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

by Fiona Anderson

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 places for queer association. This chapter brings to the fore queer appropriations of the New York waterfront and nearby bars, its identity as a gay men’s cruising space, as a place that facilitated the political organizing of gay men and lesbians, as a site for sex work, and as a home for displaced and at-risk trans people.