ISSUE 6
Menagerie: Animals and the Waterways
From the expected—blue crabs, fish like the alewife and eels—to the extremely unexpected—a giraffe, deer with their legs bound, a seal with a Japanese fan club—New York City’s underwater and waterside menagerie is rife for exploration, adoration, and inspiration.
It was striper season in the early nineties
on the eastern bank of the Hudson River,
just south of the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge.
My mother collected antique birdcages. Nature abhors a vacuum
so we filled the cages, first with budgerigars and canaries.
Kate was scouting the pan-Asian buffets when she first saw the magician. A few chirpy women were clustered around him, and Kate watched from a distance while he rendered them boneless. They gripped each other’s elbows. They tittered and yelped. She moved to the edge of their circle and watched while the magician folded the nine of hearts into a triangle, stabbed it through with one woman’s lapel pin, an emerald dove, then vanished both from his hand. The card reappeared, unwrinkled, unpoked, in the liner pocket of another woman’s jacket.
This print a re-strike of original linoleum block carvings by Clement Hurd, illustrator of Goodnight Moon. The original linoleum blocks were carved as illustrations for the Children’s book The Mother Whale written by Edith Thacher Hurd 1973. The blocks were rediscovered by their grandson Nicholas Hurd who has reprinted the blocks in the form of a larger print.
The first time I met a live blue crab was on the Hudson River, in the summer of 2005. I’d taken a group of immigrant students from the Borough of Manhattan Community College to the Hudson River Museum of Art in Yonkers.
As the title of George Boorujy’s piece, Florida (Hurricane Andrew), underscores, we do not usually expect to see deer in New York City, let alone in the waterways of New York. And yet, in October 2011, three deer were found, frantic, at the foot of the Verrazano Bridge in Brooklyn, the first seen in the borough in many years.
This story is an outtake from Silent Beaches, Untold Stories: New York City's Forgotten Waterfront. Read more about the book, and order it, here.
To say they swam is image enough. And it was
not still summer, the water cold and chopped
by some knife of wind. Their heads only
above water. And I no longer know what is
moving under the surface.
For all the ghost horses haunting Dead Horse Bay, this was made for an Underwater New York event as part of Marie Lorenz's Flow Pool at Recess Art in SoHo, April 21, 2016.
I make portraits of phantoms to explore the connections between history, memory, and perception. My choice of materials is often intended to draw attention to the unstable nature of these entities. The unwieldy form of the ghost horse is made out of adhesive and other transparent material. It references the horse refineries that were once prevalent in Dead Horse Bay. The creatures inevitable transformation as it is submerged in water and mingled with other objects is similar to the unpredictable ways we recall the past. Some aspects coalesce while others disappear altogether.
As the title of George Boorujy’s piece, Florida (Hurricane Andrew), underscores, we do not usually expect to see deer in New York City, let alone in the waterways of New York. And yet, in October 2011, three deer were found, frantic, at the foot of the Verrazano Bridge in Brooklyn, the first seen in the borough in many years.
Taking into account the curvature of the earth, struggling to stand, they came here first from
transitional areas between forests and thickets,
From the river three of them climb early October banks in the shadow of the bridge.
And everything in the river was reassembled
into a shining plane that surfaced,
its wings dripping light, and headed west:
The giraffe is staring at him. All Johnson wants is a little peace and quiet, and this is the only tent where there isn’t an elephant raising hell, where he can escape the rank smell of horse shit and the constant screaming of children in juvenile amazement. Johnson doesn’t care if it is the circus – he had to find somewhere to take a break. And the blue tent of the giraffe enclosure is like walking into church when he was five, wrapped in utter silence as if God himself came and duct-taped Johnson’s two lips together. It is where he comes to think. But now the giraffe is fucking staring at him.
