty inches.) That salt stays in the piles until the next snow season rolls around.

There are two stockpiles downtown. I biked down to take a look. One is a lame little hill plopped in the middle of an empty parking lot in front of the Department of Sanitation site on the East River, just north of the Manhattan Bridge. The other is a more impressive stockpile that takes up about two-thirds of the salt shed at the Department of Sanitation site on the Hudson, around Twelfth Street.

The pile on the East Side is not where I expected it to be. I actually biked right by it, even though I saw it. That’s because a salt shed just went up this fall right underneath the Manhattan Bridge – a few months ago it had no roof, and now it looks like it’s completed – and I’d figured the rush was so that it could be ready when the salt came. But the shed sits gated and empty, and the salt sits in a pile under the FDR.

Maybe no one told the delivery guys that they were supposed to bring the salt to a different place this year? What is the point of the empty salt shed they worked feverishly to finish? The salt looks so much neater in the shed, like it’s actually supposed to be there, and is there really no better use for that empty lot?

That’s one mystery I don’t know the answer to. But at least now you can tell everyone you know that the salt they put down when it snows comes from South America.

Posted by Tucker at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments

Our Town downtown
January 8, 2007

An out-of-the-way storefront with a steadfast customer base

On the off chance you find yourself on Duane Street, between West Broadway and Greenwich Street, you might well walk by New York Nautical without seeing it. The blue “NEW YORK NAUTICAL INSTRUMENT and SERVICE CORP.” sign propped in the half-papered-over ground floor window looks like it’s at least a couple decades old. If curiosity prompted you to look it up online when you got home, and then successfully ascertained that the website was newyorknautical.com, you’d be further confused: the address listed on the site is 140 West Broadway. That’s the store’s old location; the website hasn’t been updated in about five years.

New York Nautical, which used to get some walk-in customers when it was on West Broadway, has become a strictly word-of-mouth institution.

And an institution it is, according to Smitty, who’s been working there almost twenty-six years and has been the store’s manager for three. “I’m an institution!” he’s yelling on the phone when I walk in. “You didn’t know that?”

The store’s gap-toothed shelves are lined and piled with nautical books that anyone might read, (“Shipwrecks Around Cape Cod”), nautical books that you probably wouldn’t read unless you were pretty damn interested (“The Cruise Ship Phenomenon in North America”), and nautical text books and pamphlets so technical that you can’t help but feel sorry for the ship captain studying for his license renewal exam (“Summary of Corrections, 2006 Charts, East Coast of North and South America”); collectibles and gifts (the most popular pre-Christmas items were chart weight compasses and rigging knives, and the most expensive item in the store is a Chelsea ship’s clock, at $2,400); and hundreds, maybe thousands of nautical charts that cover every body of water in the world (“Don’t call them ‘maps!’ warns an employee. ‘Smitty will kill you.’”).

Before it moved here, to its practically unmarked location on this little-traveled Tribeca side street, New York Nautical did business at its 140 West Broadway location for 30 years, and before that – “well now you talkin’ ‘bout history,” says Smitty. Suffice to say that the store’s been around for about eighty years.

The funny thing about Smitty is that despite his encyclopedic knowledge of his maps – er, charts – and equipment, he doesn’t sail. Ever. “No, I’m a land lover,” he says with a dismissive shake of the head.

“I’ll put it this way. A lot of people come in here that do sail, want to take me with them. I don’t get in no small boats. If it’s not a cruise ship, I’m not going. I’m just not a boat person. Besides, I don’t swim. Chances of a cruise ship going down are pretty slim.”

Smitty was hired as summer help in 1980 to fill in for someone out on vacation, but he didn’t leave when that employee got back. “That was because about two weeks there, I basically knew, not all the ins and out, but the most common ins and outs,” Smitty recalls. “You had a lot of people that did work here, they didn’t have what I had. That’s why I’m still here.” He had an aptitude for quickly measuring distances on maps, and “most importantly, you name an area, I basically knew what chart number to go and find. When it would take someone ten minutes to find it, it took me one.”

The fact that he can’t stand boats doesn’t seem to hurt Smitty’s credibility. Eighty-five percent of the customers who come once, come back, Smitty estimates.

The thirty or so customers who come in on an average day are about evenly split between commercial mariners and recreational yachters. But there’s also the occasional artist – Smitty gets maybe two a week – looking for a chart to hang up on the wall. “They’re not to the quickest to work with,” and they present a different type of challenge for Smitty: he’s got to think about the charts – land masses and bodies of water, islands and piers – in terms of aesthetics.

Then there are the law firms. “We get lots of law firms, yes,” Smitty nods, staring straight ahead at the model of a sailboat. “Sometimes there’s an accident somewhere, and they need to have a chart from that area, information on that area, and they know if they come to me, I’ll get it for them fast.”

Posted by Tucker at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments

Our Town downtown
January 15, 2007

First ship to call South Street Seaport Museum home may return to Manhattan

“So how’d you know it was me?” Teddy Charles keeps asking.

We had planned to meet in front of a diner in Riverhead, Long Island, near where the Hampton Jitney lets off. Never having laid eyes on Teddy Charles before, I walked straight to his car and got in.

What gave him away? Aside from the fact that he was the only one idling in the parking lot? It could have been his Volkswagon Rabbit, a tiny beat-up two-door relic that gets 50 miles to the gallon and requires two people to open the passenger-side door; or the giant white sail furled upon itself in the back seat/trunk area; or maybe that you don’t see many 78-year-old guys wearing shades and cruising around in such a vehicle. This was clearly Teddy Charles.

Charles’ life, as he tells it, seems to have unfolded as a series of fortuitous opportunities for which he was totally unprepared.

The first transpired when he was maybe twelve, spending the summer on the Long Island Sound. All the kids owned 16-foot sailboats, and after going out in their boats a few times, Teddy “got really hot on it.” One day, he recalls, “I asked one of the kids, ‘Are you going to take your boat out today?,’ and he said, ‘Nah, go ahead, you take it.’ I hadn’t the vaguest idea, but being young, I said ‘Sure, why not.’ The lesson I learned, it’s still good today: it’s very easy to sail out, and it can be difficult to sail back. I didn’t know how to tack. I learned.”

Good timing, and a proficiency with percussion instruments, would get Teddy out of his hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts (“the cultural anus of the world,” he calls it), and into Julliard through a back door. “It was right after the war, otherwise I never would have gotten in. It was a summer extension program; it was a lot easier to get in.”

And a few years later, yet another lucky break– in the form of Thelonious Monk showing up late for a gig – landed him at the piano at a midtown jazz club and launched his professional career as a vibraphonist and composer.

But living in Manhattan, close to the sea but so far removed, Charles eventually started to miss the water. “Well,” he thought, “I used to know how to sail. I’ll get a boat.” He bought a 1903 43-foot yawl, “fixed it up, went out sailing. Never sailed a big boat before but I learned quickly… It was almost the end of my music career.”

A few upgrades later, and he was the somewhat hesitant owner of the Mary E, a 1906 75-foot sword fishing schooner that was not at her prettiest.

She was “hardly fixed up at all from being a fishing schooner,” Charles recalls. “No staysail, schooner rig, nothing, stainless steel, just old time stuff, and I loved it. Actually, I didn’t like the way it looked at first. Ugly boat, but once we got it rigged out, got some sails on her, I started to really get to liking her.”

Operating out of City Island, Charles took New Yorkers and tourists alike on weeklong trips to the Vineyard and weekend trips to Block Island, and was even chartered by the National Park Service to sail students from New York to Miami, stopping at every national park on the way.

Around that time, Peter Stanford, “a go-getter type,” founded the Seaport Museum, intending to recreate the seaport’s old-time feel. In 1975, Stanford asked Charles to bring the Mary E to the seaport.

“We were doing great,” recalls Charles. “People flocked to go on the boat.” But the Mary E’s success would only a last a month. “They saw we were doing so good, they decided they’d better bring the Pioneer in.” The 102-foot Pioneer, which still sails out of Pier 16, quickly overshadowed the Mary E.

“They moved the Pioneer in front of me, moved the Mary E way back in the pier so it was difficult to get in and out, took my signs down so they could advertise the sailings for the Pioneer. I was so subordinated. I was just sitting there. Nothing was happening.”

The museum was also not going as planned. There had been big plans to “restore this here, put a seafood restaurant here, just like the days of old South Street, bowsprits coming up over the East River Drive and so forth,” recalls Charles. “It was all a sham. Next thing you knew there was a Citibank rising in the spot where it was supposed to be the seaport… Everyone who was serious took their boat someplace else.” Charles followed suit. “When they fired Peter Stanford, I went with him.”

In 1976, less than a year after he moved to the seaport, Charles took the Mary E to Greenport, where he started a charter business that’s still bustling today. He goes out on three trips a day, seven days a week.

But these days, Charles has been feeling the tug of the big city. “I’ve thought about bringing the boat back to New York, too,” he says, slowly, as if the notion is still forming itself. “There’s an awful lot of business in New York.”

He’s got a gig coming up at Kitano, a midtown hotel that offers live jazz, and he’s been asked to record some of the pieces he’s composed. There’s music on the stand in front of his vibraphone at home, and for the first time in a long time, he didn’t go down south this winter.

“Ideally, I’d probably like to have the boat in Manhattan, so I’d be accessible to New York clubs again. Run the boat a good part of the time and play music a good part of the time. Ideally.”

Posted by Tucker at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments

Our Town downtown
January 22, 2007

I thought no one else thought about living by the seaport

Many months ago I was wandering down by the South Street Seaport, wondering if it was worth seeing the Bodies Exhibition and deciding, again, it was too weird, when I had a wonderful daydream that made me think I could live in Manhattan indefinitely.
It was ten or so years from now. I had a family, a baby. We’d just moved into a huge apartment in a red brick building with high ceilings and enough floor space to have a ping-pong table with plenty of room for aggressive baseline rallies. The building used to be a warehouse of some sort, formerly home to something related to the fish market, or maybe the bottom floor was still a warehouse where the vendors of touristy items stored their wares overnight. You could see the mast of the seaport’s tallest ship above the FDR from the glass-paned windows.
My kid would grow up swimming in the river, which would be clean enough by that time that you could do things like that without showering immediately afterwards. He’d have a bike or a skateboard, because when he wanted to see his friends he’d have a trek to make to get to Manhattan proper. Or so I envisioned.
But I should have known, when the fish market closed, that things down there were in serious flux.
Turns out, my kid will have only to step around the corner to the cobblestone side street to find enough kids to play a game of stickball – with subs. But wait, no, because there will be traffic on those wide old streets, because all those kids will have parents who have cars and Wall Street bonuses and gyms in their buildings and roof terraces and walk-in refrigerators for Fresh Direct deliveries.
According to the Alliance for Downtown New York, I’m not the only one who’s drawn to the smell of the water. In the next two years the number of residents living south of Chambers Street will swell from 38,000 to 45,000. Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff is happy to report that the one square mile that is Manhattan’s southern tip is going through “the single biggest concentration of construction activity in New York’s history.” Thirty-eight million dollars are being invested in Fulton Street retail, the vacancy rate for Lower Manhattan is the lowest it’s been since 9/11

Posted by Tucker at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Comments