New York missive no 132 - Rainey Park and "The Father of the Bridge"

The Sunday after 4th July I took the boys to Rainey Park. Two things meant the Summer heat was delightful instead of oppressive. There was a breeze, and we were there in the late afternoon when the Sun was low in the sky. The breeze was intensified because the park is by East River.

A couple of weeks previously we’d been here in the morning to celebrate CMH’s second birthday with friends. Now, there were parties going on everywhere, this being 4th of July weekend. Groups of folding chairs were circled around portable barbeques that released the smell of lighter fluid and burgers into the wind. The parties merged into one another because the park is only small and the children created a constant stream weaving between them, across each other, over the play area with its soft tarmac hills and slides that were too hot to slide down, unless, that is, you tipped buckets of water down which made them thrillingly fast, too fast for the little ones.

Most of the people in the park were Latino, presumably because many of Astoria’s whites headed out of town over the holiday weekend. The whole neighborhood had had a dropped-shoulders feel from Friday 4th because of the reduced population and changed demographic.

CMH headed straight for the water fountains. For an hour he ran in and out of the jets, putting his foot on them at times to block them, or observing groups of older kids with their water games, sticking out his belly to assert his toddler-confidence. JNH gravitated to the other side of the play area, a slope of unkempt grass tilting down to the river. He chased dragonflies. Huge ones swung about in the air above him. At one point he asked for a pot or a net to catch them, but when that didn’t come through he just ran beneath them, waving his arms excitedly but clearly with no real intent to catch them.

I later learned that Rainey Park is named after Dr. Thomas Rainey, who had dreamed of building a bridge from that same place across what is now Roosevelt Island (then Blackwell Island), to Manhattan. A group of Long Island City-dwellers incorporated the “New York and Queens Country Bridge Company” in 1871. Rainey became its treasurer and traveled the country to raise funds. But the War Department was worried a bridge could weaken the defense of New York and access to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and didn’t approve it. Anyway, most of the interest was for a bridge project linking Brooklyn and Manhattan. By 1892 the project was on hold. But a community group called the Committee of Forty kept the idea alive. It gained momentum after the consolidation of the three boroughs into New York City in 1898, and finally the bridge was built a few blocks South of the original location. It was called Queensboro bridge.

Dr Rainey walked across the bridge on opening day in 1909, and received a gold medal with “The Father of the Bridge” inscribed on it. He said to the New York Times:

“This is my bridge. At least it is the child of my thought, of my long years of arduous toil and sacrifice. Just over there, are the old towers of my bridge, which I began to build many years ago. I spent all I owned on the project...It is a grand bridge, much greater than the one I had in mind. It will be in service to thousands in the years to come, when Dr. Rainey and his bridge projects will long have been gathered into the archives of the past.”

In 1912, after Rainey had died, the area which he had planned for the bridge was named after him and then turned into a park.

So there we were. In a park that commemorates a man’s dream for a bridge. The air contained children’s yet-to-be-formed dreams for their future, teenagers’ emerging dreams, adults’ abandoned, lingering or realized dreams, but just contained them. All were suspended on a Summer afternoon when attention was occupied in the present, with barbeques, water-jets or dragonflies.

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Two phrases I’ve been encountering recently with implications that outstretch their mundane context:

1. The way that yoga teachers describe crossing your arms in the direction that you’re not used to:

“A non-habitual interlace.”

2. And what New York subway drivers say to their passengers, after warning them to keep a close eye on their possessions (or to report instances of sexual harassment):

“Remain alert, and have a nice day.” (They give a big emphasis to aLERT - the ER sounding the same as in "jerk").

Which of course means "keep alert – oh, and have a nice day too". But it could be understood to mean that if you remain alert, you will have a nice day.

Thank You Conrad Manuel Hiraldo - part 3 - Roosevelt Island: Perspective

This is part three of my seven-part essay "Thank You Conrad Manuel Hiraldo." Introduction and part one. Part two.

Via Socrates Sculpture Park and Vernon Boulevard we find ourselves on Roosevelt Island Bridge, which links the island to the borough of Queens. Until now I did not know the bridge existed. A notice half way across says that in 1955 it received an award of merit for the “most beautiful steel bridge” from the American Institute of Steel Construction. I am not surprised. It is a dark red color. Its tall structure recalls the railroad gantries a little further South in Long Island City that hauled cargo from ship to train. It has that thrill of soaring metal that so many of the New York City bridges do. Conrad’s stroller, which is not big, just about fits across the width of the walkway that is squeezed between whipping traffic and the drop to the river below. There is a wire mesh fence between us and the river but that does little to break the sense of threat.

The island has been put to many uses over time. Dutch settlers ran pig farms on it. In the 1830s, a prison and the New York Lunatic Asylum were built; undercover reporter Nellie Bly exposed the horrendous conditions at the asylum by spending ten days there. “In the upper halls,” she wrote, “a good view is obtained of the passing boats and New York. I have watched patients stand and gaze longingly toward the city they in all likelihood will never enter again. It means liberty and life; it seems so near, and yet heaven is not further from hell.”

The island, which for a while was called Welfare Island, was also the site of a smallpox hospital. The hospital ruins remain. They are floodlit at night and from Manhattan look like a hollow-eyed ghost facing the river. Soon after moving to New York I bought a book, Invisible Frontier – Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York. I bought it in the now-closed Blackburn bookstore on Broadway in Astoria. Little did I know that within four years I would be raising my children in the neighborhood. In the book a group of urban explorers sets about almost-inaccessible parts of the city, including the smallpox hospital. They describe a precarious clamber over crumbling brick walls clad in foliage, opening their account of the exploration with two lines from T.S. Elliot’s The Waste Land:

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish?”

Today, the mostly un-ruined Roosevelt Island consists of chunky apartment buildings, many of them home to people who work at the United Nations building across the river.

We cross through to the Western side of the island (it is less than a kilometer wide) and do a loop over its Northern tip, pausing for a while in a park with a view across to Manhattan. Among Manhattan’s squeezed streets it is easy to forget that it too is an island, despite what you might think would be wake-up calls in the form of hurricanes like Sandy that hit a couple of months after our walks in the city. From here the geography is more apparent. We are close to the water with its choppy current and it is not difficult to flash back a few hundred years to when Native Americans navigated it in their canoes. The backsides of the Manhattan buildings look like temporary appendages.

On the top tip of the island is a small lighthouse. It has not been used since the 1940s. I have seen it so many times from the Astoria shore that it feels disorienting now to be standing here, as if I should be looking across the water at myself. A couple on bicycles swoops around the lighthouse. Then it is just Conrad and me and the splashing water and a wide sky. Open spaces like this within the city are like a deep breath. On the concrete river wall are traces of crab shell – some pincers and a cracked back – the remnants of a seagull’s dinner. I read the small plaque at the bottom of the lighthouse in memory of Vicki Holland, a polio patient who was treated on the island before living in an apartment here, and who campaigned for disability rights. Randomly-encountered inscriptions like this are quiet voices on behalf of people who have gone, just enough to say for some time afterwards, “I existed, remember me.”

Walking back down the Eastern side of the island we pass the Fire Department of New York’s Special Operations Command Division. Small fire trucks and vans are clustered outside. Firefighters in ceremonial uniforms talk beside them. It is only then that I realize the date, immersed as I am in my and Conrad’s world. It is September 11, the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. Later I hear a little about the day’s events and how purposefully understated they are compared with the previous anniversary, the tenth. The emphasis now is on a respectful acknowledgement of those who lost their lives, a pause to reconnect then carry on. More inscriptions, this time painted onto the window of one of the trucks:

DC Raymond Downey

DC Charlie Kasper

DC John Paolillo

BC John Moran

Part four: Astoria (day): Power