New York City in 1974
To say the atmosphere in New York City in 1974 was cloudy, unsettled, is no mere metaphor. Socially, all the signs of the decaying metropolis were obvious: the city’s budget, which had for years delivered its residents some of the most robust social services found in the United States, was tottering on the brink of insolvency, and just a year later, the city narrowly avoided bankruptcy by promising its financiers great austerity, a catalytic moment that some historians have suggested was where neoliberalism first began in the United States. Communities that had just a few decades before been low-income but tight-knit ethnic enclaves were eviscerated by the onrush of seemingly endless parades of new highway construction projects, developments that left large swathes of the Bronx and other boroughs an uninhabitable mess. Robert Moses, largely responsible for the wholesale reimagination of the country’s largest metropolis in the postwar years, had finally been wrested from power by this time; Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning tome, The Power Broker, released that year, was only the final nail in the coffin for the regime he’d constructed over decades, its many failures now blindingly obvious to observers everywhere.
Yet you need look no further than the hazy sheen of the city’s skyline, oft obscured by pollution that was still at sky-high levels despite the 1963 passage of the Clean Air Act, to understand the unsettled state the city found itself in at this time. During the summer of 2023, as smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted south towards the United States, residents were warned of the grave health risks posed by extended time spent outdoors, the air cast in an eerie, almost cinematic orange glow. This level of poor air has become an increasing anomaly in the last half-century, as major pollutants have been curtailed, or otherwise made to appear in the lives of poorer, less-regulated countries elsewhere around the globe. Such relief had yet to arrive in America’s metropolis in the mid-70s: a 1966 smog episode led to adverse health impacts on at least ten percent of the city’s population, and in the first six months of 1973 alone, over 300 oil spills occurred in the New York City area, leaving the waters surrounding the Statue of Liberty and elsewhere in the city caked in petroleum. In this climate, an air of hopeless uncertainty seemed inescapable to many residents, pushed many of them from the city’s midst—a population that stood at 7,894,862 in 1970, but fell more than 10 percent to 7,071,639 a decade later.
The haziness that shrouded the city’s physical geography clung to the minds of its residents as well. Where, one might ask in the long, hot summer months, was the city heading? What could its citizens expect from its future, when recent history had provided such great disruptions, such keen reminders that the city would not, could not, remain a fixed entity? Perhaps most importantly was who was asking. To those living in public housing or derelict tenement buildings in the Bronx or the Lower East Side, their communities torched and disfigured by landlords who saw greater value in insurance payouts than in the ongoing wellbeing of the renters inside, a better future might mean little more than a modicum of stability, some hint that the perpetual terror of your neighborhood going up in flames would not become an eternal truth. Yet those real estate interests who surveilled the scene from a higher perch, aware of the downward spiral and its negative impact on the city’s tax base, the calculus was different: could these same burnout buildings instead be brought back to life, not in service of those who had endured so much within them for years, but instead to house a richer, whiter population than ever before?
Within this tumult, the summer of 1974 marks a moment of uncertain waiting for those above and below along the city’s western waterfront, no fate certain to arise. For those artists and queer men like David Wojnarowicz who began using the derelict West Side Piers to make art and cruise, the future seemed like a distant concern: with full awareness that the site of their intervention was never meant to be used for such divergent ends, far more important was the present moment, a site where emergent social and artistic possibilities could flourish out of view of many kinds of authority, at least to a degree.
But those on the piers were largely confined to a street-level view of the city, lacking that kind of power that could remake an entire neighborhood overnight, a force used and misused by Moses for decades. The chokehold that Moses had evinced for decades was wrested away in 1968, and by the time 1974 rolled around, those financiers and other power players had to contend with a new crisis, one with intimate ties to Moses’s legacy. On December 15, 1973, the West Side Elevated Highway collapsed, a crumbling structure brought to ruin by a dump truck overloaded with asphalt meant to fix the failing infrastructure. The highway, completed in 1951 after several decades of on-and-off development, had slipped into decay within a short span, made brittle by an attitude that prioritized ushering in the new over sustaining what was already there. According to The Power Broker, the highway “could have been kept in perfect repair during the 1950’s for about $75,000 per year; because virtually no repairing was done, by the 1960’s, the cost of annual maintenance would be more than $1,000,000 per year.” Instead, those stepping into the void left by Moses’s departure sought to create Westway, a $2.1 billion project that would have buried the highway underground south of 40th Street, constructing luxury housing in the land created above it.
When the powers-that-be first contemplated Westway, its future was far from given. Moses’s handiwork on the city, legacies that would take generations to fully comprehend, had in the short term left the city a disfigured, contentious mess, even by the standards of a fraught era in American urban history. The project provoked fierce resistance from many camps, and after years of trying and failing to stop the bulldozers from reshaping their communities, these oppositional forces could now point to the damage wrought by this model when fighting back. Even from their lofted views, particularly from high up within the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, which were completed in 1973 and towered over the Lower Manhattan and the Hudson River, those in charge could no more easily foresee what was to come than those on the ground. In this uncertainty, it is perhaps most fitting that one man, French highwire artist Philippe Petit, should be held aloft on a slender cable between the two buildings on a muggy workday morning that August, all of the city held in delicate suspense to all that had yet to transpire.
For the queer men who ventured past the ruined remains of the West Side Highway that year, the downed structure added a physical heft to the psychic divides that cleaved Wall Street day traders and others from polite society just a few miles east from the wayward energies happening along the waterfront, making it accessible only on foot or by bike. While the demise of the highway likely deterred some curious souls from making their way towards the rotting piers, structures that had just a generation before served as the city’s economic engine, the relative sense of physical isolation helped spur the flourishing of a short-lived but abundant period of artistic and erotic ferment for those who appropriated the piers, a different kind of flourishing from the space’s intended uses.
Perhaps the most well-known artist to make the space a temporary shelter was David Wojnarowicz. Born in 1954 and raised in part in nearby New Jersey, it’s almost more accurate to suggest that the city itself became the home for the precocious, insatiable youngster, already accustomed to nights spent in endless walks up and down Manhattan’s spine from his teenage years, living full-time on the streets by age 17. With an abusive, alcoholic father, and a mother whose own traumas gave her little space to adequately parent David and his siblings, Wojnarowicz knew from a young age how to sustain himself, turning tricks with older men he picked up around Times Square, a fraught lifestyle that lingered in the young man’s artistic practice for years to come.
Wojnarowicz was hardly the first to make his way to the Piers, first constructed in the 19th century, making New York the largest maritime economy in the United States. Yet just down the road from Greenwich Village and the Meatpacking District, two areas where member-driven gay male cruising bars offered insiders a gated space for sexual adventure, the piers operated differently: as Fiona Anderson argues in Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront, “With no entry fees, membership restrictions, or dress codes, and more cursory policing, the piers offered a complicate, hybrid of private and public space for erotic and social relations.” In this relative openness, Wojnarowicz found not merely the erotic company of other queer men, but ample decaying physical space to deepen an artistic practice that allowed the young artist to begin making sense of the personal and social trauma that defined his young life, ephemeral arts that found meaning in the body’s basest instincts.
This ruined space to exist spoke to the endless cycles of capitalist expansion and abandonment, creating a ruins in which urgency no longer meant how quickly a ship could be unloaded, but who might be free for a bout of quick, unspoken sexual contact. Anderson cites the novelist Henry James, who though that “New York was ‘nothing more than a provisional city,’ a place of ‘restless renewals,’ an always temporary construction ‘that will be replaced by another city.’” The pier’s ghostliness resonated within Wojnarowicz, finding in the abandonment an ability to commune with dead queer elders with whom he sensed a kindred connection, energies that then passed through abrupt, often unspoken sexual encounter and onto the walls as short-lived works of art.
Writing in his journal in 1979, Wojnarowicz described a sense of ““déja-vu, filled with old senses of desire,” the maritime history of the site lively in its absence, as he found traces “of oceans, of sailors, of distant ports and the discreet sense of self among them, unknown and coasting.” In this environment, and in other derelict spaces that resulted from wider-scale abandonment of American urban space and the particularities of Moses-driven redevelopment, Wojnarowicz completed a series of photographs from 1977 to 1979 known as Rimbaud in New York, in which Wojnarowicz and his friends donned a mask of the 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, whom he sought to emulate and bring into a new mode of living in the present tense. Life on the piers made peers between the two, and Wojnarowicz learned to meet Rimbaud not as a dead, lifeless figure, but as a reminder of alternate sense of temporarily loosened from capitalism’s relentless linearity, his body able to exist in any number of moments, as he wrote:
going on outside the shop just rushing by in waves of sound & I can’t do anything about it it could be nineteen twenty or eighteen sixty or now & it wouldn’t make a difference except maybe I wouldn’t be reading what I’m reading where I am.
To exist within this heightened erotic and artistic ferment did not come easy for Wojnarowicz and his peers, who had to contend with the realities of crushing poverty, the often hazardous physical state of the crumbling buildings, and the deadly harm brought by the police and homophobic men who knew to seek out the waterfront for easy targets of wanton violence. Following the murder of two gay men by an off-duty transit cop in 1968, the Mattachine Society, one of the longstanding groups advocating for peaceful incorporation of gay people into straight society in the years before Stonewall, warned of the pier’s dangers in a 1969 newsletter called “Docks, Darkness and Danger.” They wrote:
The area has become a mecca for uptight hoodlums looking for a ‘queer’ to beat up. One of the favorite games is to shove a homosexual into the cesspool known as the Hudson River. . . . At least four people have drowned in the filth after hitting their heads on pier footings.
For Wojnarowicz, long accustomed to the knifes-edge precarity from years of turning tricks, this dangerous dance was often part of the allure. Photographs from the time capture the intermingled sense of decay and arousal in this space, like Stanley Stellar’s 1984 print Red, in which a man, naked save his shoes beneath the waist, straddles a half-emptied metal window frame, the anonymous body itself penetrating the grid once filled with glass, now left behind in jagged remains.
Drawing inspiration from the sexual cruising happening on the piers, artists gay and straight embraced the ephemerality of the environment, aware that these works could disappear at any time, with the city promising to tear down the piers for many years. Gordon Matta-Clark was an exemplar in this regard, and spent much of the 1970s pursuing “anarchitecture,” reshaping the built environment across the city and elsewhere by cutting large-scale holes into abandoned buildings, which he found in abundance. Matta-Clark took this approach to Pier 52, where he created “Day’s End,” a piece that tore a large, misshapen oval into the former Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company building, sending light streaming into a structure that, in photographic memory, seems otherwise relatively structurally sound, unlike many other spaces nearby. Matta-Clark’s cuttings found a natural home in this space, an act of conscious architectural degradation in surroundings redolent with the entropy of capitalism’s boom-and-bust mentality.
Wojnarowicz became familiar with the cruising happening at the piers after his return from a stint in Paris in 1979, and soon thereafter began frequenting the site to write and to cruise, often grabbing coffee at nearby cafe Silver Dollar and then imbibing the atmosphere with pen in hand. The artist then began using the piers to create visual art in 1981, adopting the Ward Line Pier (known numerically as Pier 34, running out from Canal Street), and Pier 28 (coinciding with Spring Street) as his primary spaces for creation. Notoriously prickly after so many years of hard living, his friends and peers found the artist playful and childlike in the quiet space, for a time able to create large-scale works like a pterodactyl with wings spread, captured in a photograph by friend Marion Scemama with Wojnarowicz in midair, arms similarly outstretched. Even as fires tore through the structures, leading to more attempts by officials to close off the sites and renewed calls for their demolition, the buildings continued to attract attention, for good and ill.
Wojnarowicz himself was instrumental in the piers becoming more widely known, as he and fellow artist Mike Bidlo discussed “the horrible constrictions of being a young artist trying to show in New York,” as Bidlo recounts in Cynthia Carr’s Wojnarowicz biography, Fire in the Belly. The two began inviting others to use the space early in 1983, and within half a year, the anti-gallery, anti-show that David had described as “the real MOMA” had reached a breaking point. As Carr recounts: “By the time I made it down there myself, with Keith Davis, he was telling me stories about artists having fistfights over which space they were going to get. Some had painted over other people’s work. Collectors were coming in with saws and cutting chunks out of various walls.”
The frenzied energy surrounding the piers disgusted Wojnarowicz, who soon decamped back towards the East Village scene that he was instrumental in developing in the 1980s. The piers themselves did not last much longer anyways, as demolition finally began in 1984, closing a window on a fleeing moment of open-ended, improvisational practice along the Hudson River, energies that kept going back in the East Village, where many who used the piers worked and lived. Yet the maw of capitalist reappropriation was impossible for Wojnarowicz and his peers to fully escape, and he spent the rest of the decade watching his surroundings targeted by endless waves of redevelopment, the artists themselves made into key instruments of the gentrification of Manhattan.
The other force slowly gaining viral momentum in this period was, of course, the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Barely a blip at the edge of conscious awareness as Wojnarowicz began cruising the piers in the late 1970s, the virus would, within just a few years’ time, prove cataclysmic within the downtown arts world, killing innumerable people whose ghostly absence today triggers many of the same feelings of spectrality that he contended with in his invocations of Rimbaud, Jean Genet, and other long-gone figures.
Recognizing the impossibility of looking back on this period from today without knowing what was to come, Anderson writes in Cruising the Dead River, “I am keen to rid this period of the sense of viral momentum that often accompanies popular, or at least heteronormative, narratives of gay life in the late 1970s.” Taking stock of the ways that cruising appropriated space in novel ways, she asks whether “cruising in ruins itself might be figured as a model for tracing the discontinuous, fragmentary, and ephemeral erotic and social histories of this queer moment.” Wojnarowicz himself understood intuitively that art was a method for collapsing normative, linear time, making space for intergenerational, often ghostly connections. Writing in his journal while watching the waves come in, he knew that the present moment always held space to experience other timelines, reflecting:
Future time is as vivid for me as past time. All it takes is being in the right state for it. And the right state is usually set off by things about light and, you know, solitude. Usually walking by myself somewhere and usually close to a river.
While the queer men along the water found fleeting release in the derelict piers, those with access to a higher view of things were forced to wait. The publication of The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s magisterial takedown of Robert Moses, reanimated recent history, enlivening debates on how his approach to large-scale development had irrevocably reshaped the city. Nina Bourne, vice-president of Knopf, said of the book in an internal memo, on view at the New York Historic Society’s exhibit celebrating its 50th anniversary, “I read on with total suspense as if I didn’t know how the plot came out.” This sense of bated breath, of wondering what path the city might take, kept the powers-that-be from making immediate moves, aware that to persist in the Moses style of development would now result in severe scrutiny they’d never known before.
It didn’t help that the city was on the brink of financial collapse, in so many ways a product of Moses’s meddling. Despite attracting a seemingly never-ending stream of federal dollars for large-scale highway projects over several decades, the ways that Moses’s highways decimated neighborhoods pushed many stable, tightly-knit (if tenuously middle-class) ethnic enclaves to ruin, eroding its tax base. The city’s robust public sector, which included benefits largely unknown elsewhere in the United States, like free college education within the City University of New York system, became imperiled by the city’s rising debt levels, and by 1974, the city was on the brink of financial ruin. The austerity measures imposed upon the city’s population, as the historian Kim Phillips-Fein argues in Fear City, inaugurated an era of neoliberal economics across the country, just as Moses’s highways set the standard for large-scale urban highway building two decades prior. As Senator William Proxmire, discussing the city’s debt repayment in Congress several years later, told his colleagues, “If New York City, with its long tradition of permissive, easygoing government and its notorious lack of discipline, can embrace austerity and succeed, why can’t this Congress?”
All of these larger-scale financial questions were palpable by the time 1974 rolled around. In the shadow of the collapse of the West Side Highway, with federal money slowing and the city’s dire straits obvious to all, what might replace the downed structure remained an open question.
Jane Jacobs, long one of the most recalcitrant voices willing to speak out and make a fuss against the Moses model, had decamped for Toronto in 1968, the same year Moses lost control of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which granted him much of his power. Her leadership against the Lower Manhattan Expressway throughout the 1960s, a project that would have cut through Chinatown, Little Italy, and SoHo, connecting both the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges to the West Side Expressway, was crucial to its eventual cancellation in 1971. And while she was no longer in New York to continue the fight against the Westway, which was already under discussion as early as 1971, she understood its importance to the city’s fate, telling her friend and fellow writer-activist Roberta Brandes Gratz in an interview that ran as a New York Magazine cover story in that “Westway is different,” adding:
“I just think it’s the single most important decision that New York is facing about its future and whether it can possibly reverse itself, or whether it’s hopeless…. This is in part because of the practical damage that Westway will do to the city. And it’s also very important as a symptom of whether New York can profit by the clear mistakes and misplaced priorities that it’s had in the past or whether it just has to keep repeating them.”
As Gratz recounted in her book The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, Westway’s downsides were not immediately obvious. Instead of bisecting existing urban neighborhoods, the project would have actually created 200 acres of additional land on the western waterfront, with the highway itself buried underground. “On top of the landfill, two hundred acres of new city would be created for housing, parks, and commercial development,” Gratz wrote, a rare gift in the close confinement of Manhattan’s narrow urban footprint. Yet there were deceptions lurking in the shadows: “Deceptively, the Westway route was drawn as a straight line on all maps. The highly consumptive on-and off-ramps were rarely shown.”
Yet the physical realities of the project were often kept from view as those in power began assembling a coalition of endorsers, a formidable list that David Rockefeller, then CEO of Chase Manhattan Corporation, “past three Presidents of the United States, the past four Governors of New York State and every mayor of New York City since John Lindsay.” (This list included his own brother, Nelson Rockefeller, who served as New York governor from 1959 to 1973, before becoming Gerald Ford’s vice president in December 1974.) Arguing that the project would benefit from billions of dollars of federal funds, money necessary to complete what would have been the most expensive highway ever constructed, the sheer number of those in power who supported the initiative gave it an obvious heft and likelihood as its backers began to use the December 1973 collapse to build momentum for the project, receiving initial approval from the Department of Transportation in 1976.
In addition to needing to rebuild or replace the collapsed section of the highway, Westway had another obvious motive: clearing out the piers once and for all. Without federal funds, the cost of tearing down the dilapidated structures would fall entirely on the city; yet by tapping into federal funds first created by President Eisenhower in 1956, which would have covered 90 percent of the costs associated with the project, Westway backers could kill multiple birds with one stone. Moreover, by keeping 82 acres, or nearly half of the 178 acres of new landfill poured into the Hudson River, available as a continuous, 2.5 mile park space, project backers could present their case that Westway would expand public space, something often untrue of previous, Moses-backed highway projects.
How would opponents begin their battle against enemies with far more money, political capital, and media buy-in? Two crucial shifts in federal policy proved essential to the opposition campaign, both driven by a burgeoning environmental movement that challenged decades of US policymaking. As a transportation project, proponents had argued that the city would benefit from the Highway Trust Fund dollars, money that would otherwise be unavailable for use. But in a series of legislative negotiations from 1972 to 1976, New York Congresswoman Bella Azbug, in collaboration with Boston-area legislators dealing with their own unpopular highway project and crumbling public transit infrastructure, battled the highway lobby and successfully passed legislation that would allow these federal funds to be transferred, albeit with less perpetual largesse, to mass transportation needs. The final version of the legislation passed in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973 disrupted the hegemony of highway construction as the federal government’s only transportation priority, ending a period where government spending was 30-1 in favor of highways. With Westway funds now usable for the city’s failing subway system, its opponents could argue that the city’s population, most of whom did not own cars, would benefit more from redirected resources than a new highway. This was followed by Gerald Ford’s National Mass Transportation Assistance Act of 1974, the first time when federal funds would be used to subsidize operating cost for big-city transit systems.
Westway opponents also took advantage of new tools created by passage of the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Clean Water Act, allowing them to enact a “regulatory war,” as William Buzbee describes it in Fighting Westway: Environmental Law, Citizen Activism, and the Regulatory War that Transformed New York City. While the seeming might of Westway’s supporters was substantial, Buzbee argues that “In contrast to military wars, where strength plays the critical role, regulatory wars are framed by law.” In the mid-70s, as these federal policies went into effect and were tested by the environmentalists who helped to prod their passage in the first place, the rising social consciousness around these issues, and the legal tools needed to make substantial challenges to older models of development, converged in this fight, dragging out the project until it died a quiet, humbled death.
the eventual demise of the Westway projecttook 15 years from its first conceptualization in 1970 to its final death in 1985. “No single person on the pro-Westway side served that cause in a single-minded, dedicated manner,” Buzbee wrote, and in that absence, despite many voices throwing their support for the project, doubt and delay eventually gained momentum. (Moses himself, perhaps hurt by his loss of power, actually spoke out against the project, writing in a pamphlet in 1974, “I am for public works and for government aid within reason but my imagination is staggered by the demand of a ninety or even fifty percent handout at Washington for a race-track highway on the West Side of Manhattan.”)
Able to call upon these newfound federal policies that encouraged greater environmental study, data collected showed that the western Manhattan shoreline was a crucial breeding ground for striped bass, a species that had faced steep population declines in the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware River, one that would be decimated by the proposed landfill. Despite Mayor Ed Koch’s offer to “build the [striped bass] a motel in Poughkeepsie where they c[ould] breed to heart’s content,” it was these kinds of environmental factors that resulted in the project’s demise, killed by a thousand paper cuts from repeated legal challenges in this new political landscape. After years of mounting opposition, alongside growing evidence that the highway’s supporters had covered up evidence of the project’s true environmental tolls, Congress blocked funding for the project in August 1985. A month later, the city decided to reallocate a portion of the Westway funds to go towards much-needed mass transportation improvements, while preserving $811 million for the eventual replacement of the highway.
State officials briefly flirted with another Westway-style project in the late 80s, around the same time that the remaining pieces of the collapsed highway were removed in 1989, a plan that never materialized. Finally, by 1996, a new vision for the West Side emerged, its backers learning how to broker compromises that previous backers never managed. Today, the Hudson River Park stretches from 59th Street to the southern tip of the island, making it the city’s second-largest park space at 550 acres, second only to Central Park. Revived piers are now dedicated to concert venues, corporate offices, and more, and the 2021 completion of the Little Island at Pier 55, a floating island park built atop tulip-shaped pilings, now offers visitors a less precarious way of floating above the river than the abandoned piers had decades before. The roadway, a more modest, street-level highway, suffers the same snarls that plague the city everywhere, with longtime taxi drivers calling traffic the “worst ever” in a July 2024 Times article. Construction of the highway replacement from Battery Park to 59th Street concluded in August 2001, heralding a new chapter for the city’s western edge — a defining moment in the city’s history, soon eclipsed by events whose impact would reverberate well beyond city limits.
In a metropolis dead set on perpetual renewal, to find traces of the events of 1974 on the Lower West Side of Manhattan is an almost Sisyphean task. The biggest change is, of course, the downing of the Twin Towers in 2001, remaking the entire geography of Lower Manhattan and shifting the city’s future in innumerable ways in its wake. As someone born in the mid-90s who did not make it to the city until after that fateful September day, the city’s most well-known ghosts are nearly inconceivable to me, the incessant appearance of the Twin Towers in media the only way I can access their ghostly remains.
Yet along the Hudson River waterfront, the more recent emergence of Day’s End, a sculpture finalized in 2021 alongside the Little Island, nods back towards the days of the piers, reviving the structure that Gordon Matta-Clark had cut into more than 45 years before. Designed by David Hammons, the project came about as the artist stared out from the newly-built Whitney Museum in 2015, knowing that the piers were, in a different era of the city’s history, right there beneath his gaze. With a blank steel frame outlining the former physical dimensions of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company building, critic Evan Moffitt argues: “Although designed to be permanent, the sculpture looks temporary, like the armature for a tent. Light doesn’t pass through it so much as swallow it whole: the work has been buffed so that it gleams in the afternoon sun like the glass condominiums that now line the West Side Highway.”
I only recently learned about Moffitt’s sculpture, just in time for me to make regular visits to sit alongside it while staying at the Jane Hotel, a longstanding structure that houses both short-term guests like myself who pay $200 a night for 50 square feet rooms, and older tenants who have fought to stay in the building after new owners purchased it in 2008 for $27 million. I felt a great sadness in all that was already lost, disappointed that the city’s official history of the waterfront, affixed to a series of four placards adjacent to the sculpture, bore no mention to this history. Still, seeing the visual outline of one of these structures reanimated these stories in the embodied present, enough to create the kinds of temporal disjunctures that Wojnarowicz wrote about decades ago.
In the novel Let the Great World Spin, set during the summer of 1974, author Colum McCann anchors his story around Philippe Petit, a French highwire artist who, along with numerous accomplices, managed to string a 200-foot long steel cable across the gap between the newly-built World Trade Center towers. Petit then danced in the liminal space 1,312 feet above the ground, defying gravity and the police trying to pull him in, for 45 minutes before surrendering himself. Petit’s poetic gesture, the ability to stand alone atop the great clamor of the morning rush hour frenzy, is a magnetizing force that spins each of the characters into its orbit, if only indirectly. Yet this moment is only one action amidst so many others in the lives of millions of city residents. Describing the everydayness of a car wreck that kills several characters early in the story, setting just as much plot in motion as the highwire walker above them all, McCann writes: “It had been a summer of sirens. His was another.”
Later in the text, Gloria, a woman who lives in some of the Bronx public housing projects that rose above a borough that had been irrevocably remade in the postwar period, stands on her balcony, surveying the scene, and reflecting, “Sometimes you’ve got to go up to a very high floor to see what the past has done to the present.” For everyday New Yorkers in this moment, any high view of the city would reveal the obvious: their home was in many ways unrecognizable to the place it had been just a generation before, inexorably changed by billions of dollars of highways that bore some of its former inhabitants out of city limits and into newly-built suburbs just beyond its borders.
Profound transformations within the built environment, the economy, and the social climate of the metropolis would continue to cascade through the city in the years to come, from the near-bankruptcy the following year to the 1977 blackout, which resulted in an estimated $300 million of looting and damage, a far cry from the one that had occurred in 1965, when only five documented cases of looting occurred. In the eyes of the world at large, it was hard not to hear the admonitions of the city’s police in this moment, as off-duty police officers stationed themselves at the city’s airports, handing out palm cards streaked with the words “FEAR CITY” and an image of the Grim Reaper, predicting immediate danger as soon as darkness descended upon the metropolis.
Fifty years later, and we know the basic outlines of these interwoven stories. The piers, already barely hanging on in the mid-70s, were all gone by 1984, destroyed just as the AIDS crisis brought mass death to the queer community and set the stage for the advancement of gentrification across Lower Manhattan, as Sarah Schulman argues in The Gentrification of the Mind. And while the Wesway project never saw the light of day, the current state of New York’s western waterfront, especially after the opening of the $25 billion Hudson Yards project, subsidized by the city to the tune of $6 billion, suggests that the capitalist approach to the city’s future won out.
All well and good. Yet history is never so simple. To project backwards a sense of inevitable momentum towards a certain outcome is to miss the prevailing sense of doubtfulness that clung to the metropolis in this moment, a grim fatalism that insists upon the so-called “end of history,” a logic set in motion upon the collapse of the Soviet Union in the Nineties and dramatically ruptured with the destruction of the World Trade Center at the dawn of the 21st century. With a full quarter-century of life passed in the new millennium, daily reminders of history’s fickle nature pile up around us, fresh uncertainties that remain rooted in older stories, like those that predominated fifty years ago. The spectral outline of Pier 52, while giving little sense to the average passerby of the legacy it invokes, nonetheless offers the ghosts of the city’s past a place to emerge in conversation, voices like Wojnarowicz’s speaking across great spans of time, even when so much has changed.
While the current state of Manhattan’s western edge appears complete, uncertainty for the city lingers. Most obviously, the rising tides wrought by leaving climate change unaddressed will continue to wrack the city’s waterfront infrastructure, likely rendering New York unimaginably different well within the next few decades. Capitalism’s stubborn refusal to alter its course to prevent these outcomes will create new ruins, fertile grounds for old ghosts of the cruising undead to haunt the physical plane once more. To say what these shifts will look and feel like is not for us to know today; instead, the events of 1974 should urge caution upon us, as each passing day suggests unforeseen possibilities as new realities. These shifts will not happen overnight, but the signs are already there that what is familiar and assumed now cannot hold for much longer.
Perhaps Moses himself, his imprint upon the city inescapable so many years after the fact, should have the last word. “I have no fear of change as such and, on the other hand, no liking for it merely for its own sake.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.