Civil War Weekend

Stepping way far back into vanished New York history, Governors Island this weekend hosted a few groups of Civil War reenactors, who transformed the island to its olden days as a base for recruiting Union soldiers and a prison for Confederates. And while it was Governors Island circa 1863, it felt, in odd ways, eerily like Brooklyn 2010.


photos: my flickr

There were musket drills and firings of cannons. There were tents set up in rows, each one outfitted by its owner with personal items--packets of letters, tin cups, tobacco.



Womenfolk baked bread over open fires, in between the washing and drying of clothing. They talked about sewing and the business of handwork. The officers and their wives enjoyed a lavish meal of local foods.



A makeshift general store sold pickled eggs, handmade soap, and plain wooden pencils that brought to mind Field Notes pencils, each of which are stamped with a dizzying description of their virtuous contents: "Lacquer-free Renewable Cal-Cedar Wood Casing, Recyclable Aluminum Ferrule, Enviro-Green Degradable Eraser and Certified Non-Toxic Imprint Inks."



The Civil War reenactors' pencils did not have that information stamped onto them. Still, I couldn't help but think of the artisanal trend, the simple trend, the DIY, seasonal, locavore trend. Everything looked, in some odd way, contemporary.

Aside from those pencils, it reminded me of the Freeman's empire. And of people who pickle things and put them in jars with labels that look old but aren't old then sell them at the Brooklyn Flea, or who hawk hunks of rough-hewn soap at the Renegade Craft Fair.

Maybe it was all those guys with curly mustaches and burly muttonchops, but the whole thing was kind of hipster, except without the irony.

Ellis Island Ruins

On Sunday, thanks to OHNY, I took a tour of the ruins on the south side of Ellis Island. It was a popular event, with five tours running on both days of the weekend--plenty of chances for New Yorkers to experience this important piece of history, and enjoy the thrill of accessing a rarely seen aspect of the hidden city.


Art-Deco eagles

That's the best part--stepping through private doors into a place few people go, into a no-man's land of contagious disease wards and psychiatric lock-ups.


the face of misery on a hospital building

There is something deeply satisfying about a modern ruin. The smallpox hospital on Roosevelt Island, the High Line before it was reclaimed, Admirals Row at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Maybe they bring to mind the oddly peaceful, unpeopled pleasures of the post-apocalypse.



Maybe it's their familiarity that attracts us to them. In the Staff House at Ellis Island, a building recently reclaimed from wild vines, we can imagine ourselves sitting by the fireplace...



...looking out at the view of the harbor and Statue of Liberty, listening to the ocean as it laps against the sea wall just feet from the back door. This isn't an ancient Roman ruin, far removed from our own experience. This is a room we might know.



It is not hard to imagine our nearest ancestors shuffling through the Isolation Ward, walking on a nurse's arm along the curving, U-shaped corridor. Today, vegetation pokes through the busted windows. Nature is ever-pressing, waiting for the humans to depart, waiting to take over again, creeping in through the cracks, tearing down the walls.



In haunted rooms, nature has eaten away the floors and sunk the ceilings. There used to be beds here, white sheets, vases filled with flowers. The air smelled of Listerine. This is not some distant Pompeii. In these ruins, we hover between possibilities--the known past, photographed and documented, and the foreseen future, easily imagined because it's already here.



Down a long corridor through the measles wards, we pass broken glass and twining vines, a pile of dead leaves sweeping in on the wind, and silence. No people to be seen. Only their rusted remains, their confused detritus.

A porcelain urinal leans against a tree. A mortuary seethes with bats. Oxygen and moisture devour the doors on cabinets that once held cadavers.

We know what life after the apocalypse will look like.



See all my photos of the Ellis Island hospital here

For more modern ruins, see:

• Sympathetic Compass
• Bluejake
• Nathan Kensinger

Chatty Conductors & Ferry Shines

There are those who make our dreary daily commutes a little more interesting. Surrounded by androids tuned out on ipods and handheld video games, cell phones and Blackberries, a flash of humanity can mean a lot.

Conductor Jason Lewis has been making life on the #2 train more human by adding his own words to those of the automated robot voices, wishing his riders good morning as he cracks jokes and waxes philosophic. This all may end, however, as he was passed over for a job as dedicated announcer. The MTA was afraid he would not conform to their official script. "I'm done," Jason told the New York Times.



In 2003 Carmine Rizzo said he was done, after shining shoes on the Staten Island Ferry for 35 years. He was the last of the ferryboat shoeshine men. I remember him as a stooped little man with an oily wooden box in his hand and a tired voice that called out, "Shine, shine, shine." He said not another word to me when I got a shoeshine from him, but it was a pleasure to prop my foot on his box and feel the thrum of his brushes while I watched the harbor flow past.

I haven't thought much about that man until this weekend when I visited the Staten Island Museum's ferry exhibit where they have Carmine's retired box and brushes on display.



Although the newspapers all say Carmine quit, the guy taking admission at the museum told me he was more or less pushed out by Bloomberg's post-9/11 city and its need for monotony in the name of security. The bands that used to play on the ferries were banned and so was the "rhyming salesman," deemed a "quality-of-life problem" according to SI Live.

New York used to be full of characters, but these days not everyone wants a city with character. Some commuters on the #2 train wish the happy conductor would just shut up and at least one ferry rider had this to say about the shoeshine men, "To me, it just gets annoying putting up with them yelling 'Shine' all the time...I'm glad to see them go."

Such is life in today's vanishing New York. I wish Carmine would come back.

• All Feet on Deck, Forlorn
• Carmine on retirement

ferry sketch with shine man by Cecil C. Bell