ISSUE 4
Shipwrecked
To keep treasure-hunters at bay, the officials in New York City are mum on the exact locations of our many, many shipwrecks. We do know some basics, though. Somewhere in the depths of Arthur Kill, Staten Island, there are 1600 bars of silver worth 26 million dollars, sunk with their barge back in 1903. Clearly visible in Coney Island Creek is a yellow submarine, the work of Jerry Bianco, who hoped to use it to venture out to the more famous wreck of the Andrea Doria before running aground himself. The 1904 sinking of the General Slocum saw NYC’s worst loss of life until September 11th, 2001. When the Princess Anne Steamship hit a sandbar off of the Rockaways, the crew refused to disembark without their luggage. In the 1990s, a ship called the Golden Venture, carrying Chinese migrants, met with tragedy in the Rockaways, too, and is the subject of a beautiful broadside with artwork by Francis Estrada and a poem by Wo Chan. It isn’t just ships that have wrecked in the waterways of New York. Collected here are also the tales of cars, trains, and planes sunken, submerged, and surfaced.
World of the usual kind. Sunset on the widest of oceans. The Captain was eating supper with the crew down below. The mate notched a piece of wood and his action was rather brilliant. Edwards watched the water. He was not accustomed to these pleasure cruises for the rich, to the beautiful strong-jawed ladies and the men concerned less with those ladies than with their own pocket squares.
Rickie’s got a foot on my head, I’m holding onto a fistful of his hair and he’s pressing my nose so far back it feels like it’s ramming into my brains. Whenever we get together, he beats the crap out of me. I’ve known Rickie since we were little, since baseball camp, when I had thick glasses and a patch to correct my lazy eye. Sometimes, my eye still goes berserk.
I read about Dead Horse Bay while researching odd spots in NYC for my blog, This Hidden City. I had to see it for myself, and visited on Halloween, a little after low tide ended. It was a mild, but windy day. I parked too far, and it took forever for me to find an entrance to the bay. While I did take a few photos, I could hardly believe what I had seen. I returned with my girlfriend the following week, at the most extreme low tide. It was a colder, though less ominous day. I knew my way around this time, and did a bit more exploring. These photos are from both visits.
Sarah Mostow wrote and illustrated an artists’ book inspired by what lies beneath the surface of the river, and by her own personal history with the Hudson. Each page contains an original painting or drawing depicting such images as a dead giraffe, Henry Hudson’s ship the Half Moon, and a view of the River seen from Sarah’s childhood home.
Tom wanted a Cadillac Eldorado but his cousin George said he’d cut him a deal on the Lincoln and when it came to family that was that. Where George had gotten the Lincoln, who knows? His cousin was full of mystery. An entrepreneur, is what George called himself. He loved to lord his vocabulary over Tom, challenge him, stretch out the syllables. On-tra-pri-noo-er.Restaurant manager, realtor, car salesman. Why pin yourself down? George said. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, dabbling his fingers in the air. Master of none.
Yesterday morning while I read Montaigne
a man drove his car into the Gowanus canal.
I have never seen a greater monster or miracle
than myself, Montaigne wrote in the late 16th century.
It was a bright day.
The sun forgave no one.
“Single white derelict technical individual seeks thrill-happy, no-frills speedy kid for lasting velociromance”
Arthur Kill, that slim waterway that prevents Staten Island from being part of New Jersey, has a surplus of discarded watercraft. Scuttled, sunken, or just eternally moored. The Rossville Tugboat Graveyard is certainly best known of these sites, but wander the other industrial neighborhoods of western Staten and you’ll find yourself in places like this one: some dozen vessels, ranging from seemingly-operational to scrap-heap, all tucked into a narrow cove hidden from the road by a veil of trees. A hidden salvage yard? Temporary storage inadvertently become long-term? It is difficult to say.
Carcasses is about the various cars that have come to their final resting place in the waters surrounding New York City. The movement of the car-shaped plexiglas pieces strung together as a mobile is how I like to imagine these cars slowly sinking down to the bottom.
Hey Brooklyn, come home
with me. Traffic makes the parade
look bigger. My mother says
if you can’t feel your cheeks,
it’s time to stop.
New York is a city of nooks and crannies, discovered and undiscovered, above and below the waterline. Years of industry and years of the collapse of that industry have left much of the city ringed in relics: sunken piers, cement edifices, twisting metal. Recent times have seen much of the coastline reclaimed by municipal projects and developers, much more remains as it had been. And whatever the changes on the shore, it seems likely that the oil-slick surfaces of inlets like Newtown Creek and the Gowanus Canal will hold onto their mysteries for much, much longer. All of this is worth investigating, and worth documenting along the way.
Carcasses is about the various cars that have come to their final resting place in the waters surrounding New York City. The movement of the car-shaped plexiglas pieces strung together as a mobile is how I like to imagine these cars slowly sinking down to the bottom.
Lost boy,
Shipwreck in my life.
When your little hand found mine,
Suddenly
We were home,
You and I,
Meant to be
Tied with a seemingly tenuous knot,
Not of blood or biology
On the small kitchen table lay a set of objects: a vial of pills that looked prescription but bore no prescription; the scuffed cover of a punk CD of unknown origin; and one of the manuals, the writing on its cardboard cover Sharpie-scrawled and illegible. Like the pills, it had arrived from her mother the previous day. Vera Schiele Obek stood over it all, eyeing the items and wondering what the coming voyage would hold.
When the greenish lights hit the smoke rising from the DJ booth, it formed a noxious cloud. If you dance inside it, you die, Alice decided. They were there at the behest of someone called Darien, a stick figure given life and stringy black hair. Elyse had sent him for drinks.
Editors' note: Scrap Dive is an exhibit created by graduate student Margaret C. Argiro for "The Social Hall: An Oral History Exhibit" at Columbia University on May 1, 2014. For Scrap Dive, Margaret drew on oral history interviews conducted with Ed Fanuzzi from October 2013 - March 2014, as well as photos and objects from his personal collection. This post is a digitized version of the exhibit.
I took the sea to the C
searching for ghosts at Dead Horse beach
a ship appeared to me
I swam out so I could see
"Come aboard my darlin
it's the last time I'll be callin
come aboard and sail with me."
Watching the construction downtown from my roof
Allyson says it’s a fish decomposing:
the spotlights a spine
the floors rib bones piling up across the river.
I carried pails of water once, too.
Seawater, up along the shoreline
to dryer sand. I picked out seaweed and shells.
From our beginning we've been joined, eager to take up the same space, breathe the same air. In our mother, we acted as one. We were almost born stacked, though that couldn't be. Instead we felt a moment of brief separation, a fissure. When the doctor plucked me from my mother, I reached out for my sister. I had never felt alone.
Mary Mattingly is a photographer and sculptor based in New York. Mary just completed “Waterpod," a floating sculptural eco-habitat in the New York Waterways, where she lived this summer. In 2009, she exhibited her work at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Tucson Museum of Art, and “Nomadographies” at Robert Mann Gallery, in 2008, she exhibited “Fore Cast”, a multimedia opera at White Box in Manhattan, in 2007: “Frontier” with Galerie Adler in Germany, and “Time Has Fallen Asleep” at the New York Public Library. In 2006 her photo work headlined “Ecotopia , the triennial at the International Center of Photography.
—The only men I admire are suicides, I repeated, as the Turk looked away, or not away but rather past me, the Turk was frequently looking past me, his thoughts seeming to drift like the wisps rising from his meerschaum pipe’s slow-burn—only to wheel back when I least expected and fix me with a gaze of redoubled intensity. In the morning on rising, I immediately drank the cup of black coffee and smoked both of the cigarettes allotted me by the Turk, then lay back in my berth and stared through the porthole at the sun’s perplexing diffractions for several hours before the Turk requested I join him above.
Photos by Elizabeth Albert, who joined fellow UNY contributing artist Marie Lorenz on a Tide and Current Taxi excursion to College Point, Queens.
Francis Estrada and Wo Chan were inspired to create their drawing and poem, respectively, by the tragic 1994 shipwreck of the Golden Venture, a vessel smuggling people from China that ran aground on the Fort Tilden beach in the Rockaways, killing ten migrants. Buy a copy of this broadside here.
This body of work required a search for something real and sustainable both in the physical construction of the work and the images I chose. The image of the shipwreck became a tangible object as a metaphor for our fragile state as a society. The appeal of these large, well constructed, man-made objects came from their use as war tanks.
These two prints are from a series made from objects that I find while exploring in my boat. In some ways I think of printing washed up debris as another way to collaborate with the tidal currents in the harbor. The harbor takes all these objects and sucks them in, then redistributes them around the shore according to weight, shape and density. Then I come along and do something else with them.