The Accidental Playground: Brooklyn Waterfront Narratives of the Undesigned and Unplanned

1. Discovering and Engaging

CHAPTER 1 DISCOVERING AND ENGAGING A VACATED WATERFRONT from the end of the pier at North 6th Street, I looked back toward the landmass of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A section below me was collapsed, forming an irregularly shaped chasm that stretched across the width of the pier. In a shallow puddle at the bottom of this depression lay a series of well-eroded wood beams in layers both along and perpendicular to the length of the pier—the wood cribbing that had provided the pier’s foundation. Several of these beams had been dislodged from the supportive positions in which they were laid untold years earlier. A carpet of weeds covered those chunks of dirt and gravel that remained in place and formed the top of the pier, but it was only a matter of time before these sections would also collapse. Less than twenty years earlier this pier, like others to the north and south, supported strings of railroad cars and their freight, which were pulled by locomotives off of (or pushed onto) “car-floats”—specialized barges equipped with railroad tracks—that had been towed across the harbor. (Within two years, this pier would be impassable, just a few small sections of concrete surrounded by water.) From the only somewhat sturdy part of the pier, its concrete edges, a line of four or five men cast their lines and tended their traps. This was a favored spot for fishing, particularly when striped bass or the blues were running, and the areas around the edges of the pier were reliable places for crabbing. By late afternoon when conditions were good, 10 discovering and engaging a vacated waterfront I would see people on this pier and a similar one to the north with large buckets full of blue crabs, which were usually caught with a trap baited with a chicken neck or wing. Beyond the pier was the southern part of the former rail yard, now a tightly packed mass of garbage containers of varying shapes and sizes. Larger dumpsters sat in tight rows perpendicular to the shore with smaller containers piled inside of them, many standing upright on their smallest sides. Weeds had aggressively claimed every sliver of space in between these containers while also claiming their tops, many of which still contained construction and demolition debris taken from some long-ago building site. Covering much of two waterfront blocks, this dumpster landscape was owned by national garbage carting giant USA Waste, which operated a controversial transfer station on an adjacent block to the south. USA Waste’s large corrugated metal transfer shed was idle at that time on a Saturday afternoon. To the north was the one-story ventilation shaft of the L-train subway tunnel, and beyond that, more piers, some in worse condition than the one upon which I was standing. Between the ventilation shaft and the pier at the end of BEDT’s rotting finger piers were popular spots for fishing (2000). discovering and engaging a vacated waterfront 11 North 10th Street stretched a beach and above it an open three-block expanse of the former rail yard. I could see people arrayed across this beach on this hot day in June 2000. I had in fact just come from this area, where dozens of people were enjoying a leisurely afternoon by the waterfront. With its views and somewhat sandy edge, some of the locals called this spot “the Brooklyn Riviera.” I carefully made my way back to shore, following the edge of the pier, hopping over a few gaps in the concrete, and annoying one of the people fishing when I gingerly stepped over him and his stuff. Once on solid land again, I walked along the seawall back toward the ventilation shaft along the line of dumpsters. This colorful landscape of trash containers —many of which were so beat up they themselves had become trash—looked like a sprawling, postindustrial jungle gym that invited exploration and physical exertion. Looking for an appropriate dumpster to scale, I was soon distracted by music and laughter and the smell of lighter fluid. I could see the top of a beach umbrella over a wall of large concrete blocks. Finding a seam between the blocks and the dumpsters, I followed the music and entered a small, irregularly shaped clearing perhaps fifteen feet across at its widest point. And there they were: seven men of the neighborhood partying...