Notes on an Old Map

Some weeks after her move, Catherine's nieces and nephews emptied the house. They found its furnishings neat, modest, even austere. She had thought material possessions an encumbrance. Perhaps this reflected the inclination of her generation of Harts to the religious life. An older sister took the veil.

Others tested their vocations to realize, usually with sadness, theirs was not a true calling. Catherine's simplicity saved her from the taste for interior decoration that, as Donald Herington wrote, "reflects zeal without taste," relentlessly filling shadow boxes and knickknack nooks with an assembly of objects without plan, art or elegance. If memory serves, Vladimir Nabokov once called this stuff poshlost. Tchotchke, being less pretentious, better suits her. In either event, Catherine's house was barren of reproductions of those paintings whose subject matter, rather than artistry, has made it kitsch, whether Leonardo's Last Supper or Durer's Praying Hands, or competent genre art such as This Daily Bread; or porcelain figurines, or decorative colored glassware, to quote Herington again: "shell-shaped vases, etched glass and frosted glass, Depression glass, Fostoria and Sandwich, saucers and bowls and compotes."

Catherine's books, papers and photographs were in the attic: nearly 60 years of tax returns, bank books and check registers; letters from relatives neatly filed away in shoeboxes; photograph albums full of faces and places no one else now living remembers (my Aunt Sally takes one or two with her when she visits Catherine: between the two of them, they hope to transform anonymous snapshots into memories), and only a handful of souvenirs.

William Maxwell, who wrote exquisite short stories for the old New Yorker, was once handed a Roman coin, part of an army payroll buried in the North African desert to keep it from invaders' hands so successfully it was lost for nearly 2000 years. In reflecting, perhaps, on the persistence of memory, he murmured, "The odds are on objects."

"Nonsense," Catherine would have snapped, and her language might have been sharper if she had enjoyed a highball or two. Memory, in my families, is all that matters. Objects reflect mere sentiment and catch dust. One relative often repeats the rapidly aging one-liner about Irish Alzheimer's: you forget everything but the grudges. I never found that true among my Irishry.

Memory, matured over time, seems more human and less materialistic, and, prompted at odd moments, unexpectedly warms the heart. When my parents and my Aunt Sally and her husband had gone through Catherine's possessions, they mailed me some books and papers that otherwise would have gone out with the trash. So much for the things of a life.

Harts rarely visit New York City. They believe it dirty and dangerous. I cannot argue against the first and arguing against the second is hopeless. Their rare and awful visits were carefully arranged for only the greatest of events. Thus, my mother faintly remembers visiting the great World's Fair of 1939-'40 in Flushing Meadows, Queens, although she was then only four. I suspect most Harts have not visited since.

So I was surprised to find in the package The Complete Street Guide to New York (Geographia Map Co., New York 19, New York, copyright MCMLIX), produced under the direction of Alexander Gross, F.R.G.S. I was not surprised to find it unopened. Incidentally, Mr. Gross' mysterious and pretentious postnominal initials signify he was a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society?"that is," as H. R. Trevor-Roper wrote of the identically distinguished recluse, sinologist and forger Sir Edmund Backhouse, F.R.G.S., "one of six thousand subscribers to its Journal."

The Complete Street Guide advises the reader on its first page that "The Third Avenue L line in Manhattan has been recently discontinued, therefore all stations of same Line in Manhattan should be disregarded in this Guide." Third Ave., like 2nd Ave., is wide not for the convenience of automobilists but because it once accommodated the vast iron structure that bore the Manhattan Railway's elevated trains between the Battery?via Coenties Slip, Pearl St., the Bowery and 3rd Ave.?and the Bronx. The elevated railroad was the subject matter of John Sloan and the Ashcan painters: Brendan Gill recalled it darkening "the avenue with its Piranesi crosshatch of heavy black steel uprights and sooty crossties." Although the Board of Aldermen had granted the el and its master, the sinister financier Jay Gould, a 999-year lease amid a saturnalia of corruption that left not one wallet unfilled, thirst unquenched or itch unscratched (after all, the straphangers would eventually pay for it, nickel by nickel), the entire el in Manhattan was abandoned and demolished during six months in 1955.

Third Ave. was no longer "cast in perpetual shadow." The soot, rattle and noise no longer protected the low-rent offbeat restaurants, Irish bars, cut-rate hairdressers, thrift shops, barber colleges, tattooists and flophouses that had preserved something of the 19th century as it really was, rather than as today's glossy period films would have it appear. Remember, during Mrs. Wharton's Age of Innocence, the Dept. of Street Cleaning disposed of the 2.5 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of urine deposited by horses in the city's streets. The smell must have been memorable. Third Ave.'s grittiness came close to that reality. Soon, the developers began demolishing 3rd Ave.'s handsome brownstones for the sterile sequence of skyscrapers that crowds it now. The once-mighty 3rd Ave. elevated railroad's last fragment survived into the 70s as a feeder to the IRT west-side lines, shuttling between Gun Hill Rd. and 149th St. in the Bronx. In 1974, the el still bestrode Fordham Rd. like a colossus when I saw it for the first and last time.

The Guide is an artifact in several ways. First, it reflects the everyday use of language when Eisenhower was president, Rockefeller governor and Wagner mayor. All houses of worship, for example, are classified as churches, and between the listings for Greek Orthodox and Lutheran is Hebrew, a term that, in that context, might have seemed slightly offensive even then.

There are the Foreign and Special Districts, which makes Chinatown, Greenwich Village, Harlem (carefully described as "Negro"), Little Italy and Yorkville (German) sound like extraterritorial enclaves. Under City Offices, Tax Collection had not yet been sanitized into Finance, or Welfare into Human Resources, or the Morgue into the Medical Examiner. The Children's, Domestic Relations, Gambler's and Women's Courts still served their constituencies.

As one moves into the back of the book, the lists more emphatically reflect 41 years' change. A listing of department stores includes Altman's, Best & Co., Franklin Simon, Gimbel Brothers, Hearn's and Oppenheim Collins: all gone. More irritating is the reduced hours of the New York Public Library at 5th Ave. and 42nd St.: over the 60 years from opening day until the fiscal crisis in the mid-70s, the library was open from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., six days a week, and on Sundays from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. A quarter-century after Hugh Carey proclaimed an end to the days of wine and roses, amid great prosperity, the traditional hours of the library have not been restored. One might hope the politicians still want the people to read.

Yet the map itself shows the most dramatic change. The Lower West Side was then lined with piers, wharves and ferry slips, "like teeth in a comb," to quote the AIA Guide to New York City. The Washington Market, where produce was delivered by boat, wagon and truck, dominated the area economy. At Cortlandt St., the Hudson Terminal Building, a large, faintly seedy office building that housed the end of the line for the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad (now the PATH train), towered over the ferry piers at its foot. Around the terminal were printing plants, warehouses and factories, all cheek by jowl with docks and bars. The World Telegram and Sun published from Telegram Square.

Transportation most visibly reflects technological change. Within a decade of the Guide's publication, the railroad ferries between Hoboken, Weehawken and Jersey City and Barclay, Chambers, Christopher, Cortlandt and 42nd Sts. would vanish, and with them their tall-stacked boats, passing "back and forth, back and forth, in and out of those yawning caverns" of "their pompous, but distinctly weather-beaten stations...with huge clocks, flagstaffs, and enormous railroad names." The Guide's page of railroad names, too, is now but a page from the Book of the Dead.

The final surprise is the two pages of shipping companies, often exotically named: American Mail, Black Diamond, Bull Steamship, Cape Horn, Cuba Oceana, Dollar, Dolphin, East Asiatic, Interocean, New York & Porto Rico (not Puerto Rico), Standard Fruit & Steamship, Sword and Texas lines. They are nearly all gone, and the business they created now spread throughout the region. As Manhattan '45 author Jan Morris wrote, "there was almost as much traffic in the harbor as there was on the streets, and billowing black clouds of steamship smoke habitually drifted over the waters. Wherever you looked out there, sea-shapes were moving."

Scheduled passenger air service to Europe was still new. Traveling abroad meant voyaging by sea. Not merely Lower Manhattan, but the west side up to 59th St. was lined with piers, the steamers stacked nearly side by side, from the fruit docks off Washington Market to "Liner Row," Piers 84-97, where the ships of the Cunard White Star or French Lines often left on the same morning tide. In 1957, New York saw its peak year of passenger travel by liner: Morris states its top day was Sept. 3, 1957, when 12 liners disembarked 9000 passengers. Yet that was also the first year in which as many left New York by air as by sea.

Change came overnight. The passengers went to the airliners. The cargoes went to the newfangled container ships. Intermodal shipping containers, which can pass from ship to truck or flatcar without breaking bulk, made longshoremen, the ships they unloaded and the docks they worked from obsolete within two decades. The City government seemed unable to grasp, let alone welcome, this change. New Jersey did, and thus the ships that might have come to Brooklyn and the west side now moor in Newark and Elizabethport. In 1984, The New York Times discontinued its daily listing of shipping arrivals and departures. It no longer seemed important.