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"The Rivermen" part 3
Posted By: william rutledge
Date: Friday, 14 February 2003, at 2:10 p.m.
Excerpt #3 from Joseph Mitchell's 1959 essay, "The Rivermen":
Off the upper part of town are expanses of shoals that are called the Edgewater Flats. They are mucky, mirky, silty, and oily. Stretches of them are exposed at low tide, or have only a foot or two of water over them. In some places, they go out two hundred yards before they reach a depth of six feet. For generations, the Edgewater Flats have been a dumping ground for wrecks. Out in them, lying every which way, as if strewn about long ago by a storm, are the ruins of scores of river vessels. Some of these vessels were replaced by newer vessels and laid up in the flats against a time that they might possibly be used again, and that time never came. Some got out of commission and weren't worth repairing, and were towed into the flats and stripped of their metal and abandoned. Some had leaks, some had fires, and some had collisions. At least once a day, usually when the tide is at or around dead ebb, flocks of harbor gulls suddenly appear and light on the wrecks and scavenge the refuse that has collected on them during the rise and fall of the tide, and for a little while they crawl with gulls, they become white and ghostly with gulls, and then the gulls leave as suddenly as they came. The hulks of three ferryboats are out in the flats -- the Shadyside, the George Washington, and the old Fort Lee. Nothing is left of the Shadyside but a few of her ribs and part of her keel. There are old tugboats out there, and old dump scows, and old derrick lighters, and old car floats. There are sand-and-gravel barges, and brick barges, and stone barges, and coal barges, and slaughterhouse barges. There are five ice barges out there, the last of a fleet that used to bring natural ice down to New York City from the old icehouse section along the west shore of the river, between Saugerties and Coxsackie. They have been in the flats since 1910, they are waterlogged, and they sit like hippopotamuses in the silt.
Although Edgewater is only a short ride by subway and bus from the heart of New York City, it has some characteristics of an isolated and ingrown old town in New England or the South. The population is approximately four thousand, and a large proportion of the people are natives and know each other, at least to speak to. A surprising number of them are related, some so distantly that they aren?t at all sure just how. The elderly people take a deep interest in local history, a good deal of which has been handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth, and nearly all of them who are natives consider themselves authorities on the subject. When these elderly people were young, quite a few men and women bearing the names of the original Dutch and Huguenot families were still living in old family mansions along River Road, and they remember them. They know in a general way how the present-day old families are interrelated, and how several of these families are related to the original families. They can fish around in their memories and bring up vital statistics and stray facts and rumors and old jokes and sayings concerning a multitude of people who have been dead and gone for a generation, and can point out where buildings stood that have been torn down for fifty years. Sometimes, in the manner of old people in old towns, unable to tell only a little when they know so much, they respond to a simple question with a labyrinthine answer.
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