Feature

Battered City Syndrome

Which it did -- not that Mr. Zimmer lived to see the full extent of it. Still, the harborman might be happy to learn that somewhere down the road, after decades of detoxification, Fresh Kills will eventually return to the wetlands it once was. The black snakes and marsh hawks, should any remain, will be back.

If once upon a time people strode toward the future in this place, now, as the daily damage reports underscore, we’re deep into middle age. The band-aid men are the true champions of the city now; maintenance is the only abiding verity. It isn’t that the city isn’t capable of the Big Effort. Anyone riding 25 stories down below Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx to visit the 200-yard-long valve chamber of the $5 billion Third Water Tunnel cannot help but be awed. Twenty-eight years in the making, the water tunnel, the city says, is the single biggest infrastructure project in the Western Hemisphere. But for all this prodigious digging (and the death of 24 sandhogs in the process), the tunnel is meant only to supplement the existing pipes, enabling them to be repaired for the first time since they were laid down in the beginning of the century. Today, even when we do the impossible, we’re still only keeping up. It’s the same with the effort to replace the late, lamented Pennsylvania Station. The celebrated plan, championed by Senator Moynihan, involves no grand new structure -- just retrofitting an existing post-office building.

Nowadays, building the future appears a far less heroic endeavor, arrived at by increments. I got to see a bit of it one cold and misty February night, just over the city line in Yonkers. A few months earlier, a car had crashed into a gasoline truck, setting off an explosion that destroyed a New York State Thruway overpass. Tonight, the overpass would be fixed. A 120-foot-tall crane was lifting an 80-foot-long, 73-ton prefab section of new roadway. It was then fitted into place like a gargantuan Lego. Hours later, with five more giant “pieces” snapped together, the bridge was finished, in time for the morning rush.

“Replacement parts, built somewhere else -- this is part of where we’re going,” says my guide for the evening, Sam Schwartz, a.k.a. “Gridlock Sam,” all-around infrastructure maven and former New York City traffic commissioner (it was he who ordered the Williamsburg Bridge closed in 1988). “It’s not romantic, but it works.”

Watching that huge concrete slab dangle in midair, I couldn’t help but think of a recent visit I’d made to the headquarters of Robert Moses’s old Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Commission. Here, alongside a giant photograph of Moses and Walt Disney surveying a plan for the 1964 World’s Fair, are several models for projects both completed and not. Among these is a four-foot-square miniature of Moses’s most despised, neighborhood-wrecking scheme, the never-built Lower Manhattan Expressway. Pull on the Lucite handles and a swath of Broome and Kenmare Streets disappears, to be replaced by a plastic facsimile of the prospective expressway. Watching this model in action now is a creepy experience. After all, it was Moses’s pernicious social legacy that made heroes of people who stopped huge infrastructural projects, not of those who built them. Still, in these patch-and-paste days, there lurks a demented nostalgia for the era when such wholesale manipulation of the landscape, no matter who or what stood in the way, was deemed the great work of men. The memories of it, conjured up by Moses’s toy model, make a 73-ton prefab hunk of concrete seem puny. Which is another infrastructural irony, considering many observers believe that the prefab system used on the thruway bridge might be the best way to renovate Moses’s teetering Gowanus Expressway. One wonders what the old power broker, who was routinely saluted by tollbooth operators as he passed by in his chauffeured limousine, would think of something as un-Promethean as that.

So this is what it’s come to: a future by Lego. Snap in, snap out. I suppose it could be worse. Still, there is plenty of non-interchangeable, one-of-a-kind, no-size-fits-anything infrastructure here. It’s why this place is unlike any other, which is something I like to point out to my children when we drive around and visit the city’s living fossils. You can’t depend on kids to get excited by the sort of prose Harry Granick wrote back in the forties. They might think it’s corny. It’s better to let them see for themselves.

Recently, we’ve been stopping at the 9th Street-Gowanus Canal bridge. Until it was closed in 1994 after flunking safety tests, we crossed the 84-foot-long span on a daily basis. Now we watch the city try to replace it, which has not been easy. In fact, according to one engineer close to the project, “the 9th Street Bridge is one of the most fouled-up jobs to hit Brooklyn in 25 years.”

It was a problem of overload of trans-temporal, intermodal infrastructure at the bridge site, I try to explain to my children. The car bridge was built in 1903 to span the reeking Gowanus (a key industrial-shipping passage for decades after it was first dredged in the 1840s). Above is the elevated F-train stop at Smith and 9th Streets, erected in 1933. Ninety feet high, to accommodate the now sparse Gowanus boat traffic, the hideous, concrete-covered F station is the highest in the entire New York subway system. This became a concern when it was noted that the train trestle had begun to vibrate during the sinking of the caissons for the new 9th Street Bridge below. The Transit Authority demanded that the Department of Transportation stop work while the F-train stanchions were outfitted with motion sensors. It was found that the trestle had, indeed, “settled” somewhat, which required the periodic uplifting of the structure with beer-keg-shaped hydraulic jacks.

All this, I told my children, was the reason we hadn’t driven across the 9th Street Bridge in close to four years and were not likely to for several months to come. There were other stories of infra-snafus as well, mostly having to do with problems incurred as a result of the intense pollution in the Gowanus, but the kids were not in the mood. Aside from being gleefully disgusted that the D.O.T. used divers for welding projects under the toxic muck of the Gowanus, they’d rather go to Coney Island, they said.

No problem. The journey to Coney is a deeply trans-temporal experience, infrastructurally speaking. Among other treats, you get to drive under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. When the bridge that would alter Staten Island for all time was first constructed, Moses boasted that if the cables of the span were stretched end to end they would circle the earth five times and reach halfway to the moon. But it was John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever who had the most memorable line about Robert Moses’s bridge and New York City infrastructure in general. Sitting beneath the bridge’s mighty roadway, describing how a worker slipped and fell into the massive concrete anchorage (and was still in there), Travolta reflected a moment, then snickered. “Dumb fuck,” he said.

Anyway, arriving in Coney, we contemplated the superstructure of the Stillwell Avenue elevated subway stop. First opened in 1920 as the southernmost reach of the then privately owned BMT system, the fortress-like Stillwell station serves as the last stop for the D, F, N, and B lines, a distinction noted in the name of the now-shuttered lodging establishment across the street, the Terminal Hotel. We sat there a while in the semi-forbidding darkness, watching the trains rumble in and out of the beat-up yet seemingly impregnable station. “Isn’t it amazing that people just like us built that?” my daughter finally said, as if the Stillwell Station were a Mayan pyramid come to Brooklyn.