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

by Fiona Anderson

This sense of loss points to a long-standing and deep-rooted view of New York as a city that progresses by destroying what came before, that continually rewrites the story of its own heritage and progress, a practice that gathered pace in the late 1970s with real estate developments, and concomitant tax breaks, designed to attract white-collar labor back to the city it had fled in the 1960s. This city, Gregg Bordowitz has suggested, “is about as archival as a trade paperback whose spine is meant to be broken by mass transit consumption.”21 By focusing on what archival traces remain and on visual records of queer appropriations of the city’s piers, I examine the civic battleground of the city’s historic waterfront from the perspective of those who were “losing out,” exploring the “complex realities” of activism, preservationism, and protest that have been obscured by the gentrification of both the waterfront and its queer history.