Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront

by Fiona Anderson

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 temporary construction “that will be replaced by another city.”17 Page’s theory recasts Michel de Certeau’s observation in The Practice of Everyday Life that New York is a “city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental relief,” that it “invents itself, hour by hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future.”18 The liminal, transitory qualities of the waterfront, as the domain of ships and of peripatetic sailors and temporary laborers, were augmented by the incompleteness of the city that it fringes and its proclivity for “restless” redevelopment.19