Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Charlie laid aside his Sunshine and Health and sat up in the life dory. ‘That must’ve been around the time old Christine was ruling the south end of the island,’ Charlie said. ‘Old Chrissy was an old rascal of a woman that was the head of a gang of wreckers. They lured ships in with false lights, and they killed the sailors and passengers, so there wouldn’t be any tales told. Old Chrissy always took charge of the killing. She had a big club and she’d hist her skirt and wade out in the surf and clout the people on the head as they swam in or floated in. She called a wreck a wrack, the way the Block Islanders do. That’s the way she pronounced it. One night, she and her gang lured a ship up on the reef, and the sailors were floating in, and old Chrissy was out there clouting them on their heads. One poor fellow floated up, and it was one of old Chrissy’s sons, who’d left the island and gone to the mainland to be a sailor. He looked up at old Chrissy and said, “Hello, Ma.” Old Chrissy didn’t hesitate a moment. She lifted up her club and clouted him on the head. “A son’s a son,” she said, “but a wrack’s a wrack.”’

  (1947)

  The Rivermen

  I OFTEN FEEL drawn to the Hudson River, and I have spent a lot of time through the years poking around the part of it that flows past the city. I never get tired of looking at it; it hypnotizes me. I like to look at it in midsummer, when it is warm and dirty and drowsy, and I like to look at it in January, when it is carrying ice. I like to look at it when it is stirred up, when a northeast wind is blowing and a strong tide is running – a new-moon tide or a full-moon tide – and I like to look at it when it is slack. It is exciting to me on weekdays, when it is crowded with ocean craft, harbor craft, and river craft, but it is the river itself that draws me, and not the shipping, and I guess I like it best on Sundays, when there are lulls that sometimes last as long as half an hour, during which, all the way from the Battery to the George Washington Bridge, nothing moves upon it, not even a ferry, not even a tug, and it becomes as hushed and dark and secret and remote and unreal as a river in a dream. Once, in the course of such a lull, on a Sunday morning in April, 1950, I saw a sea sturgeon rise out of the water. I was on the New Jersey side of the river that morning, sitting in the sun on an Erie Railroad coal dock. I knew that every spring a few sturgeon still come in from the sea and go up the river to spawn, as hundreds of thousands of them once did, and I had heard tugboatmen talk about them, but this was the first one I had ever seen. It was six or seven feet long, a big, full-grown sturgeon. It rose twice, and cleared the water both times, and I plainly saw its bristly snout and its shiny little eyes and its white belly and its glistening, greenish-yellow, bony-plated, crocodilian back and sides, and it was a spooky sight.

  I prefer to look at the river from the New Jersey side; it is hard to get close to it on the New York side, because of the wall of pier sheds. The best points of vantage are in the riverfront railroad yards in Jersey City, Hoboken, and Weehawken. I used to disregard the ‘DANGER’ and ‘RAILROAD PROPERTY’ and ‘NO TRESPASSING’ signs and walk into these yards and wander around at will. I would go out to the end of one of the railroad piers and sit on the stringpiece and stare at the river for hours, and nobody ever bothered me. In recent years, however, the railroad police and pier watchmen have become more and more inquisitive. Judging from the questions they ask, they suspect every stranger hanging around the river of spying for Russia. They make me uneasy. Several years ago, I began going farther up the river, up to Edgewater, New Jersey, and I am glad I did, for I found a new world up there, a world I never knew existed, the world of the rivermen.

  Edgewater is across the river from the upper West Side of Manhattan; it starts opposite Ninety-fourth Street and ends opposite 164th Street. It is an unusually narrow town. It occupies a strip of stony land between the river and the Palisades, and it is three and a half miles long and less than half a mile wide at its widest part. The Palisades tower over it, and overshadow it. One street, River Road, runs the entire length of it, keeping close to the river, and is the main street. The crosstown streets climb steeply from the bank of the river to the base of the Palisades, and are quite short. Most of them are only two blocks long, and most of them are not called streets but avenues or terraces or places or lanes. From these streets, there is a panoramic view of the river and the Manhattan skyline. It is a changeable view, and it is often spectacular. Every now and then – at daybreak, at sunset, during storms, on starry summer nights, on hazy Indian-summer afternoons, on blue, clearcut, stereoscopic winter afternoons – it is astonishing.

  The upper part of Edgewater is largely residential. This is the oldest part of town, and the narrowest, but it still isn’t entirely built up. There are several stretches of trees and underbrush, and several bushy ravines running down to the river, and a number of vacant lots. The lots are grown up in weeds and vines, and some of them are divided by remnants of stone walls that once divided fields or pastures. The streets are lined with old trees, mostly sweet gums and sycamores and tulip trees. There are some wooden tenements and some small apartment houses and some big old blighted mansions that have been split up into apartments, but one-family houses predominate. The majority are two-story houses, many of them set back in good-sized yards. Families try to outdo each other in landscaping and ornamenting their yards, and bring home all sorts of odds and ends for the purpose; in yard after yard conventional garden ornaments such as sundials and birdbaths and wagon wheels painted white stand side by side with objects picked up around the riverfront or rescued during the demolition of old buildings. The metal deckhouse of an old Socony tanker barge is in the front yard of one house on River Road; it is now a garden shed. In the same yard are a pair of mooring bitts, a cracked stone eagle that must have once been on the façade of a public building or a bank, and five of those cast-iron stars that are set in the walls of old buildings to cap the ends of strengthening rods. In the center of a flower bed in one yard is a coalhole cover and in the center of a flower bed in an adjoining yard is a manhole cover. In other yards are old anchors and worm wheels and buoys and bollards and propellers. Edgewater used to be linked to Manhattan by a ferry, the Edgewater-125th Street ferry. Most of the captains, wheelsmen, and deckhands on the ferryboats were Edgewater men, and had been for generations, and the ferry was the pride of the town. It stopped running in 1950; it was ruined by the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel. There are relics of it in a dozen yards. In former Mayor Henry Wissel’s yard, on Hilliard Avenue, there is a chain post that came off the vehicle gangway of the ferryboat Shadyside, and the Shadyside’s fog bell hangs beside his door. In former Fire Chief George Lasher’s yard, on Undercliff Avenue, there is a hookup wheel that came off the landing stage of the old ferryhouse. It resembles a ship’s wheel. Chief Lasher has painted it white, and has trained a climbing rose on it.

  In the middle of Edgewater, around and about River Road and the foot of Dempsey Avenue, where the ferryhouse used to stand, there is a small business district. In addition, a few stores and a few neighborhood saloons of the type known in New Jersey as taverns are scattered along River Road in the upper and lower parts of town.

  The lower part of Edgewater is called Shadyside; the ferryboat was named for it. It is a mixed residential and factory district. The majority of the factories are down close to the river, in a network of railroad sidings, and piers jut out from them. Among them are an Aluminum Company of America factory, a coffee-roasting plant, a factory that makes roofing materials, a factory that makes sulphuric acid, and a factory that makes a shortening named Spry. On the roof of the Spry factory is an enormous electric sign; the sign looms over the river, and on rainy, foggy nights its pulsating, endlessly repeated message, ‘SPRY FOR BAKING,’ ‘SPRY FOR BAKING,’ ‘SPRY FOR BAKING,’ seems to be a cryptic warning of some kind that New Jersey is desperately trying to get across to New York.

  There are six or seven large factories in Shadyside and six or seven small ones. The Aluminum Company factory is by far the largest, and there is somet
hing odd about it. It is made up of a group of connecting buildings arranged in a U, with the prongs of the U pointed toward the river, and inside the U, covering a couple of acres, is an old cemetery. This is the Edgewater Cemetery. Most of the old families in Edgewater have plots in it, and some still have room in their plots and continue to bury there. The land on which Edgewater is situated and the land for some distance along the river above and below it was settled in the seventeenth century by Dutch and Huguenot farmers. Their names are on the older gravestones in the cemetery – Bourdettes and Vreelands and Bogerts and Van Zandts and Wandells and Dyckmans and Westervelts and Demarests. According to tradition, the Bourdette family came in the sixteen-thirties – 1638 is the date that is usually specified – and was the first one there; the name is now spelled Burdette or Burdett. Some of the families came over from Manhattan and some from down around Hoboken. They grew grain on the slopes, and planted orchards in the shelter of the Palisades. In the spring, during the shad and sturgeon runs, they fished, and took a large part of their catch to the city. The section was hard to get to, except by water, and it was rural and secluded for a long time. In the early eighteen-hundreds, some bluestone quarries were opened, and new people, most of whom were English, began to come in and settle down and intermarry with the old farming and fishing families. They were followed by Germans, and then by Irish straight from Ireland. Building stones and paving blocks and curbing for New York City were cut in the quarries and carried to the city on barges – paving blocks from Edgewater are still in place, under layers of asphalt, on many downtown streets. Some of the new people worked in the quarries, some worked on the barges, some opened blacksmith shops and made and repaired gear for the quarries and the barges, some opened boatyards, and some opened stores. The names of dozens of families who were connected with these enterprises in one way or another are on gravestones in the newer part of the cemetery; Allison, Annett, Carlock, Cox, Egg, Forsyth, Gaul, Goetchius, Hawes, Hewitt, Jenkins, Stevens, Truax, and Winterburn are a few. Some of these families died out, some moved away, and some are still flourishing. The enterprises themselves disappeared during the first two decades of this century; they were succeeded by the Shadyside factories.

  The land surrounding the Edgewater Cemetery was once part of a farm owned by the Vreeland family, and the Aluminum Company bought this land from descendants of a Winterburn who married a Vreeland. As a condition of the sale, the company had to agree to provide perpetual access to the cemetery. To reach it, funerals go through the truck gate of the factory and across a freight yard and up a cement ramp. It is a lush old cemetery, and peaceful, even though the throb of machinery can be felt in every corner of it. A part-time caretaker does a good deal of gardening in it, and he likes bright colors. For borders, he uses the same gay plants that are used in flower beds at race tracks and seaside hotels – cannas, blue hydrangeas, scarlet sage, and cockscomb. Old men and old women come in the spring, with hoes and rakes, and clean off their family plots and plant old-fashioned flowers on them. Hollyhocks are wide-spread. Asparagus has been planted here and there, for its feathery ferny sprays. One woman plants sunflowers. Coarse, knotty, densely tangled rosebushes grow on several plots, hiding graves and gravestones. The roses that they produce are small and fragile and extraordinarily fragrant, and have waxy red hips almost as big as crab apples. Once, walking through the cemetery, I stopped and talked with an old woman who was down on her knees in her family plot, setting out some bulbs at the foot of a grave, and she remarked on the age of the rosebushes. ‘I believe some of the ones in here now were in here when I was a young woman, and I am past eighty,’ she said. ‘My mother – this is her grave – used to say there were rosebushes just like these all over this section when she was a girl. Along the riverbank, beside the roads, in people’s yards, on fences, in waste places. And she said her mother – that’s her grave over there – told her she had heard from her mother that all of them were descended from one bush that some poor uprooted woman who came to this country back in the Dutch times potted up and brought along with her. There used to be a great many more in the cemetery than there are now – they overran everything – and every time my mother visited the cemetery she would stand and look at them and kind of laugh. She thought they were a nuisance. All the same, for some reason of her own, she admired them, and enjoyed looking at them. “I know why they do so well in here,” she’d say. “They’ve got good strong roots that go right down into the graves.”’

  The water beside several of the factory piers in Shadyside has been deepened by dredging to depths ranging between twenty and thirty feet. Everywhere else along Edgewater the inshore water is shallow. Off the upper part of town are expanses of shoals that are called the Edgewater Flats. They are mucky, miry, silty, and oily. Stretches of them are exposed at low tide, or have only a foot or two of water over them. In some places, they go out two hundred yards before they reach a depth of six feet. For generations, the Edgewater Flats have been a dumping ground for wrecks. Out in them, lying every which way, as if strewn about long ago by a storm, are the ruins of scores of river vessels. Some of these vessels were replaced by newer vessels and laid up in the flats against a time that they might possibly be used again, and that time never came. Some got out of commission and weren’t worth repairing, and were towed into the flats and stripped of their metal and abandoned. Some had leaks, some had fires, and some had collisions. At least once a day, usually when the tide is at or around dead ebb, flocks of harbor gulls suddenly appear and light on the wrecks and scavenge the refuse that has collected on them during the rise and fall of the tide, and for a little while they crawl with gulls, they become white and ghostly with gulls, and then the gulls leave as suddenly as they came. The hulks of three ferryboats are out in the flats – the Shadyside, the George Washington, and the old Fort Lee. Nothing is left of the Shadyside but a few of her ribs and part of her keel. There are old tugboats out there, and old dump scows, and old derrick lighters, and old car floats. There are sand-and-gravel barges, and brick barges, and stone barges, and coal barges, and slaughterhouse barges. There are five ice barges out there, the last of a fleet that used to bring natural ice down to New York City from the old icehouse section along the west shore of the river, between Saugerties and Coxsackie. They have been in the flats since 1910, they are waterlogged, and they sit like hippopotamuses in the silt.

  Close to shore are some barges that are still being used. They are drawn up in a straggly row, facing the shore, and narrow, zigzaggy footwalks built on piles made of drift lumber go out to them. These are second-hand railroad barges. They were once owned by the Pennsylvania, the Erie, the New York Central, the Jersey Central, and other railroads that operate barge fleets in the harbor. Their bottoms are sound and their roofs are tight, but they got too old to be jerked this way and that by tugs in a hurry and bumped about and banged into (most of them are over forty years old, and several are over sixty), so they were discarded and sold. Some are owned by shadfishermen, who move them up or down the river at the start of the shad season and tie them up along the bank, each fisherman placing his barge as close as possible to his row of nets. The fishermen eat and sleep aboard them and use them as bases while the shad are running, and then return them to the flats and keep them there the rest of the year and store their equipment in them. Others are owned by boat clubs. There are seven boat clubs on the Edgewater riverfront, and four are quartered in secondhand railroad barges. One club, the Undercliff Motor Boat Club, owns two, but uses both for the winter storage of its boats, and has its quarters in an old queen of an oyster barge named the G. M. Still. The wholesale oyster companies in New York City used to carry on their businesses in specially built barges that were docked the year round at piers on the East River, just north of Fulton Fish Market. These barges had two or three decks, and could hold huge stocks of oysters. They were top-heavy but beautifully made. Some had balconies with banisters shaped like tenpins on their upper decks, and the offices in several
had mahogany paneling; the reputation of an oyster company partly depended on the splendor of its barge. There were over a dozen oyster barges on the East River at one time, and all were painted a variety of colors and all had ostentatious black-and-gold nameboards across their fronts and all flew swallowtail pennants; people visited the waterfront just to see them. The G. M. Still was the last to go. It was owned by George M. Still, Inc., the planters of Diamond Point oysters, and its final East River location was at a pier at the foot of Pike Street, under the Manhattan Bridge; it was there for a generation. In 1949, the city took over this pier, and the Still company was unable to find another, so it moved ashore, and sold the barge to a dealer in old boats, who sold it to the boat club. The G. M. Still is almost eighty years old – it was built in 1880 – and the recent years have been hard on it. Even so, not all the teardrops, icicles, scallops, and other scroll-saw curlicues that once ornamented it have disappeared, and its last coat of paint under the Still ownership – black, yellow, white, orange, and green – has not entirely faded, and the balcony on the bow end of its upper deck looks as regal as ever.