Wednesday, June 27, 2007

City Kid-Captain











Our Town downtown




June 25, 2007








Pioneer is an urban ship, and that’s no oxymoron

“If we could just muster amidships,” says Captain Aaron Singh. Although his voice is not much louder than conversational, the handful of volunteers and two paid crew scattered around the deck gather around. The command is routine, but the news is dire: an engine check had revealed that salt water had seeped into the engine, which might damage the transmission. “Which would be… bad,” says Singh, 29, who has a knack for keeping things simple.
The crew droops. A class of sixth graders had taken the subway all the way from the Bronx expecting to be taken on a three-hour trawling sail. Volunteer crew had trekked in from outer boroughs for what is, for many, an addictive escape from the city routine. The ship’s educator, who arrives a minute later, introduces herself: “Hi. I’m disappointed.”
Pioneer, the Seaport Museum’s 102-foot schooner, may be the busiest ship at the seaport. She sails every day, sometimes coming in and out of port from nine in the morning until midnight. Each weekday, Pioneer takes school kids on educational sails. To subsidize the school trips, the ship becomes a charter boat in the evenings, and also takes tourists out – the crew even dresses up in pirate costumes on occasion.
So the fact that a replacement part for the ship’s English-made engine could take three to five weeks to arrive is a big deal.
But Singh’s body language is as casual as his shorts and sandals. His speech is unhurried as he lays out the immediate possibilities: either the crew will do the educational workshops with the school kids on land, or they’ll use the wet lab aboard another ship, or the class will reschedule. The class ends up rescheduling, and Singh disappears.
Within minutes, the leak has been identified, the affected part removed, the engine supplier notified. By that afternoon, the part is in the mail. “This company I found in Seattle has the engine, so they took it off one of their engines to send to us because they want to see us operate, so we’ll get it tomorrow morning and put it in,” Singh tells me later on the phone.
Disaster averted.
Singh, 29, is a city boy. He grew up in Manhattan and started sailing through the Sea Scout program out of City Island when he was 12.
One of the requirements of the Sea Scout program was that students gain experience on a larger ship than the program’s 34-foot sloop. So in 1994, Singh and his friend Jonathan Kabak, now captain of the Seaport Museum’s other historic schooner, the Lettie G. Howard, started volunteering at the seaport, collecting hours on the water, and moving up in the ranks. No social networking necessary. Once you have 360 days of time on a vessel, anyone can sit for a captain’s license with the coast guard.
Although she was built in Pennsylvania in 1885, Pioneer has been operating out of the seaport since the Seaport Museum opened up in 1967, and by now is as much a local as her captain. “It’s a city boat,” says Singh. “The boat’s operating out of New York. We are an urban boat. Our crews are from New York City. This is who needs to be crewing on it. This is the audience we need to be taking out,” says Singh.
“I always say that people don’t really know that Manhattan is an island. By sailing, we’re actually teaching by example. So a lot of the students we’re taking out, they can do the same thing. They can be a captain eventually. They can learn how to operate the boat, and do everything that we’re doing.”
The message seems to be getting through. Of the army of volunteers who help out on the boat and the slew of students who come aboard, more than 100 have gone on to make a career of sailing, says Singh. Singh calls the volunteer route “New York’s community sailing program.”
“Our biggest thing is getting people to know that we’re here. You can have a job from 9 to 5, you can have been to work and sail on a six o’clock sail or on the weekends, and not go to Long Island.”
Last year, six crew members decided to quit their day jobs and go off and sail on traditional tall ships.
“One of the appealing things about the seaport is you can escape downtown, you can escape the hustle and bustle,” says Singh. “I know for sure that I couldn’t stand working in midtown. People have to do that, obviously. But to be able to escape and be on the outer edges is definitely a relaxing thing.”
Are passengers surprised to discover that their ship’s captain hails not from Maine or Michigan, but Manhattan?
“I guess people are a little bit surprised,” says Singh, “but they shouldn’t be.”

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

What If You Could Dive into the River Whenever, Wherever You Wanted?

Our Town downtown
June 11, 2007

This guy says you can.

“Let’s see if we can get in. Stay on your bike; we have to escape fast.” I pedal after The Swimmer onto property that belongs to the Sanitation Department. It also happens to be the Gansevoort Peninsula, which juts out into the Hudson just south of 14th Street.
“This place used to be totally abandoned,” says The Swimmer when we come to a fence that separates us from the river. “Nobody cared at all.”
I take out my notebook and begin to write.
“Wait a sec,” says The Swimmer, suddenly nervous. “Before you write anything, what’s your piece going to be about?”
Two city workers pull up in their city car. “What’s going on here?” they ask.
The Swimmer says something about how we’re just looking around.
“This is city property.”
We bike off.
The Swimmer wasn’t always this skittish. His name and photo have appeared in print before, but the heat has gotten more intense as the piers have been turned into manicured, fenced-off Hudson River Park.
“The park cops are really zealous. They’re out of control. They’re really a bunch of assholes. That’s the reason I want to remain sort of invisible. It’s just a legal monster, the Parks Department. It should be the opposite. You go to the river, dive in, be relaxed. Instead, you’re always looking over your neck.”
Ten years ago, The Swimmer, who was not yet The Swimmer, was dangling his feet off the end of a Chelsea Piers pier. No one was paying him any mind. No one gave a shit. It was high tide, so the water was pretty clear. Suddenly he was overcome by the urge to dive in. The water was just fine: he didn’t get any horrible skin diseases or grow extra digits.
Once he’d been in, he couldn’t stay away. He found all sorts of spots, like an old restored lightship called the Frying Pan at Pier 63 Maritime, where he’d use a pile of tires to climb out of the water. He swam every day when it was hot out.
“Our protection was neglect. You could go where you want.” The only rules: “Make sure you don’t hurt yourself and stay out of the way of boats.”
Then 9/11 happened, and afterward, the river “was filled with boats: police boats, coast guard boats.”
Then planning began for the ambitious Hudson River Park, which was to run along the river from Chambers Street to 59th Street. The Swimmer and his friend, who had formed a sort of swimming lobby group, went to meetings with the Parks Department, showed pictures of themselves and others swimming, and proposed ways of making the water accessible.
They had obvious ideas, like cutting a hole in the railing on a pier and building a ramp down to the water, and ingenious ones, like enclosing the area between two piers to create a safe swimming area protected from the current. (Swimmers would still be affected by the current at high tide, but they would just be pushed from one pier to the other, which The Swimmer points out might be fun.)
Not only would swimming make living in the city more fun, but it would draw awareness to the water itself, the Swimmer argued. “The more people get in the water, the more attention they’d pay to it. Environmentally, it would get cleaner and cleaner.”
It seemed like they were being heard. Like something might happen.
Then…it didn’t.
“When it came to designing it, [swimming] was excluded totally.” In fact, one of the first things included in the park’s bylaws was a ban on swimming. According to the Park’s website, “Swimming in the Hudson River along the park is only permitted with a Coast Guard-registered swim race.”
After we’ve visited a few of The Swimmer’s old swimming haunts (now he recommends the East River downtown and the Hudson in the 90s), we stop our bikes in front of a sign that displays the architectural plans for the park.
“It’s such bullshit,” says The Swimmer—but he seems baffled rather than angry. “You can see they design things to look good in a model. They love the way models look. It’s so anal, so over-controlled…Oooh, granite paving stones.”
Annoyed though he is, The Swimmer is far from beaten. He still swims, of course, although he won’t say exactly where, and he is a veritable font of ideas, from a guerilla cleanup and photo shoot of what is currently a garbage-strewn beach to a map of the “New York archipelago,” which would point out all the little islands and beaches so that people could swim and beach-hop or kayak their way around the island.
“If this idea caught on, New York would have this new identity. It’d be like water town,” says The Swimmer.
In the meantime, happy trespassing.

The Pied Piper of Words: F-R-E-E

Our Town downtown

June 4, 2007

How a summer music festival charges nothing and rakes in tens of millions


Last July Fourth, I enjoyed one of my first – and one of the few – perks of being a reporter: two tickets to a free Belle and Sebastian show at Battery Park, to which tickets were no longer available.
It’s true that I had decided Belle and Sebastian was too saccharine for my taste, a result of overlistening on my IPod. Still, there had been eyeball scratching for the free first-come, first-served tickets, followed by bitter blog-o-rants by those who had gotten to the give-away points on time to find the tickets already gone, about how “some fans DO hold jobs.” If only because so many other people wanted to go and couldn’t, I felt compelled to take advantage of my otherwise useless press creds. I invited my then-boyfriend and we sat in the taped-off press section, which was sort of far from the stage, but which had plastic chairs and a tent with a free buffet lunch and coolers full of sodas.
As we gobbled down triangular little quesadillas, the sky opened up. After they cleared the park (I think there were concerns about lightning) and then let everyone back in, we hopped over the tape into the non-press section where, if you stood, you could actually see the performers.
Sure, we complained about the rain and about how there was no beer and no place anywhere near the performance to go get beer during the rain interruption, but complaining is what we do – or did (now we don’t talk by orders of his new girlfriend and I complain about that). By the end of the show, I was clapping along and we had no choice but to admit: we had had a picture-perfect summer in the city day, which could be improved upon only by the acquisition of a beer.
Before the encore, the band announced that they’d be heading to a bar in the area called Trinity Place, where the band members would be DJing and hanging out. Well, we needed to drink – Trinity sounded fine to us.
So we beelined it up Broadway, grudgingly paid a $5 per person cover, and had – I’m going to have to estimate – maybe two beers and a whiskey apiece? I remember ogling a bottle of $10 double chocolate stout that turned out to be worth every dollar.
Then we wandered homeward, stopping to watch two young brothers do tricks on their wheeley shoes, pleased with ourselves for having scored a free meal and concert.
Little did we realize, we had paid in kind for our “free” tickets. That’s the idea.
“Once we get them down here, we try to encourage people to shop, to dine, to check out our incredible museums,” says Valerie Lewis, vice president of marketing and communications for the Alliance for Downtown New York, which orchestrates the festival.
“Not everyone is buying flat screen TV’s or Armani suits, but even if they’re patronizing a restaurant or going out for a couple rounds of beers, that’s money spent in Lower Manhattan.”
I’ll admit that I was not particularly jazzed about interviewing anyone with the title of vice president of marketing and communications, but the folks at the Alliance for Downtown New York, Inc. have got the whole thing down to a T, including an aggressive PR guy who kept… on…calling. And then, as usually happens, it turned out that there was a story here, and it wasn’t fluff. It was cold hard cash.
Roughly $35 million was spent last year in Lower Manhattan as a direct result of the festival, according to a survey by the Alliance. (The festival itself costs between $6 and $8 million to put on, depending on the year.) About 75 percent of those dollars are dropped on food and drink, the other 25 percent on shopping. To calculate that number, the Alliance asked festival attendees how much they spent, and how many people were in their party, and multiplied that per-person average by the number of people who attend the festival every year.
The festival, which launched its sixth year the first weekend of June, began as a “sort of a roughshod experiment” to jumpstart the economy post-9/11, but, says Lewis, “we’ve come a million miles since then. We’ve moved from healing the community to trying to revitalize the community with economic development to establishing an arts base here to sort of a nice combination of all three.”
Although Battery Park is overrun by tourists who are sitting ducks for marketers (see: the statues of liberty, the caricaturists, the rice grain name-writers, the fake purses, the I Heart New York T-shirts, the break dancers), this festival is not targeted at them. Last year, over seventy-five percent of festival attendees were from the five boroughs, and only 4.4 percent were international tourists.
“Cause we want to create a lasting impression about Lower Manhattan – a year-round impression,” says Lewis. “I want to bring somebody in from, say, the Bronx, who hasn’t been to Lower Manhattan in over a decade, and say, ‘Wow, I want to come down here,’ or ‘I want to live down here,’ or ‘I want to bring my business down here,’ or ‘I want to shop down here,’ or ‘I want to take kayaking lessons here.’”
Is it a bit slick, a little slimy, to lure music lovers in with the promise of a free show and an eye on their wallets? The hipsters who will take the day off work to queue up for their free tickets to see the New Pornographers on July Fourth might be unsettled to learn that the event was manufactured by a blonde in a gray pants suit from her office in a high-ceilinged office building which you need to present identification to enter.
“I think using arts as an economic development tool is one of the most important things a recovering community can do,” says Lewis. And downtown’s economy, for all it has rebounded, is still struggling. “A lot of people like to say, well it’s five years beyond 9/11, it’s five and a half years beyond – this community still has not fully recovered as far as retail and restaurant patrons.”
Lewis has no qualms about calling the festival “somewhat a PR tool, somewhat a marketing tool.” Music, she points out, has been used in that capacity “all over the country, and it’s been certainly used in New York, if you look at Lincoln Center.” Whatever you call it, there’s no arguing with the numbers: it works.

The Liminal

Author Ben Gibberd
Our Town downtown

May 28, 2007



We’re all mortal, but no one’s existence is more uncertain than the folks who subsist where the city meets the sea


The newest book in the New York City waterfront canon is not nostalgic. At least, it’s not meant to be. “You know, I tried to avoid it because I’m sort of mistrustful of nostalgia,” says Ben Gibberd, its author.
Gibberd’s 2500-word profiles of people who work or play on our shores are as sanguine as he, and the accompanying photographs by Randy Duchaine show subjects smiling or hard at work or both.
But even the author can’t stop his own book from exuding a wistfulness, not only for the salty “good old days” (which are always remembered more fondly after they’re gone), but even for the present reality. You can’t help but be aware, as you read, that what you’re reading about may already have been replaced by green pedestrian parks and luxury condos.
And while “the book is certainly not a tract, and it’s not meant to be didactic about what the future of the waterfront should be,” when it comes to nostalgia, Gibberd acknowledges: “Inevitably, there is a little bit, I think.”
Of the 21 people profiled, four have either lost their jobs because their businesses went under, or have jobs that are immediately threatened. “I guess the most important one, and in a way the saddest one, is Mike Gallagher, who was one of the owners of the New York Shipyards dry dock, which is now where the IKEA is going to be,” says Gibberd. “They have this incredible, or they did have this incredible dry dock: a 50-foot hold with these wonderful stone walls where they’d bring in these ships to repair them. There was a battle to save it, and I’m not quite sure what’s happened, but I think it’s about to be filled in for a parking lot. So that’s a business that’s gone and that will never come back, and that land is now gone for maritime purposes.”
Another four of the profile subjects are preservationists whose life’s work is to bring back a piece of the working waterfront. David Sharps bought a 1924 wooden barge and fought for the right to fix her up although she was designated “beyond repair.” He’s also a historian: on the morning of his interview he is teaching a group of school children the meaning of the word “obsolete.”
Gerry Weinstein, a steamboat fanatic, is the lone volunteer to show up on “volunteer Saturday” to chip away at his 800-ton pet project, a 1933 steamboat called Lilac. Weinstein has seen past restoration projects end up in scrapyards, and is plenty aware that this one may not get done during his lifetime.
It’s clear these people are passionate about what they do. Many of them have tossed convention and former lives to the wind in order to live outside it all. (“There was a general criteria,” says Gibberd of his subjects. “The harder someone was to get a hold of, the more they didn’t return your phone calls, the more we wanted to have them in the book.”) It’s equally apparent that they’re stalling in the face of inevitability. These ships will rot and sink. The blue collar folk who make their living fishing eels, sewing sails, or painting hulls will be displaced because there are more profitable uses for what has become our “gold coast.”
“It’s sort of hard, because we’re so close up to it, it’s hard to realize that the city in general, and the waterfront very much so, is going through such an incredible change,” says Gibberd, sitting on a wooden bench down at the tourist-busy seaport, his voice contending with Shakira’s and the rumble of the Water Taxi’s engines. “It’s nothing new to say, but it’s the new gilded age, and the city really is going through a period of growth that it hasn’t seen since the twenties.”
Of the billions of dollars of waterfront development going on right now, much is positive, Gibberd points out, like the Brooklyn Bridge Park or the revamping of Governors Island. One of his profiles is of Greg O’Connell, a waterfront developer in Red Hook who wears overalls and gives nonprofits rent-free space. But some of it, like IKEA and its parking lot, are prizes awarded to faceless hig0hest bidders.
Like adult teeth, our piers and maritime businesses are not going to grow back if we lose them. “Once you get rid of the last remnants of the waterfront, and the businesses that they serve, you’re never going to get that back again. Once the working waterfront is gone in New York, it’s gone for good,” says Gibberd. “It’s very easy to de-industrialize a city, and it’s impossible to ever bring industry back,” an afterthought that became clear on 9/11 when there was no place to load or unload emergency vessels near the disaster site.
Still, none of the book’s subjects are wiping their eyes while they build model ships inside bottles. In fact, they’re an inspiring lot. Many have discovered ways of incorporating themselves into the modern waterline, from the obvious (Teddy Jefferson swims in the Hudson, Manny Pangilinan and Josh Hochman surf at Rockaway Beach) to the ingenious (Olga Bloom converted an old steel barge into a world-class floating concert hall, Philip Frabosilo stores his fishing rods in the trunk of his taxi, Pamela Hepburn hung her infant from a snap hook in the wheelhouse of her tugboat while she operated the thing).
Next week, the waterfront will see yet another first. The book’s subjects – or the ones who check their email – its author and photographer will get together on Olga Bloom’s barge-turned-music hall for a floating book launch party and an unlikely meeting of littoral minds.