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

by Fiona Anderson

Hujar focuses on the intersections between doorways, windows, and hallways, on places of connection and passage.

Like Hujar, Thek appears to have embraced ruins, in part, as a creative reuse of his enforced social exile. In an essay for the short catalog that accompanied Paul Thek and His Circle, Peter Harvey quotes from a series of letters Thek sent him in the mid-1950s. They are anxious and romantic and often address

Thek’s experiences of rejection from heteronormative society in terms of space. “It is not that the world has suddenly found itself without room for us,” Thek wrote. “It is that the world has quickly gone about making no room for us. You know we are dangerous.”

24 We might conclude, then, that attending to the ruined boathouse on the fringes of Deering’s estate, forgotten as the house and much of the grounds underwent restoration for a wider tourist public, was both an act of claiming a liminal space in a place “without room for us” and an opportunity to pay respects to a hallowed “gay ground” as i...

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”25

A photograph, Hujar stated in a recorded interview with Wojnarowicz from the mid-1980s, is not a frozen moment, but “an echo” of one; it takes on its own life and exists according to its own temporality:

It doesn’t seem like a freezing of life, but of—it’s like taking the shape of that moment, of what’s happening, and making something else out of it. It’s not frozen. Sometimes people freeze moments of life and they become memories. That’s one kind of way of doing it. I keep hoping that when I do a picture that it has its own life, it really has nothing to do with that moment. It’s not something frozen. It’s the echo of that time. And what’s on that piece of paper has its own life. Which is very different from the life that was in that moment in which the picture was taken. . . . In the end it has nothing to do with it.28

Like the dormant machines at Passaic, “instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future”: They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. . . . Both past and future are placed into an objective present. This kind of time has little or no space; it is stationary and without movement, it is

going nowhere, it is anti-Newtonian, as well as being instant, and is against the wheels of the time-clock.29

Time there, as Hujar’s photographs make clear, had broken down “into many times.” Wandering for hours, if not days, at the piers, as Wojnarowicz and Hall did, walking from room to room along decrepit hallways and looking through holes that appeared in decaying walls, “rather than saying, ‘What time is it?’ we should say, ‘Where is the time?’”32

The work shown in these spaces was often ephemeral and frequently unsalable.

One of the PS1’s earliest

successes was, Foote wrote, the Rooms show in June 1976, a “remarkable spur-of-the-moment exhibition” in which around eighty artists participated. Artists such as Robert Ryman, Joseph Kosuth, and Acconci “hacked, gouged, stripped, dug, poured and picked away” at the building’s “rotting hulk.”33 Matta-Clark produced a cutting work that extended through all three floors of the once-derelict building. The spaces themselves seemed to demand this kind of revolutionary approach. A “crummy” space, Foote wrote, “can be brutalized, destroyed, completely restructured; it can be ‘amended’ subtly by small additions that comment on its nature and adapt their posture to its own; it can serve as medium,...

Lew spoke abstractly of his hesitation to “fix” 112 Greene Street as stemming from his reluctance “to disturb the raw power of the space,” Baranik branded its unrenovated quality a “focus on surface trappings instead of content . . . a carefully regulated dinginess, a kind of studied poverty, where the enemy became not philistine levelling but white walls and a contemplative space.”38

Vito Acconci’s contribution to Sharp’s exhibition, a durational performance work titled Security Zone, consisted of the artist standing blindfolded and with his ears plugged at the edge of the pier, making a quite literal reference to the subject of isolation in the derelict and potentially dangerous space of the abandoned waterfront, but also alluding, through loose insinuations to bondage and penetration, to its appropriation as a gay cruising space. In an untitled work from earlier the same year, the artist invited friends to another abandoned warehouse at 1:00 a.m. over a series of twenty-nine nights, where he proceeded to “reveal to that person something that hasn’t been revealed about me before, something that I would normally keep concealed.”50 Both works spoke to Acconci’s broader rejection of “the gallery as the space where art itself

occurred while someone else watched,” the boundaries between voyeur and viewer becoming blurred, as they were in the cruising that took place in the same waterfront landscape. The unregulated, abandoned site of the warehouse allowed Acconci “to work in a public rather than in front of a public,” relatively unmediated.51 Distinct from Sharp’s earlier project, which was focused on documentation for a museum audience and, indeed, could be recorded photographically at all, Acconci’s second pier piece was performative to the point of being visually inconceivable, contingent upon and enhancing the waterfront’s interstitial qualities and its dereliction.

“The establishment of certain space in the city as ‘public,’” he argues, “is a reminder, a warning that the rest of the city isn’t public. New York doesn’t belong to us.”

Acconci suggests, however, that space may rendered public in two ways: either designated by “right,” that is, permitted by city authorities, or “made public, a place where the public gathers precisely because it doesn’t have the right—a place made public by force.” Like the derelict waterfront, this latter kind of space is “a place in the middle of the city but isolated from the city.”52 The idea of public space is not in itself exclusionary, he argues, since both legislated and appropriated spaces can be conceived of as public. All public space, whether cruised or not, is inherently sexual, Acconci proposes, because “the public space of the city is the presence of other bodies”:

public space is an analogue for sex—either it’s a composite of objects of the desire for sex, or it’s a composite of images that substitute for sex. . . . You liberate yourself into public space when sex at home closes you up inside a relationship and “sex” becomes reduced to a subcategory of “relationship.” Public space is the refusal of monogamous relationships and the acceptance of sex that has no bonds and knows no bounds.

By presenting the city’s fringes in this abstracted, flattened way, Jonas points explicitly to their value as spaces for aesthetic and social exploration, dislocated, attenuated, flattened,

and penetrated without permission.57 Jonas uses “these techniques,” Crimp has argued, “to thwart our desire to know or possess the city beyond our immediate experience of it in the moment of use.” Her fragmented view leaves the city open for further reclamation, underscoring Acconci’s belief that while “New York doesn’t belong to us,” to artists, it might be made ours, at least temporarily, through creative practice. After all, Crimp concludes, we only ever “see the city in fragments . . . in our peripheral vision—and in recollection.”58

Situated on a peeling, crumbling wall, her work at the Ward Line pier addressed the vulnerability of the site and of those who wandered its hallways and corridors, drawing attention to its broadly masculine history and queer sexual appropriation (figure 2.18).

but also makes their actual arrival seem magically imminent (as wild animals depicted on cave walls in prehistoric times might have seemed to Palaeolithic people),” further complicating the line between the urban and rural, the contained and the wild, the past and the present in a ruined city space that was itself approaching extinction.

An imagined classical past is united with an American late-capitalist present through the image of the ruin, a fetishized symbol of glory as much as a marker of decay and failure. Ruination is imminent, and, as the buildings of downtown New York decay in the disappearing

present, they are, Wojnarowicz suggests, both pitiful and picturesque, crass and classical.

Magid writes longingly, “I am on the pier but there is nothing left here to remind me of you”

“Being homosexual is, to me,” he remarked in an interview with his friend Keith Davis, recorded in 1983,

it’s like you’re not working with the support of society, not living with the support of society at large. And that’s something political in itself. Here’s masses of people who have been taught that something is not right, not correct, as a way of living, as a life, as a life form. And so in your being queer, you’re living without support, without the total support of society. You’re living on your own strength.

Future time is as vivid for me as past time. All it takes is being in the right state for it. And the right state is usually

set off by things about light and, you know, solitude. Usually walking by myself somewhere and usually close to a river.11

An encounter with the past in the present was, for Wojnarowicz, always a multiplicitious encounter, a friendship, a collaborative erotic experience, and a bodily one. As Freeman puts it, an erotohistoriographic encounter with the past in the present “uses the body as a tool to effect, figure or perform that encounter.” It “sees the body as a method, and historical consciousness as something intimately involved with corporeal sensations.” It “does not write the lost object into the present so much as encounter it already in the present, by treating the present itself as hybrid.”15 The erotohistoriographic narrative that Wojnarowicz created in his waterfront writing was, then, a queer one. As Judith Butler asserts in the closing chapter of Bodies That Matter, if the term “queer,” and the collection of meanings and identities it both incorporates and generates, “is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and future imaginings, it will have to remain”—like the derelict waterfront—“that which is never fully owned, but always redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage.”16 Like queer time and ruined space, the specter “remains difficult to name,” for it is also “neither soul nor body, and both one and the other. . . . It is flesh and phenomenality that give the spirit its spectral apparition, but which disappear right away. . . . One does not know whether it is living or if it is dead.”17

concerned less with a rearticulation of the language or content of Rimbaud’s poetry than with its enthusiastic desire to “hold many opposed ideas in one’s mind at the same time and function fully.”

The influence of Apollinaire’s ahistorical poetics is seen, too, in an unpublished poem by Wojnarowicz, titled “Reading a little Rimbaud in a Second Avenue coffee shop.” As Apollinaire wrote in “Zone” of “standing at the metal counter of some dive / Drinking wretched coffee where the wretched live,” Wojnarowicz wrote of sitting in a coffee shop where “newspapers draped over the counter tell of the fall of the city.”54

For each writer, the waterfront was an erotically appealing setting; each was moved by the harbor’s rich past lives, by memories of sailors and stevedores, by the eroticism of what Wojnarowicz called “something silent and recalled,” by “the sense of age in a familiar place.”91 It was from this multiplicity, this erotic desire for communication and friendship, that the potential for the multigenerational collaboration that Wojnarowicz so keenly explored during his early career, in both personal journals and early publications such as The Waterfront Journals, emerged.

In Whitman’s poetry, the New York waterfront, most often on the Brooklyn side, appears as a space that plays host, simultaneously, to an entropic disappearance of solid, chronological time and an expanding archive of its uses and inhabitants in the past, present, and future.

The “pile fields,” as she terms them, “are stunning reminders of a city past. As compared to the monumentality of the [Queensboro] bridge,” which also appears in the book and in the public art project she proposes, “the scale here has been anthropomorphized, and thus demands that we acknowledge the physical history of this place, its decay, and the topography of desire that is New York City.” Roysdon “asks people to focus on the ethics of communication, the ways in which we move about this city and the speeches we employ. Talk is territorial and speaking is a dance.”115 The nonfunctionality of the pilings, which stand suggestively in the water, no longer supporting a pier or warehouse, and their decaying material status, permit this kind of projection and thus problematize the discourse of “proper use” that Roysdon challenges with this work.116

West Street is the street you had to cross to get to the piers. I am interested in this choice to cross the street and that sort of boundary, which takes different shapes, and in many ways is not there, except we queers know it is there, and we step over it and we go to a space to find many different things.

Here I consider the preservationist efforts of queer writers, artists, and filmmakers in the face of mainstream narratives that tend not only to resist the renewal of existing buildings and landmarks, but to erase minority histories. Cruising, as an illicit appropriation of the city’s derelict spaces, was itself a means of preserving them as noncommercial, as spaces for political organizing among gay men and lesbians, and as a home for displaced and at-risk trans people.

urban neglect in New York in the 1970s was largely not a matter of negligence but a considered political strategy, “abandoning buildings, harassing and evicting tenants, and rapidly turning over neighborhood property in order to escalate real-estate values.”

By 1984, for example, the city had acquired 60 percent of property on the Lower East Side by way of tax defaults and abandonment by incompetent or insolvent landlords. “Contiguous lots” of derelict or neglected housing were “put together to form what is known in the real estate business as ‘assemblages’ . . . sold for large sums of money at municipal auctions to developers who thus amass entire blocks for the construction of large-scale upper-income housing.”13 Careful management, that is to say perpetuation, of abandoned spaces and empty buildings was key to these municipal strategies of intentional neglect and exclusionary public access and citizenship. One “general public” was being evicted to accommodate another.

Writing in the New York Times in 1979, almost contemporaneous with Koch’s pledge to “[open] the waters to the people of the city,” architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable bade a bittersweet farewell to the “shabby” East Side harbor, as she criticized the young developer Donald Trump’s emergent plans for a commercial restructuring of the still-abandoned riverfront: I guess what I am really doing is saying good-bye. Because what will surely be lost is the spirit and identity of the area as it has existed over centuries—something that may only be important to those of us who have loved the small, shabby streets and buildings redolent of tim...

“Key to the gentrification mentality,” Schulman argues, “is the replacement of complex realities with simplistic ones.”

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.

“Soon,” Wojnarowicz observed as he wrote about the cruising space of the derelict piers, “all this will be picturesque ruins.”31

Ruins, Rebecca Solnit writes, “are evidence not only that cities can be destroyed but that they survive their own destruction, are resurrected again and again.” They “stand as reminders.” “To erase the ruins,” she argues, “is to erase the visible public triggers of memory; a city without ruins and traces of age is like a mind

without memories.” The “ruins themselves, like other traces, are treasures: our links to what came before, our guide to situating ourselves in a landscape of time.”32 The image and experience of the ruin as ephemeral, temporally complex, and resistant to homogeneous historicization is central to Wojn...

The “larger the range of representations,” he wrote later, “the more I feel there is room in the environment for my existence, that not the entire environment is hostile.”

Throughout New York, muggings and murders were on the increase as poverty rates increased and the city’s law enforcement agencies and other municipal bodies failed to respond effectively to increased crime and public disorder. Between 1960 and 1968, robberies in New York had increased more than eightfold and burglaries had more than quadrupled.41 The number of homicides in New York tripled between 1965 and 1975.42 Between August 1976 and August 1977, the city was in thrall to the serial killer David Berkowitz, known by the self-assigned moniker “Son of Sam,” who murdered six people, all women, and wounded seven others, sparking an extensive police manhunt and equally expansive press coverage. In the midst of this spiraling violence and continued urban neglect, the safety of queer New Yorkers was additionally compromised by homophobic policing, epitomized by the many raids on gay and lesbian bars, which continued after Stonewall into the 1970s, and by limited civil rights legislation. Beginning in 1971 the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) sought to challenge New York’s continued failure to protect its gay, lesbian, and transgender citizens from violence and discrimination by sponsoring a bill in the city council, titled Intro. 554, to extend the prohibition of “discrimination in employment, housing or public accommodations based on race, religion or sex” to include that based on sexuality.43 The bill did not pass until 1986.

Although ostensibly an attempt to raise awareness among cruising gay men of the increasing number of assaults and muggings at the piers, Ryan’s diatribe is a critique of the creative mixed use of the derelict waterfront that privileges one sort of appropriation and asserts a right to safe association and protection from violence shaped by a discriminatory attitude with regard to class

and race. Christina B. Hanhardt has noted that in neighborhoods like Chelsea and the West Village in the mid- to late 1970s, “the departure and displacement of racially diverse working-class communities from dilapidated housing stock was followed by an influx of middle- and upper-income whites who refurbished homes and businesses.” She adds that this same area was, of course, “also home to the majority of New York’s gay leather and S/M bars, courtesy of its emptying industrial spaces and proximity to the popular public sex spot of the piers along the West Side.”51 The gentrification of the area can be gauged in part, Hanhardt suggests, by tracking the growing hostility of its white gay male residents toward teenaged people of color in the neighborhood, and their efforts to formalize it.