On an overcast, windy weekday a couple of weeks ago--the hem of Hurricane Michael was sweeping over us--I spent the day on Governors Island as part of my residency hosted by Works on Water and Underwater New York. The house on Nolan Park was quiet and echoey and full of mosquitoes. What with the gurgling of water crackling through the headphones of someone’s video installation, it felt eerie in there and expectant of some cataclysm (which may be saying more about my state of mind than the house), so I went walking around the island. The winds and currents were strong and the waves were crashing over the seawall and the fence onto Buttermilk Promenade. Not quite the king tides the island saw in 2011, but a good reminder of the way Governors Island will be increasingly hard-hit by both hurricanes and rising sea levels.
As I was swimming up Buttermilk Channel on the home stretch around Governors Island back in June, they'd felt so uncanny looming over us, and us so small and vulnerable down there, hurtable flesh amidst the iron and steel. It's like seeing a whale while you're in the water, only it's over, not under you.
According to Kate Ascher in The Works (a fascinating illustrated encyclopedia of how infrastructures work in NYC), I finally understood that those giraffes are ship-to-shore container cranes (rubber-tired gantry cranes to be precise). Knowing this information didn't make me much wiser about how they worked, but being able to say the name to myself made them seem a tiny bit less uncanny, and myself a tiny bit less ignorant about my city.
Out here crossing New York Harbor, or swimming in Coney Island Channel, I think about the history of the NYC waterfront, and its future. How we’ve become disconnected from the industrial systems that make our daily lives possible. How little we know about how or where the food we eat is transported, unloaded, and warehoused. So much of that no longer happens where we can see it—the biggest container terminal serving the city is now in Elizabeth, New Jersey—that even when we are seeing parts of “the works,” we have no idea what we’re looking at. And as for the future, the Army Corps of Engineers is considering building a storm surge barrier that may further drastically alter the Hudson River and the entire New York Harbor by restricting the flow of tides and so decimating the habitats of many species of fish and waterfowl (see here for Nathan Kensinger's investigation into the social and environmental impact, and here for the Riverkeeper's position against the current proposed plan). Everything that we see out here points back to our manufacturing history, and forward to a future where our vulnerability to, and dependence on, our waters will become an increasingly daily reality.
Reading about the gantries, and about the different kinds of cargo vessels traveling our waterways, makes these looming giants seem less mythical, more historical, and tied to the politics of our city. Still, every time I’m in the water and see a behemoth container ship, I’m going to feel that queasy something in the pit of my stomach, visions of being sucked under in its undertow, of ironclad whales amassing out in Ambrose Channel.
Out here crossing New York Harbor, or swimming in Coney Island Channel, I think about the history of the NYC waterfront, and its future. How we’ve become disconnected from the industrial systems that make our daily lives possible. How little we know about how or where the food we eat is transported, unloaded, and warehoused. So much of that no longer happens where we can see it—the biggest container terminal serving the city is now in Elizabeth, New Jersey—that even when we are seeing parts of “the works,” we have no idea what we’re looking at. And as for the future, the Army Corps of Engineers is considering building a storm surge barrier that may further drastically alter the Hudson River and the entire New York Harbor by restricting the flow of tides and so decimating the habitats of many species of fish and waterfowl (see here for Nathan Kensinger's investigation into the social and environmental impact, and here for the Riverkeeper's position against the current proposed plan). Everything that we see out here points back to our manufacturing history, and forward to a future where our vulnerability to, and dependence on, our waters will become an increasingly daily reality.
Reading about the gantries, and about the different kinds of cargo vessels traveling our waterways, makes these looming giants seem less mythical, more historical, and tied to the politics of our city. Still, every time I’m in the water and see a behemoth container ship, I’m going to feel that queasy something in the pit of my stomach, visions of being sucked under in its undertow, of ironclad whales amassing out in Ambrose Channel.
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