Water’s Edge
Photographs by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, text by Robert Sullivan To know New York, or at least to experience it, the tourists often start at Times Square, with its theaters and shows and chain restaurants that offer out-of-towners what they expect (and pay) to be surprised by — the hot dog, the bagel, the Broadway spectacle, in the intersection of glass and stone-covered skyscrapers. The native starts at the water. Because if you want to get to the physical, historical, and even, I would argue, emotional essence of the city that is packed with eight million people, you head to the water’s edge, or edges — all 578 miles of them, all as close as they are far away. These are the places where New York, even if you think you know it, changes before your eyes, where the city seems less concrete and more dynamic, where you are never sure what is flora and what is fauna, or what is natural and what is not. As is well known, the shoreline of New York City is back. Where did it go? A quick synopsis: in the mid-1800s the waters of New York become a place where swimming involves navigating trash and dead animals, primarily horses, which are tossed in whole. The shoreline is the place for docks, obviously, as well as sail makers, oystermen, printers, tanners, sailors, and the refuges of sailors. Sewage treatment begins around 1900, but the pace of sewage production (i.e., urban life) increases. Sewage treatment can’t keep up and is then overwhelmed by all the other things we begin to pump into the water, especially after World War II — namely, chemicals. At this point the water gets really bad, and the people who deal with it directly are those who have no choice: the powerless, the poor, and the marine industry, which begins to struggle, then nearly dies off. In the 1960s comes, first, the idea that the river is polluted and, second, that it does not have to be. In the 1970s comes the Clean Water Act. In the 1980s, in response to the act, comes clean water. In the 1990s little creatures begin to jeopardize the wood in the old piers, a good problem as far as water quality goes, and the bigger creatures (i.e., us) begin to turn around and face the rivers and the harbor, the kills and the bay. It is a long and tortured story, but Westway, which was once to be the great modern interstate along the Hudson, on the West Side of Manhattan, became instead the Hudson River Greenway. And yet still, to this day, no one really knows exactly what is on the water. No one has really explored all of the 578 miles, not even the Shorewalkers, who walk the watery circumferences of the city, who see a lot of the shore. (Their motto: "See New York at 3 m.p.h.") Even the people who tell us about the edges in various official capacities and subsequently make bold plans for them may not be certain about what is there. In fact, the 578 miles themselves are not a certainty. Municipal legend has it that it was Mayor John Lindsay who, in groping for the precise number of shore miles at some harried moment in the 1970s, asked his staff, who took string to map to come up with — quick — 578! Into the breach of visual, statistical, and other, more visceral awareness jumped Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, photographers who went, in some cases, where few New Yorkers had gone before. Cook and Jenshel are married, and although they have separate careers, they have worked together on many projects: photographing aquariums, volcanic hot spots, and, most recently, glaciers, floating on water, ethereal portraits of what, despite their solidity, seem like about-to-vanish ghosts. Jenshel works in color and was a pioneer in what is sometimes called the New Color Revolution of the 1970s. Cook works in black and white. They met in 1979; the story involves cannoli and an Italian pastry shop in Poughkeepsie, New York. They married in 1983 and began collaborating in 1991. Cook was born in New York City but grew up in Indiana, spending summers on the beach back in New York. Jenshel was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Queens. In 2002, Cook and Jenshel received a grant from the Design Trust for Public Space to document the city shoreline. They came away from their initial forays feeling as if they had just seen new-found land. "When we first started the project," says Cook, looking through work prints one afternoon in the Flatiron District of New York, "we would show the pictures to friends who have lived their whole lives in New York, and they would say, ‘Where is this?’ " "They would also say, ‘Where are the people?’" Jenshel adds. "So that convinced us to do this," Cook says. This is a full-blown exploration of the city shorelines, and the result is a series of photographs that remind us of the importance of what we can’t see, of the importance of the edge, of those places that are not quite water and not quite land, that are not inhabited but are not uninhabited either — places in between. In a time of binary operations, of developed or not developed, of land that is deemed either good or bad by the powers that decide, these photos taken together are a tonic of mesmerizing ambiguity, celebrations of the borders between New York City’s land and sea. The urban waterfront often seems dilapidated, but it is also being vigorously reinvented, in some cases by view-greedy developers and by politicians hoping to fund their campaigns with the money that, until the crash, was associated with builders of luxury condos and pricey hotels. But in other cases the landscape is being redeveloped by people who want to create sustainable futures, and the water’s edge is the place to see the importance of the relationship between cities and sustainable ecologies. In a context of cities, nature is portrayed as the green shoot breaking through the concrete. The shoreline is a good place to see things reversed: humans are the living thing that always turns up on a shore, to fish, to drink, to stand and ponder. The sustainable future is in the reimagination of urban spaces, with special attention paid to the urban wilderness, or wildness, to use a Thoreauvian term. The place where the water meets the land is always wild. A few words on the methods of the photographers in filming the city’s terra incognita, on their littoral trials and tribulations. There were suspicions to deal with, of course, immediately following 9/11, when anyone out alone might be reported to the authorities, many of whom are not as interested in documentary photography as they perhaps should be. Being a photographer on the water in New York almost by definition means you are close to a bridge or marine facility; whereas standing on the water’s edge once could mean contemplation, now it is seen as suspect. Cook and Jenshel were eternal suspects. While working during the 2004 Republican convention, they were watched especially. "People followed us around talking into their wrists," Jenshel says. "We developed this super-nice persona to take the edge off the hostile situations," recalls Cook. The police weren’t the only hazards. Newtown Creek is the tidal creek that separates Brooklyn and Queens and is emblematic of much of the waterfront: once rural, then overdeveloped, now regaining a foregone wildness that is as much about neglect as it is about the relentlessness of what we refer to as nature. This tidal creek was named for the town in the first settlements of Queens that was "new" around 1652. More recently, it has become known as the site of one of the world’s largest underground oil spills, about 17 million gallons, which is 6 million more than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. (Even more recently, New York State has seen the return of a Colonial-era apple species, the Newtown pippin; Erik Baard, an author and environmental activist, identified its pedigree.) Jenshel and Cook photographed the creek after a rainstorm, or what is euphemistically called a stormwater event, which means the water slicks with chemicals, street runoff, and the stuff from household sewers. The result was a beautiful color test of a photo by Jenshel, and three weeks of subsequent sickness. Despite the health risks and wrist talkers, Cook and Jenshel’s results are celebrations of a mystical emptiness, painterly studies of the awkward but ultimately hopeful intersections between the man made and the non–man made. Taken as a whole, their work depicts a sometimes tropical waterfront, a place of interpersonal engagement as well as overgrown complexity. The waterfront of the husband-and-wife team is a place that disputes, in other words, the seemingly overwhelming rush of cement-fueled box store and parking lot sameness, the race to clean and park-ify all that is shore. Their work is a portfolio of secrets. There are quarantine stations, sites long abandoned, islands commandeered by vines. Like the photographs themselves, the vistas from Staten Island are a balm: it is an island which performs the valuable service of providing New Yorkers with perspective on the rest of the city, lest we forget that New York is a port, is an island chain, is (even before global warming raises the sea level) nearly at sea. In highlighting broken reeds (the wetlands-destroying phragmites) and seemingly discarded vessels, their photos give a sense of the intimacy of these places, the spiritual importance of entropy. Broad Channel is the only inhabited island in Jamaica Bay, a wildlife refuge within the Gateway National Recreation Area. Houses are built on stilts. The feel of the place is, like the feel of City Island in the Bronx, more like Maine, or a fishing village on some other part of the New England coast. Broad Channel and City Island are not fancy places. On City Island, the restaurant once owned by the late Tito Puente, timbales player extraordinaire, takes the place of a Starbucks. It is true that murders and innumerable other crimes have happened in our marshlands, but then so have untold moments of personal reflection, of stillness — moments of water- and sky-draped unmomentousness that purify the emotional watershed. Cook and Jenshel give us the ubiquity of sky from shore and the joy of ruins, which take on the significance of religious artifacts in a city and a country that are wondering how to proceed industrially. In fact, plans for the waterfront were part of the reason they went to particular places to photograph. At the beginning of the decade past, New York’s shoreline was full of places that had been marked for large-scale Olympic development. These were places that the Olympic hopefuls considered useless and dead and of little or no value. (The Olympics plan is currently dead itself.) "Some of what drew us to certain places was, okay, this is going to be, say, an Olympic rowing place — well, what is there now?" Cook recalls. "It was annexation," Jenshel says. In the end, this is what Cook and Jenshel’s photos do. They assert a public ownership and denote the valueless as valuable. The photographers are like explorers who, rather than claim the land for the king or queen, claim it for all, claim it for its trodden but still unspoiled beauty, claim it for reconsideration, perhaps, by you or me. Oftentimes the people who are already in the area don’t need much help in this regard. You don’t need a degree in urban planning to know that value is not necessarily added with nice hotels or ballfields made with plastic grass and black rubber dirt. "At one of the meetings," Jenshel says, "someone got up and they said, ‘You know, sometimes we just want to walk out on a patch of dust and sit out under a tree and that’s enough.’ And that really struck us." "I find those places beautiful," Cook says. "And transformational," says Jenshel.
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Water’s Edge