At Sea in the City by William Kornblum

Author:William Kornblum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2002-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5 / Concrete

The hole was half a city block square, and went down over fifty feet deep into hard rock. Pools of grayish water, high derricks, piles of cable and twelve-by-twelve timbers, large boulders, steam shovels, compression machines, shanties, tool sheds and endless pipe filled the space between the walls of jagged rock. Luigi received his brass work check and proceeded in the line of laborers to the shanty.

—Pietro Di Donato, Christ in Concrete

The morning after we beached our friends on the shore of Battery Park City, I hauled anchor at the earliest crack of dawn. Without raising sail, I pointed Tradition toward the southern tip of Governors Island across from the Battery, allowing the waning ebb tide to carry us across Anchorage Channel in the upper bay. The flood tide would begin just before sunrise, and then we would turn up Buttermilk Channel and into the East River.

Susan was still fast asleep in the cabin, deep under the covers. The engine’s exhaust tapped out its regular put-swish-put sounds. Before making way, I’d managed to light our crotchety alcohol stove without too much clatter. I sat alone at the wheel, my reward a steaming mug of hot coffee and the dawning light over the peaks of lower Manhattan and the towers of the East River bridges. On my left in the morning gloom passed the gathering auto traffic on the East River Drive; on my right loomed the pilings and broad warehouses of Brooklyn’s Red Hook shore.

We had almost six hours of favorable tide ahead of us but needed only about two hours to get Tradition through the difficult Hell Gate passage under the Triborough Bridge at northern Manhattan. I wanted to anchor for breakfast above the Williamsburg Bridge, near Kips Bay, on the Manhattan side of the East River. There was a place on the river I’d always wanted to show Susan from the water’s edge, a spot on the Manhattan side at Twenty-First Street. In the earliest days of our courtship there was a construction yard and dock there that played a significant part in our lives.

Governors Island was shrouded in mist and shadows. I could make out only its ugliest landmark, the massive concrete ventilation tower for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, but the island’s remarkable ice-cream-cone shape and its truly beautiful historic structures remained hidden. Originally known as Nuttin Island, it was purchased from the Indians by the Dutch and then became the summer residence of the English governors during the colonial period. “Black Jack” Pershing departed from the island with his Expeditionary Forces when the United States entered World War I. In 1998 the Coast Guard vacated the 175-acre island, which it had used for decades as its primary East Coast base, creating the most important opportunity for new harbor development in the past century. The rounded original island, about ninety acres, has been designated a historic district, and it includes some of the most beautiful forts and early-nineteenth-century military housing anywhere in the harbor. The island’s

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