Water's Edge
Photographs by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, text by Robert Sullivan
To know New York, or at least to experience it, the tourists often start at Times Square, with its theaters and shows and chain restaurants that offer out-of-towners what they expect (and pay) to be surprised by -- the hot dog, the bagel, the Broadway spectacle, in the intersection of glass and stone-covered skyscrapers. The native starts at the water. Because if you want to get to the physical, historical, and even, I would argue, emotional essence of the city that is packed with eight million people, you head to the water's edge, or edges -- all 578 miles of them, all as close as they are far away. These are the places where New York, even if you think you know it, changes before your eyes, where the city seems less concrete and more dynamic, where you are never sure what is flora and what is fauna, or what is natural and what is not.
As is well known, the shoreline of New York City is back. Where did it go? A quick synopsis: in the mid-1800s the waters of New York become a place where swimming involves navigating trash and dead animals, primarily horses, which are tossed in whole. The shoreline is the place for docks, obviously, as well as sail makers, oystermen, printers, tanners, sailors, and the refuges of sailors. Sewage treatment begins around 1900, but the pace of sewage production (i.e., urban life) increases. Sewage treatment can't keep up and is then overwhelmed by all the other things we begin to pump into the water, especially after World War II -- namely, chemicals. At this point the water gets really bad, and the people who deal with it directly are those who have no choice: the powerless, the poor, and the marine industry, which begins to struggle, then nearly dies off.
In the 1960s comes, first, the idea that the river is polluted and, second, that it does not have to be. In the 1970s comes the Clean Water Act. In the 1980s, in response to the act, comes clean water. In the 1990s little creatures begin to jeopardize the wood in the old piers, a good problem as far as water quality goes, and the bigger creatures (i.e., us) begin to turn around and face the rivers and the harbor, the kills and the bay. It is a long and tortured story, but Westway, which was once to be the great modern interstate along the Hudson, on the West Side of Manhattan, became instead the Hudson River Greenway.
And yet still, to this day, no one really knows exactly what is on the water. No one has really explored all of the 578 miles, not even the Shorewalkers, who walk the watery circumferences of the city, who see a lot of the shore. (Their motto: "See New York at 3 m.p.h.") Even the people who tell us about the edges in various official capacities and subsequently make bold plans for them may not be certain about what is there. In fact, the 578 miles themselves are not a certainty. Municipal legend has it that it was Mayor John Lindsay who, in groping for the precise number of shore miles at some harried moment in the 1970s, asked his staff, who took string to map to come up with -- quick -- 578!