Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront
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In February 1977, while living in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood near the New York Naval Shipyard, the young writer and aspiring artist David Wojnarowicz produced a short poem titled “Circulating drunk to midnight music.”
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Wojnarowicz’s poem evokes the disused Brooklyn harbor of the late 1970s as a bleak and dangerous place, desolate, dystopian, and highly erotic.
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Since the mid-nineteenth century, Red Hook, Vinegar Hill, nearby Sands Street, and, later, the navy yard had been appropriated as gay cruising spaces.
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Systemic municipal and industrial neglect had rendered the waterfront’s piers and warehouses a no-man’s land. No longer economically viable, they were effectively outside any civic or private proprietary jurisdiction.
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When the ruined warehouses “became silhouetted at a certain point of the day,” Wojnarowicz told the curator Barry Blinderman, “I could dream myself—project myself—all around the world in my imagination by looking at those qualities of light, and by looking at those structures.”7 As he cruised there, Wojnarowicz was reminded “of sailors, of distant ports,” that, even as maritime trade declined and disappeared, cast a long erotic shadow on the waterfront.8
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A place of pleasure and of danger, the cruising ground of the abandoned waterfront appealed, in erotic and aesthetic terms, to a range of writers, artists, filmmakers, and amateur photographers. The piers were, the novelist Andrew Holleran wrote, a space of “peculiar magic.”12
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the peculiar eroticism of ruins. The sociologist Laud Humphreys, in Tearoom Trade (1970), his groundbreaking study of male cruising in public toilets in the late 1960s, posited that “these men seem to acquire stronger sentimental attachments to the buildings in which they meet for sex than to the persons with whom they engage in it.”
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A study of the gentrification of the waterfront in this period provides a vantage point from which to consider the city’s long-standing disinclination to archive itself, evident in its promotion of urban developments that resist the renewal of existing buildings and landmarks, and to explore the commitment of queer writers, artists, and filmmakers to preserving the ruined waterfront in the face of initiatives that tend to erase minority histories. Cruising, as an illicit appropriative occupation of the city’s derelict spaces, was itself a form of preserving them as noncommercial spaces and ...more
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While Cruising the Dead River is, at times, a nostalgic book, as it wanders through now-demolished piers and warehouses and recalls abandoned bars and absent city spaces, it is not a book that longs for a return to a supposed golden age of pier cruising. I am not looking back wistfully to a bareback utopia, though I recognize that there is pleasure and power in doing so. Instead, I am interested in how New York’s gay cruising cultures in the late 1970s are remembered and how they have been historicized. I ask whether cruising in ruins itself might be figured as a model for tracing the ...more
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For Max Page, Manhattan’s landscape has been shaped across the past two centuries by abandonment and loss, a pattern he terms “creative destruction.” Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Page argues, as modern building projects expanded across the city to accommodate its burgeoning industries and a growing population, “New Yorkers learned to see the cycle of destruction and rebuilding as ‘second nature’—self-evident, unquestionable, and inevitable.” For the novelist Henry James, New York was “nothing more than a provisional city,” a place of “restless renewals,” an always ...more
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coalesce. In a similar way, Sarah Schulman, in The Gentrification of the Mind, argues that the urban process of “gentrification literally replaces mix with homogeneity, it enforces itself through the repression of diverse expression.” “Key to the gentrification mentality,” she writes, “is the replacement of complex realities with simplistic ones.”22 In light of Schulman’s theory of the gentrification of the mind, there is a clear and urgent political drive to my interest in documenting the queer life of New York’s abandoned waterfront in the 1970s.
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“IT IS IMPORTANT,” he wrote, “TO MARK THAT TIME OR MOMENT OF DEATH. IT’S HEALTHY TO MAKE THE PRIVATE PUBLIC.” But, he continues, the spaces we provide for mourning and memorialization, the chapel and the home, are unnecessarily divisive and atomizing. They separate us from each other in our time of need. “ONE SIMPLE STEP,” he writes, “CAN BRING IT OUT INTO A MORE PUBLIC SPACE. DON’T GIVE ME A MEMORIAL IF I DIE. GIVE ME A DEMONSTRATION.”23
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There, he wrote, “away from the blatant exhibitionist energies of the NYC music scenes gay scenes,” he felt “uncontrollably sane.”2
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the ruined waterfront as a liminal space “as far away from civilization as I could walk.”3
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In a journal entry from June 1979 he wrote of “the semblance of memory and the associations” invoked as he cruised the West Side piers, reminded “of oceans, of sailors, of distant ports and the discreet sense of self among them, unknown and coasting.”9
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Intentionally, queerly ambivalent, Rechy’s characterization of the “exiled excitement” of sex in Central Park and the “desperate night-experience” of cruising reflects, in stark terms, the dangerous, necessarily clandestine sexual culture of 1960s New York and the persistent erotic appeal of its “crushed intimacy,” a tension between secrecy and exposure.38
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Like the perpetual threat of violence inherent in the decaying piers and warehouses on the waterfront, cruising in the late 1960s was marked, according to Rechy, by a dialectical energy of despair and “frantic” pleasure. This dialectic is what Rechy later termed, in reference to the cruising culture of the piers, “the pornography of implied violence,” a complex and violent eroticism that resonates in the multiplicitous uses made of the abandoned piers and warehouses of the waterfront in the following decade.39
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The clubs were, as Tattelman later argued, “alternative sites inserted into the city,” rather than appropriated or reclaimed. Distinct from the erotic culture active in the trucks along the waterfront, these were “places of containment and consumption.”53
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Peter Hujar’s photographs of the Canal Street pier in the early 1980s, such as Pier—Four Doors (1981; figure 1.1), revel in the ruinous aesthetic of the waterfront warehouses, playing with their functionlessness.
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multiplicitous doors offer no spatial or temporal direction. They encourage wandering, visual cruising. They face the edges of the picture plane and, in their ineffectuality, direct our gaze toward the peeling animation of the rotting walls. Accidental orifices have developed on almost every surface, revealing the underlying structure of the warehouse or only darkness. Light pours in from above—we might imagine, a burned or windblown hole in the room’s ceiling—illuminating graffitoed texts encouraging contemporary visitors and latter-day viewers to “CELEBRATE” something. Waterfront buildings ...more
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Unpoliced and largely unlit, the warehouses and piers often acted as an extended back room after closing time. There, the strict rules and membership codes of the West Street bars held little sway. As photographs by the amateur photographer Leonard Fink and the artist Alvin Baltrop make clear, while many of the men who cruised the piers wandered there from the adjacent bars, others were those intentionally excluded from such spaces. Many of them were homeless, overweight, disabled, older, poor. Many were African-American or Latinx. In February 2008 Artforum published a series of ten ...more
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Baltrop’s photographs capture the grandeur of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century piers, their vast hallways and broad corrugated walls, and the play of light through metal beams and open doorways. And they demonstrate that waterfront cruising, like the cruising scene in Central Park in the 1960s, was not only a nighttime activity, as numerous couples and groups dot the sides of the piers in the bright daylight of summer. Men are pictured cruising in Pier 52, the site of
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Gordon Matta-Clark’s vast cutting work Day’s End, in the summer of 1975 (figure 1.2). The men Baltrop depicts are white, African-American, Latinx, and of various ages (figure 1.3). Sex is not always immediately discernible. We have to cruise the images for clues. In some, pairs or groups of men are partially obscured behind steel frames or warehouse walls, the photographer’s gaze paralleling the stealth of the cruising act (figure 1.4). An image of a shirtless young man peering through a gaping hole in a warehouse wall plays with the notion of the frame and, again, of voyeurism (on the wall is ...more
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interested in the fact that queers chose, and it was a choi...
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The degeneration that made the warehouses structurally precarious also rendered them more appealing as cruising spaces: long corridors facilitated wandering, office partitions formed private cubicles, hidden rooms provided peepholes, and cracked windows and broken floorboards created glory holes.
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And he said, the fire really took this place apart, but man if these floorboards could talk . . .84
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I could dream myself—project myself—all around the world in my imagination by looking at those qualities of light, and by looking at those structures. Those qualities of light, of sound, of pieces of tin rattling in the breeze way off in some other part of the building.85
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Yeah if these floorboards could talk, if those streets could talk, if the huge path this body has traveled—roads, motel rooms, hillsides, cliffs, subways, rivers, planes, trucks—if any of them could speak, what would they remember most about me? What motions would they unravel within their words . . . ?86
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The three men are led to wonder: “Why do gays love ruins? . . . The Lower West Side, the docks. Why do we love slums so much?”107
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“Why,” one friend inquires, “do I feel a strange sense of freedom the moment I enter a decaying neighborhood?” “Why,” he asks, retracing evenings spent cruising the Lower East Side, when walking by “a tenement with a collapsed wall . . . do I imagine giving a party there—or better yet, conjure up a slender fellow, half hidden by the rusted doorframe, inviting me into the rubble to make love, entirely in ruins?”
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It was only at the piers, “in this despised section of the city,” Miller wrote, that I could meet up with an interesting character. The crumbling architecture itself was an inspiration, to say nothing of the morbid, sordid streets leading to the waterfront. What a world there was here, perhaps still is, despite all the efforts to clean it up!111
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For Holleran, too, the historical suggestiveness and ruinous dereliction of these spaces are markers of the harbor’s temporal and spatial disjunction from the rest of the city and from heteronormative sexual cultures and productivity—and so add to its appeal as a cruising space, in terms of both safety and fantasy. One of Holleran’s friends, an “alumnus of the Mineshaft,” ponders what will happen “if Westway [a proposed development] is ever built” and “the shoreline made pretty by city planners”:
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When the city is totally renovated, when gays have restored all the tenements, garden restaurants have sprouted on the Lower East Side, and the meatpacking district is given over entirely to boutiques and cardshops—then we’ll build an island in New York Harbor composed entirely of rotting piers, blocks of collapsed walls, and litter-strewn lots.
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The proliferation of gay cruising cultures in ruined buildings on the Manhattan waterfront in the 1970s underlined the failure of municipal authorities to redevelop this once-prosperous industrial space or to properly police the fringes of the city. As New York continued to reel from its industrial and economic decline, its heteronormative fabric also began to fray at the edges.
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As the extent of Akerman’s disconnection from “home” becomes clearer, the seemingly detached visual narrative and the city’s empty spaces acquire an emotional weight. Akerman creates a powerful sense of place, an indelible image of a now-lost New York, by underscoring her familial placelessness, her dislocation from the “home” of the film’s title. Her anonymity in these spaces, her separation from those around her, is key to her liberatory experience of the city. The emptied downtown streets enable Akerman to exist untethered
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in the postindustrial city, to embrace displacement and move freely through lower Manhattan’s broad avenues, side streets, neon-bright bodegas, subway stations, fish markets, and piers. In the film’s closing scene, we watch as the camera pulls out of a pier by the South Street Seaport and sails toward Governor’s Island or the Upper Bay, with lapping water as the only soundtrack, until Akerman’s camera runs out of film.
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This disconnection imbues the apparently dispassionate camera direction with a sense of what Giuliana Bruno has called an “erotic nomadism.”1 This “nomadism” is perceptible in the ways in which Akerman occupies the city as both a resident and an outsider with emotional links to another “home.” But it also visible in the oblique glances she takes at fellow citizens and in the spaces in which she wanders, largely at dusk and seemingly without purpose. Playing on her sense of separation from those around her by focusing on the city’s architecture, rather than its residents, Akerman, according to ...more
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that displaced affect. Focusing on the city’s interstitial sites—streets, subway platforms, the waterfront—Akerman instead cruises nocturnal Manhattan for spaces that permit free, anonymous occupation. The reading of the letters, whose subject is longing, nostalgia, and separation, suffuses the shots of recognizably dilapidated places—visibly the domain of the impoverished, the overworked, the lonely a...
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“The omnipresence of emptiness, of abandoned housing and imminent demolition,” he writes, “gave me the freedom to experiment with the multiple alternatives to one’s life in a box.”
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He writes suggestively of his experiences of “New York’s least remembered parts,” “driv[ing] around in my pick-up hunting for emptiness, for a quiet abandoned spot on which to concentrate my piercing attention.”3
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the “gold breathin’ light across the surface of the dark rolling river.”8
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poetic descriptions of light take precedence over reports on the erotic encounters taking place here.
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Everything is quiet or silent. And or near silent there. A lot of it, the cruising . . . it’s quiet, you know. There’s no question as to why people are there. . . . There’s none of,
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having to go to a bar and deal with conversation. It’s really very direct. If you don’t want to make it with somebody . . . Visual acknowledgement of eye contact; that’s usually all that’s required.
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Yet “even when’s nobody’s there,” Hall remarks: aesthetically I find the place fascinating. Just weird and different and interesting. It’s the kind of thing that I’d be into. Forgetting the sexual nature or orientation of people meeting there. Not even thinking about that, just the fact that it’s this big abandoned place like that. The way it looks, burnt out. The space. The sun coming in. The windows. The halls. The light. All-natural light. Things smashed in. It’s just weird. It’s a combination of so many different senses and visual aspects and suggestions, memories, things you’ve seen in ...more
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Along with the warehouses of New York’s derelict waterfront, Hujar photographed New Jersey junkyards, Manhattan car parks at
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night, and bankrupt, shuttered shops. Not just personal investigations of ruined places, his images are studies of the formal properties of crushed automobiles, of steel shavings, of torn paper, of discarded shoes and items of clothing, of weeds growing through fences and in the hallways of emptied buildings. They fixate upon the waste products of American industry and draw our attention toward the debris that accompanies hurried exits or evictions, the visual culture of late capitalism’s ruins.
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Hujar’s black-and-white image gives the viewer little sense of the character of the surrounding dump, reducing, even crushing, the sense of space between the viewer and this lumpen form. While the compression of space and compositional focus on a simple form suggest abstraction, this photograph is resolutely not abstract. The punctum is the moment of recognition of the form as a car, the realization that what sits here is an item once invested with value, now wrecked beyond repair, transmuted into this new shape in preparation for a new economic function, the resale of the ruined remainders of ...more
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“Agonized travesties of what was once grandeur, they gasp on their sides, or stack crazily on high, looking like the aftereffect of some timeless carnage.”
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Beyond recognizing in ruination an opportunity for experimentation and freedom from sociocultural regulation, all three find a darkly humorous parallel to their own alienation and queer nonproductivity. Importantly, Hujar draws these connections, or rather, makes these visual allusions, without anthropomorphizing ruins.
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