MOSAIC

OVER AND BACK I am a poor city boy riding a ferry with my father crossing the Hudson river on a cold Sunday morning in spring. The Hudson River is 315 miles long…From its beginning at Lake Tear in the Cloud to its end at the mouth of New York Harbor, the river is trout stream and estuary, water supply and sewer, ship channel and shad river, playground and chamberpot. The dark water of the river softly slaps the side of the boat, docked and still, its cabin and rows of benches empty. I kneel on the smooth wooden slats of the bench along the railing at the front of the ferry peering over at the river. A muffled rumble of the diesel engine sends invisible tremors through the boat. My knees vibrate. My father’s strong arm secures me. The river below erupts into small mounds of bubbles, a cool briny mist rises, like incense at a funeral mass, blesses my forehead, lips and breast. The ferry eases away from the slip. A long row of large gray pilings, upright like pipe organs, seems to slide steadily backwards. Clear of the Weehawken terminal, the double-ended “Albany” accelerates over the tranquil surface of the river taking us back to the Hell’s Kitchen terminal, returning to our first floor flat that we fled this morning. The “Albany” was built in 1925 in Staten Island, except for its steel hull, this double-ended ferry is virtually unchanged from the Robert Fulton’s “Jersey” which in 1812 inaugurated ferry service across the Hudson. A double-ended ferry is a mechanically powered vessel that hauls passengers short distances and its distinctive feature identical ends for easy docking enables it to operate equally well in either direction. Across the Hudson, I see the long cavernous West Side piers, like fingers reaching into the river, alongside ocean liners and large cargo vessels, tethered to large bulbous-shaped metal bollards, are motionless. Between two piers, a small police boat moves toward shore, dwarfed by the docked ships, illuminated by the early morning sunlight radiating down the canyon-like streets of Manhattan. A nimbus graces the flat rooftops of the tenements that dominate my neighborhood. Nearby, abandoned slaughterhouses and blood-stained deserted streets. Farther east from the river, the Broadway theatres are dark and quiet, the glass and steel skyscrapers of the expanding office district soar above the neighboring theatres and Hell’s Kitchen tenements. One September in 1881 a reporter for the New York Times plunged into the depths of Hell’s Kitchen and…visited the rookery known as Hell’s Kitchen…The reporter was well acquainted with such civic pestholes as the Mulberry Bend district, the Bowery, Ragpickers’ Alley, Cockroach Row and the Five Points, but he was inclined to regard Hell’s Kitchen as the worst of the lot…The whole neighborhood is as an unmitigated nuisance to the police whose record books are overflowing with the names of residents of these tenement houses. The river is wide, its surface calm and without undulation. The solid steadfast bluestone of the Jersey Palisades recedes as we embark on our journey home. Wearing his “Sunday” clothes-- gray suit, top coat and fedora—my father protects me from the cold breeze standing at the front of the boat, the turbulence of our sleepless night and the marital turmoil, that still engulfed our apartment this morning, ignited by my father’s unannounced trip to the race track. The pilgrimage to the river and the ride on the ferry is a purification of those aspects of life that a boy should not be aware of so young, and an antidote to the allure of the opportunities that have given my neighborhood its well-known reputation and that he embraced. The longshoreman he is or the bookmaker he was is not the man I see on these regular, unplanned ferry rides. The boat approaches the Hell’s Kitchen terminal. The engine stops and we drift peacefully and silently forward. Standing in the front of the ferry is exciting and frightening. I grip the iron gate that keeps the passengers safely away from the boat’s edge, the deck hands on the other side to dock the boat. The engines hum, propelling in reverse, to slow the entry. The ferry glides and glances off the row of pilings in the slip. My father’s thick hands grab my shoulders To steady me as we dock. The iron gate is lifted. I bolt from the ferry happy. My father runs to catchup, bowlegged and breathless.   Together we walk, side by side, along the cobblestones of Twelfth Avenue back to our apartment uncertain about what awaits us. In 1959, the New York Central which operated the ferries across the Hudson ended ferry service between Weehawken and 42nd Street. Eight years later, on a Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the only remaining ferry service across the Hudson, between Barclay Street and Hoboken, ended. After more than 150 years, ferry service across the Hudson was gone. The next morning November 24, 1967, there was a strange quiet over the Hudson River.