(by Joseph Mitchell)
The six pieces in this book were originally published in The New Yorker between 1944 and 1959, and all of them have something to do with various maritime industries in and around New York. As Lucy Sante notes in her foreword, these pieces were published at a time when “the harbor and its many trades were an integral part of the city’s daily fabric”. I love how Sante describes Mitchell and his writing and his subjects: she notes that his “favorite device was the list, and his favorite conjunction was “and”,” and that he “was drawn to the harbor first of all because he was interested in people, in process, in specialized skills, in accreted time, in individual reckonings with tradition, in the annexes and alcoves and side rooms left out of the broader historical account.” I love lists and New York and the waterfront, so I was expecting to thoroughly enjoy this book, and I was not disappointed. Every piece has some interesting information and some great sentences and transported me to a version of New York that was disappearing or had disappeared decades before I was born, though traces of it were still here when I got here, and traces of it are still here even now.
The first piece, about a restaurant across from the old Fulton Fish Market, made me think of my own one-time early-morning visit to the fish market when it was still in Manhattan. (My visit was in the early 2000s, when I took Kenneth T. Jackson’s great class about the history of the city of New York; the class ended in an all-night bike ride that started at Columbia’s campus and ended at the Brooklyn Bridge, with a pre-dawn stop at the fish market. I didn’t experience the “smoky riverbank dawn” that Mitchell writes about, but I remember the bustle of the market, and I can imagine what it must have been like in 1952, when Mitchell wrote Up in the Old Hotel.) My other favorite pieces were Mr. Hunter’s Grave—in which Mitchell learns the history of Sandy Ground, a community in Staten Island started before the Civil War by free Black people who worked in the Prince’s Bay oyster industry (which I learned about this year thanks to one of Nathan Kensinger’s great NYCH2O walks) and The Rivermen, which is about shad fishing in the Hudson River and also contains great descriptions of Edgewater and how it was in 1959 and what its history was over the hundreds of years since it was first settled. (I’ve done a decent amount of walking up and down River Road but I didn’t know about the old Edgewater Cemetery, which used to be nestled among the buildings of an aluminum factory and now sits next to Sojo Spa, and I was amused by a snippet of conversation that features a local complaining about the traffic on River Road all those decades ago.)
Probably my favorite sentences in the book come from The Rivermen: I love this part where Mitchell is describing the factories by the river in Edgewater: “Among them are an Aluminum Company of America factory, a coffee-roasting plant, a factory that makes roofing materials, a factory that makes sulphuric acid, and a factory that makes a shortening named Spry. On the roof of the Spry factory is an enormous electric sign; the sign looms over the river, and on rainy, foggy nights its pulsating, endlessly repeated message, “SPRY FOR BAKING,” “SPRY FOR BAKING,” “SPRY FOR BAKING,” seems to be a cryptic warning of some kind that New Jersey is desperately trying to get across to New York.”
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