The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  45

  I MAY HAVE NODDED OFF in that brick alcove. Just to shut off my senses as the storm raged. Just to escape. When I opened my eyes again, all was still. Sunlight penetrated the furnace through the square holes up top, casting slant parallelograms on the dark bricks.

  The water had retreated from the shaft as emphatically as it had surged in. I dropped down, climbed back out through the tubing and the hatch, and emerged into a dazzlingly bright seascape of blue sky and endless sand. The waters of the Great Bay had receded halfway to the horizon, leaving behind a beach seemingly without limit, glinting with a revealed treasury of shells and polished pebbles. The beauty of the sun-smashed morning mocked the violence that had preceded it.

  There was wreckage, too, plenty of it. But nothing I wanted to look at for long. The Bogardus was unrecognizable, a contorted pileup of old iron driven out onto the seabed between the island and the mainland, where it was certain to be swallowed up when the waters flowed back. Little remained of the factory but its listing steel uprights and the collapsed cage of its roof beams.

  I turned away to face the ocean. The revealed seabed there, the ephemeral expanse of new beach, held remnants of more pasts than my own. Out beyond the margin of yesterday’s island, beyond where I’d come ashore and tied up my now-vanished boat, stood a crumbled colony of pink-brick chimneys, headstones of homes perhaps engulfed by a previous century’s hurricane. Strewn among them, and in front of them, and beyond them as far as the eye could see, were the tumbled heads of hundreds of stone and terra-cotta New Yorkers.

  I removed my sneakers and walked out barefoot over the crunching carpet of shells. With the carved and cast faces lying every which way, some nose-down, some half sunk in sand, this raw aftermath of a landscape had the feel of a Civil War battlefield. Some of the keystone portraits stared skyward with an empty, smooth-pupiled gaze; they looked dazed, as if wondering what had brought them to this place. But most of them simply looked like what they were: lifeless objects made of rock or fired mud. Wrested from the living city, deprived now even of the animating passion of their collector, all they were was dead.

  When the tide began its return, I headed out to greet it, my sight blurred by what I suppose were tears. I wasn’t in the mood to gather fragments, whether polished blue shards of sea glass or keystones from dismembered townhouses. I picked up no carvings, and left behind the terra cotta, too, all but a single oblong castoff, which fit surprisingly snugly under my arm.

  —

  The distant mosquito buzz of an engine came to my ears well before I saw its source. Visible at first only as a white speck sparking diagonally across the bay, the vessel turned out to be a Coast Guard powerboat with one red stripe and one blue stripe slanting across its bow. I made a move toward it as if stepping off a curb, and my arm shot up, two fingers raised, hailing a ride home.

  46

  THE FIFTY-THREE-STORY RIDE in the express elevator was exhilarating, like moving through time. Backward, to the Gothic tower’s 1913 debut as the world’s tallest building, but forward, too, for reasons only I knew. This was a city where you could inhabit multiple eras simultaneously.

  The shoulder strap of my duffel was digging into my collarbone. When the doors chimed open, I humped the bag down the hall as briskly as I could, right past the clouded-glass door marked FULMER & ASSOCIATES, the name I’d given as my father’s place of business for the second day in a row when I told the lobby guard I was visiting my dad. Unlike yesterday, when I’d headed back downstairs a short while after dropping my supplies in the gutter that ran around the outside of the building, this time I hid in the stairwell inside for a couple of hours. As soon as I was pretty sure everyone on the floor had gone home, I came out of hiding. I slid open one of the two tall windows on the building’s western wall and climbed outside with my duffel.

  I couldn’t have chosen a better evening. It was one of those days when the moisture rolls in off New York Harbor and blankets Lower Manhattan in white fog. From up here, the whole city had vanished, all but the great twin rods of the World Trade Center, rising out of a puffy bed of cotton. From up here it was possible to imagine Dad was still down in the remembered streets somewhere, driving his phantom Good Humor truck up to the Carnegie Hall Cinema for a double feature, or over to his friend DeCarlo’s to pick out a nice casket for himself. From up here I could get away, for a while anyway, from all of Quigley’s tiresome crying about Dad’s drowning, and from Mom’s unconvincing pretense that she was perfectly happy in our cramped new apartment in an oppressively dreary redbrick urban renewal tower on West 100th.

  Zev loved what I was up to today. He’d helped me out with tools and materials, told me the best way to go about it. He’d called his friend at D.D.&M. to confirm that the Woolworth’s maintenance crew still kept a ladder and planking in the fifty-third-floor storeroom. He even offered to come along, but I told him a boy would attract less suspicion than a man. This was something I wanted to do on my own.

  The Woolworth’s “restoration” was complete. All four tourelles were now entirely faced in tacky beige-and-blue aluminum siding, with those cheapo giant toothpicks jutting out where the vivid terra-cotta gargoyles had once lived. A pair of two-foot-long steel supports ran horizontally from the building to the northwest tourelle. I slid the maintenance crew’s planks across these supports to make a little bridge I could stand the ladder on. After leaning the ladder against a downtown flank of the tourelle, I ran an extension cord from an outlet in the darkened hallway and plugged in the Sawzall I’d brought up here yesterday. I carefully climbed the ladder and took great pleasure in using the saw’s saber-toothed blade—zhigga-zhigga-zhigga—to amputate a southwest-facing aluminum toothpick. Then I used that same blade to enlarge the hole in the aluminum siding, revealing the original 1913 terra cotta behind it. You could see the jagged wound where a gargoyle had been lopped off.

  I swapped the Sawzall for a power drill with a very long one-inch-diameter bit and climbed the ladder again. The rest of the work went smoothly: the drilling of the deep hole in the terra cotta, the splooging of the epoxy into that hole with the caulk gun, the slathering of the mortar on the terra cotta.

  Quickly now, before the epoxy had time to dry up, I unzipped the duffel and removed the gargoyle I knew best, that sly-eyed, exiled skybeast I had both severed from this building and rescued from the wet sand of the Great Bay’s exposed seabed. He was already prepped for his return home. Zev, with a little kibitzing from me at the Greenpoint machine shop of a friend, had core-drilled a new hole in the gargoyle’s neck and inserted a length of rebar rod swiped from a construction site.

  I cradled the gargoyle against my chest with my left hand and carried him gently up the ladder to the hole I’d just drilled. But I didn’t put him back. I put him forward. I thought maybe he’d gotten tired of looking at things that had already happened. I thought he might enjoy a change of scenery. So instead of returning him to his original spot on the northeast tourelle, where for sixty-one years he had gazed out over City Hall and the old New York Times Building and the Brooklyn Bridge, I had chosen to place him here on the northwest tourelle, facing slightly downtown, with a panoramic view of a neighborhood in the making: the still-new Twin Towers, with work under way on the complementary high-rises around them, and the sprawling, undeveloped landfill above Battery Park made from earth excavated for the towers’ foundations.

  At the top of the ladder, I slipped the rebar into the drill hole and tenderly lowered the peculiar terra-cotta creature until he came to rest. To set him securely in the mortar for the long haul—to make sure he wouldn’t leave me, too—I put my arms around his neck and hugged him against the wall. For a long time we stayed like that, feeling each other breathe, listening to the fog-muffled sounds of the city. I probably could have let him go sooner than I did, but I hung on awhile for good measure. I needed him to stay put. I wanted him to get a good look, from his new perspective, at whatever might befall our shared hometown. He hadn’t bee
n situated in this spot in generations past to watch Washington Market and the Bogardus Building take form and thrive and then be swept away. But New York’s story is always retelling itself. In years to come, from this new perch, he would see a neighborhood rise and fall and rise again.

  47

  ANY NEW YORKER WHO’S PAYING ATTENTION will tell you that the city is a living, breathing organism at war with itself. This is as true today as it was in 1975, or for that matter in 1856, when that Harper’s Monthly writer was grumbling about how New York “is never the same city for a dozen years altogether.”

  I’ve made a bit of a study of the city’s self-cannibalization for “Ghosts of New York,” my wistfully cranky New Yorker architecture column. As part of the job (and for two decades before it, out of a personal compulsion I blame on my father), I’ve made a point of showing up at the deathbed of pretty much every noteworthy city building or storefront to meet its maker in the past thirty-six years. I stood outside Grand Central in 1981 and watched a teardrop-shaped wrecking ball sail into the Palm Court of the Biltmore Hotel, beneath whose clock generations of New Yorkers met their lovers (and where Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald honeymooned so boisterously they were asked to leave). The following year I was on hand the morning the Helen Hayes Theatre’s dazzling terra-cotta façade of gold, turquoise, and ivory was massacred, joining four other destroyed early 1900s theaters to make way for the fifty-story Marriott Marquis hotel. And in 2005 I nipped inside the doomed Times Square Howard Johnson’s to drink, by myself, what I’m pretty sure was the last dreadful martini ever served by that illustrious institution.

  I’m not the only one who does this sort of thing, either. You probably wouldn’t know, unless you’re one of us, that whenever one of these storied city structures is shuttered or razed, a handful of mourners shows up to say goodbye. It’s a wisecracking, heartsick crowd for the most part, but what’s always interested me is how you tend to see the same people at these things over the years.

  There’s no single type of person in our crowd, though many of us are middle-aged or older. You get pink-faced codgers in stained Brooklyn Dodgers caps, designery-looking black guys in geek-chic eyeglasses, and dowdy old Village matrons who probably used to meet Jane Jacobs for coffee at the Figaro. New Yorkers, basically.

  The one who repeatedly caught my eye, though, was a pigeon-toed, thirtyish woman with a long bronze braid down her back. She was a photographer—I rarely got a glimpse of her face because her Leica was so often in front of it—who started showing up in the early Bloomberg years, as the real estate developers were stampeding to the D.O.B. to grab demolition permits by the fistful. I think I fell for her way of seeing things before I fell for her. In fact, I know I did. While the rest of us bruised nostalgists were shaking our heads at the wreckers smashing the enormous plate-glass windows of the Beekman Theatre, she was the only one who noticed its salvaged popcorn machine tied to the roof of a BMW parked up the block. And the day the original H&H on Eightieth and Broadway was shut down after a tax fraud indictment, it was she who spotted an enterprising rat making off with the era’s last, valedictory everything bagel.

  It took me ages to work up the nerve to talk to her. Turns out that she is not so much a devotee of lost New York in particular as she is, more generally, an aficionado of derelict things, which is probably why she doesn’t mind living with me. We’ve been married just under four years, and our son will turn three next month. He’s an inquisitive little fellow, but my wife has made me promise to go easy on the pontification about Ye Olde New Yorke as he gets older, lest he be forced to pretend he’s deaf. (“Griffin’s Edifice Complex,” she calls my obsession.)

  Now that our schedules are largely ruled by babysitter availability, my wife and I can’t get away as often for our morbid little dates to visit doomed city buildings and storefronts. But we’ll always have Rizzoli. And the Moondance Diner. And the Ziegfeld. And the Original Ray’s and Caffé Dante and the Cedar Tavern. And the Jackson Hole and Steinway Hall and O’Neals. We’ll have Café Figaro and Pearl Paint and Kim’s Video and Ratner’s (with Lansky Lounge in the back). We’ll have the Four Seasons. We’ll have Cafe La Fortuna and CBGB and the Fulton Fish Market. And the Knitting Factory and Dojo and Guss’ Pickles. We’ll have the Second Avenue Deli, too, and La Lunchonette and J&R. And Endicott Booksellers and Mars Bar and Fez (downstairs from Time Café). We’ll have Astroland, the Bottom Line, Café Edison, and the Complete Traveller Antiquarian Bookstore. And the P&G Bar and the Provincetown Playhouse and Around the Clock and Joe’s Dairy. We’ll have Elaine’s and Luna Lounge and the New York Doll Hospital. We’ll have Roseland and the Roxy and the Back Fence. We’ll have Claremont Stables and Yaffa, the Liquor Store Bar and the Stoned Crow, Jefferson Market and the Drake Hotel. And Bleecker Bob’s Records, the Donnell Library, and Pete’s Waterfront Ale House. We’ll have St. Vincent’s Hospital and Sutton Clock Shop and Shea Stadium. And Café des Artistes and Kenny’s Castaways and Gotham Book Mart (“Wise Men Fish Here”). We’ll have Mimi’s Pizza and Lascoff Drugs and Andy’s Chee-Pees. We’ll have Coliseum Books and Hogs & Heifers. We’ll have El Teddy’s. We’ll have Florent.

  Another thing we’ll always have is the Woolworth Building, which was not destroyed but was merely eviscerated and expensively tarted up, shortly before having its private patch of sky invaded by 30 Park Place, the eighty-two-story monument to obscene wealth that Larry Silverstein built down the block. As you’ve surely heard by now, the top thirty stories of the Woolworth have been gutted and transformed into—what else?—yet another luxury condo for hedge-funders and Russian zillionaires (cost of the seven-level pinnacle penthouse: $110 million).

  Not long ago I wangled my way into a press tour of the palatial new apartments, and while my fellow ink-stained wretches were admiring the finishes in the kitchen of a $27 million fifty-first-floor pied-à-terre, I slipped upstairs and poked my head out a west-facing fifty-third-floor window, the one through which my father and I climbed together that terrifying February night forty-three years ago. You’ll understand why I didn’t quite have the nerve to climb out there again, but I am happy to report that my gargoyle is alive and well, keeping watch over twenty-first-century Lower Manhattan from his private perch on that northwestern tourelle. I thought it best not to approach him. He is a timeless creature, whereas I, having crossed into my second half century a few years ago, am running out of a little more time each year. So it seemed preferable just to leave us both with our memories of each other.

  I still love the Woolworth Building, no matter how crass its “superluxury” new residents may turn out to be. I think a building that beautiful can transcend the vulgarity of the humans rattling around its innards, and not long ago I wrote a column making that very argument. Working things out in my column is how I make sense of my hometown’s relentless demolition and recomposition. Over the years I’ve written pieces—some rueful, some accepting—about most of the lost buildings and storefronts I listed above, and I’ve also written a number of architectural books about New York’s ever-changing streetscape. All in all, I’ve come to know, and helped my readers to know, intimately, several hundred city buildings. But this is the first time I’ve ever been able to write a word about the brownstone where I grew up, or the Bogardus Building, or the demolished Kips Bay tenements whose rubble yielded up so much shattered treasure. It just wasn’t something I could bring myself to do without also telling the story of my father’s own demolition, and my attempts to salvage a sense of self, and a sense of my city, from what was left.

  Last week, my wife, always the playful provocateur, gave me a set of four-inch-tall rubber erasers in the shapes of notable New York buildings. I left them on the kitchen table a minute to go bang out an e-mail to my editor, and by the time I came back, our household’s smallest native New Yorker had already gotten his sneaky little fist around the American Folk Art Museum. He was lying on his belly on the linoleum floor, his face alight with the exuberance of the born troublemaker, fev
erishly rubbing away the last of the museum’s distinctive textured façade. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I guess, because that is New York as I know it: the city that sets about erasing itself the moment you take it out of the box.

  But disappearance isn’t the whole story, either, is it? Because however much we might mourn what the city is doing to itself, the damned place never fails to regenerate. It’s a snake that grows by swallowing its own tail. It’s a Möbius strip of self-annihilation and re-creation. And that’s what my father was as well. In the end, he erased himself, and in so doing, he created me.

  There are days, whole weeks sometimes, when I see myself as no more than the sum total of all those messy rubbery bits left over from the eraser after my father had completed his final vanishing act. But there’s always a chance to cobble something together on the site of that absence, too, combining those scavenged scraps with whatever else comes to hand. It’s worth a shot, anyway. We are all disposable, but with any luck, when the time comes for me to be rubbed away, there will be enough useful bits among the resulting debris to help my boy build something grandly peculiar of his own. What I’d give to see what it turns out to be.