The Hudson Docks
My mother was born before, the turn of the century in a small New Jersey town of shingled houses representing the different styles that followed the railroad lines into farm and pasture lands. Its unpaved streets wandered irregularly through pastures and in between stands of chestnut and sassafras trees.By my time not that much had changed .The houses I remember from my childhood, like the oaks and the traprock ridges, grew out of the earth and its permanence. They were the fixed base on which the changes of our life were acted out. The older houses were substantial - turreted Victorians with bay windows and covered porches. They stood in the shade of full-grow oak and elm trees, their heavy slate walks raised and canted by the spreading roots. They were part of what endured.
Christmas Poinsettia on Life Support after Two Weeks of Liturgies
The town lay on a newly built line of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad Company. In that perspective western meant Buffalo, New York.The Lackawanna's terminal was in Hoboken, on the very edge of the Hudson River, across from lower Manhattan. Disembarking train passengers were taken across the river on the Lackawanna's fleet of ferry boats. The ferry slips formed part of the terminal, and the boats left every few minutes for the quarter-hour trip to Barclay Street or Christopher Street. Even as late as my own childhood a trip to New York was quite an excursion.
The woven cane seats in the derelict coaches were polished shiny by years of use. Fine, gritty cinders always covered the aligatored windowsills. They rattled and bounced out of the New Jersey hills and across the still empty miles of the Hackensack meadows. Then, slowing to a crawl and jolting sideways every few seconds as we were switched from track to track, we passed through the freight yard walled in on either side by blocks of six-story warehouses. Track gangs of unsmiling, weary Italian immigrants leaning on their shovels and pries-their white-shirted Irish foreman in a different world ten feet away-looked up at us as we passed slowly by.
Arriving in the Hoboken terminal we climbed down from the coach and walked fast along the narrow passageway past the hot and still smoking engine. Clouds of white steam from a dozen locomotives rose up into the black roof. Mechanics with long-handled hammers walked the length of the trains, striking the wheels to make them ring.
From the tracks we walked to the terminal and then out to the ferry slips. Their entry arches were a Victorian marvel of copper columns, cornices and cupolas, all turned a white green by the harbor's salt. A little boy's desire to stop and stare always lost to the older world's determination to catch the next boat. Past the line of square, chain drive Railway Express trucks with spoke wheels and solid rubber tires. The waiting truckers in the open cabs joked with the traffic cops who funneled them into the gangway. Dockhands in greasy, high-waisted, heavy canvas pants, red kerchiefs tied around their necks, spun the six-foot wooden wheels that lowered and locked the gangway. The cars and trucks bounced over the loose wooden planks, playing them like a dull marimba, while the iron ratchets on the gang way wheels clanked out their own call to hurry on.
Up the canting stairs to the top deck to peer down into the narrow space between the slip and the stern and wait for the black, debris covered water to turn to white foam. And then hurry to the front. The boat shuddered, began to move, grazed along the slip's black-tarred pilings and bounced the seagulls from their rounded tops. The pilings stretched and groaned, the passengers lurched sideways, the boat slid out into the Hudson, and the seagulls dropped down again onto their perch.
The ferries had no fronts, no backs - just open ends to speed people and vehicles on to where-ever it was they were going lower Manhattan or the Hoboken waterfront. And once started the engines down in the hold sent us charging right into the non-stop tumult of the greatest port in America. Even going up to the subways behind the old Washington Market was an eye-widening adventure. But that was reserved for the trip back. My mother loved to walk through it, walk along the aisles of white bathroom-tiled floors where the buying and selling of great lots of meat and produce made room for small counters where old-world merchants would offer a slice of pheasant or a plate of cheeses- a proud and public side for the volumes of foods coming and going behind the scenes. A counter would have five or six high, bent-iron stools with enough crossed rods at the bottom to help a little kid clamber up. And then to perch on the round wooden seat polished to a fine shine by years of bottoms sliding on and off and watch this tumult of merchandising run by and for a city of people who liked to eat , and liked to eat well.
Once on the stool our rush stopped. Being there, sitting there was a treat. The guys behind the counters, guys in white aprons, accents, the kings of their counters, family men, were always happy to take care of a woman with a little kid. And again, being little and down near the floor, I was so impressed by the way that the tile-setters had worked two running stripes of blue tiles into the floor about half-a foot out from the counter. And right above the floor, again down in my world, was this highly polished brass rail set out from the counter, a resting place for tired feet. I was too late in Paris, maybe not smart enough when I was there, to go to Les Halles. But I didn't miss out. I still see the Washington Market.
Out on the streets was another marvel - one that has not disappeared. There was and is that non-stop human flow on the packed sidewalks of the garment district, half heading east from 9th Avenue toward 6th and the other half heading right into them non stop from 6th toward 9th. The cast of characters has changed. It used to be thousands of dresses on a stream of racks designed fit into a freight elevator - pulled, pushed along by guys - watcha truck, watcha truck, - hurrying from wherever to wherever. But that's gone. Moved to South East Asia. Today, every dozen yards or so, its a couple of overworked delivery guys, big boxes held out right in front of them and barging their ways right through from their double-parked trucks to some garment workers shop inside the buildings. Clever guys - they know that no New Yorker was going to risk a collision with some hefty guy with a big box.
My America, small town America, was a part of that world. We were outside it, forty minutes away. But we knew it. It was the show, we were the audience. But we were part of it and knew it and we knew the coal barges, tug boats, garbage scows, tenders, and all the freighters and liners that tied America to Southampton, Cherbourg, Bremen, Rotterdam, Le Havre, Barcelona, Naples, Cuba and the Caribbean, and all parts of South America. For a kid from small town America just forty minutes away New York Harbor was the world of non-stop big ship baritone blasts, smoking funnels, scurrying tenders changing directions and weaving in and out - the most fascinating, tumultuous show New York had to offer. Almost always one of the world's great liners was being slipped carefully backwards out of its home pier and into the Hudson . Or being escorted by what seemed like an honor guard of tugs, up past the Statue of Liberty and up to its slip. Obviously deferring to their size and immobilities the ferries had to weave their scheduled ways through them back and forth across the river. Once we docked I was back in my mother's world. In hindsight a would-be outsider waiting for my own turn to move out into my own stream. And do it my own way.
About ten years later I returned to the Hudson docks but this time to the Manhattan side. The Cunard Line's piers - and here their massive size merited the title pier - were at the end of the mid 30's, twenty blocks farther north than the railroads' old worlds and very much the new ikon of America's post WWII empire. A newly minted college graduate I was there to board the Queen Elizabeth and head out for Cherbourg and a new adventure. This time truly a new life. How new, how upending I did not yet have the language or the context to imagine.
