It started like any number of Sundays in 1984. I was living downtown and a few of us had gathered at Ratner's on Delancey. It closed in 2002 - R.I.P. chocolate babka, awesome onion rolls, smoked fish platters, latkes with apple sauce, and most famous of all, grumpy old waiters who could bang a coffee cup and saucer on the table and not spill a drop.....or not care if they did.
Among the party was Moi ( rhymes with "boy", or since we're starting at Ratner's, "goy" ) whose name and parentage are Chinese, but whose attitude is 100% American artist. Later that day she was joining a class of Chinese people studying English who were going around Manhattan on the Circle Line. We made a plan for me to take pictures as they passed by Delancey Street some hours later.
I knew a great place to take that photo.
I loved that bicycle. It was absolutely the best way to get around the neighborhood.
In the background is the Williamsburg Bridge, which crosses the East River at the end of Delancey, carrying subways, cars and pedestrians from the old Jewish immigrant neighborhood to the new Jewish enclave in Williamsburg. When it was built it was the largest suspension bridge in the world and probably the last one built with horses in mind. Today it's known for carrying the most bicycles of any bridge in the city.
Here's another picture of the bridge, from the other side of the river, looking toward where I'm located on the one above.
The place where I went to take the pictures is the top of the bridge tower on the right in this photo.
No, it was not open to the public.
However, sometime earlier in the year while taking a ride to nowhere in particular,
I saw this door
which was, I discovered after scampering over a few lanes of traffic,
UNLOCKED!!
What could I do but take the stairs as far as they would go?
As it turned out, they went 355 feet to the top, through the inside of the structure surrounding the cables and to a ladder with access to the roof of that structure.
Here's a view of the top.
Between the two cables is a nice flat spot for sunning and reading, but you could also get on the very top.
That is the Circle Line boat coming up the East River
I'll finish the story in a bit, but here are a few of the scenic delights which made me so fond of this secret spot.
Looking back to Delancey Street
Note the seagull in the bottom left
Kinda makes you dizzy, no?
I'm pretty sure I was the only person in New York who knew about and used this location.
So on that Sunday, I packed up my shoulder bag with camera, water, smoking material, and reading material ( In this case Candide ), and headed up the tower. And sure enough, just about when I expected them, up the river came the Circle Line boat.
That's part of the already abandoned Navy Yards in the background.
As they passed under the bridge, I could tell that Moi was on board because I could see a white scarf or shirt being waved back and forth. I responded by doing the same with my Hawaiian shirt.....this may have been a mistake.
They continued on with the circumnavigation of Manhattan.
I continued with my top-of-the-world indolence.
As it was a pretty hot summer day, and the breakfast at "Ratty's" was fairly epic, and the climbing 35 stories, and the etc., before too long I had fallen asleep. I'm not sure how much time passed but this is what I saw when I woke up.
I wondered why there would be a helicopter so close to the top of the bridge, so I got up and looked down and, sure enough, traffic was at a complete standstill. "Must have been an accident." , thought the innocent. The helicopter flew away and I returned to my reading. Not too long after that I heard someone shouting, "HEY, YOU!!!"
Imagine my surprise when I looked and saw a policeman, in flack jacket and helmet, walking up the cable and holding on to the two smaller cables on either side of it ( see above as the boat goes under the bridge ). Now that would be scary! After I acknowledged him with a wave while he was still quite a way from the top, he shouted "COME DOWN!!". Another wave and I slipped down the ladder into the structure, parted with the hash and pipe, scurried down the stairs to the waiting arms of some of New York's Finest and their squad car ( which had come up the automobile part of the bridge in the wrong direction from Manhattan ), and wondered what would be next as we backed down the bridge and pulled off just a block or so from the start of the story.
As they weren't sure if I was a jumper, a shooter, or some other kind of crazy ( guilty, your honor ), they asked some questions, often accompanied by incredulous eye rolls. The names involved alone.
"What's your name?"
"Forest Hunter" (eye roll)
"What were you doing up there?"
"Taking pictures of a friend on the Circle Line."
"What's his name?
"Her name is Moi."
Eye roll accompanied by "Really!?"
They wanted to know who was playing the baseball game of great importance today. I confessed I had no idea.
"You were up there chokin' the chicken, weren't you?"
"No. You guys got there so fast I hadn't gotten around to it."
"Don't get smart with me. I can send you to Bellevue, you know."
Profuse apologies from the soon to be incarcerated.
By the time the cuffs were on, they all realized that this wasn't going to be any of their worst nightmares and we were headed to the local precinct. The cop driving ( a bit of a cutey, I remember, let's call him "Officer Jimmy" ) allowed as how I was the best ( easiest ) collar he'd ever had. "Collar?" said I. "Yeah, you know arrested, taken by the collar." He said that once we got to the station he was going torture me and then his girlfriend was going to torture me because he was supposed to watching The Game with her. He also offered the following advice for when we arrived at the station, "Tell the Sargent he looks like the kind of guy that would beat baby seals to death. He'll think it's funny." I allowed as how " I don't think this is a good place to check on somebody's sense of humor." But as I approached his desk, Officer Jimmy said " This guy said you looked like somebody who would .. etc........." Apparently everyone was relaxed. While the Sargent was busy filling out forms I offered that if they didn't want people up there on the bridge, perhaps they should lock the door. His response, with a gesture to an indiscriminate corner of the room, was, " The suggestion box is over there." I had to laugh.
Once in the day room, I was given my own cozy iron barred relaxation area and waited while they called my local reference and finished all the necessary paper work for someone who had closed one the major bridges in the city.
When they asked for my belt and shoelaces I couldn't help but note that if I was going to kill myself, I had been in a pretty good position for that just a while ago. They had to laugh.
There was another major eye roll, this one accompanied by a sigh when Officer Jimmy, inspecting the contents of my bag, pulled out a package of Zig-Zags. Happily for me, he decided he didn't need to see anything else, put the papers back in the bag,closed it, and put it on the floor by his desk.
They teased me that if I had a better camera (at that time meaning German ) they could let me go as a photographer, "....but with this Japanese piece of shit.? No way."
I was told that there were laws on the books prohibiting the taking of photographs from the bridges. "Oh, is that left over from WWII and the Navy Yards?" Informed that I was correct I offered that I had actually taken some pictures of the Navy Yards from there. He shouted to the other end of the dayroom, "Hey, we got a communist here, taking pictures of the Navy Yards." The response from the other end was, "No, he's from Arizona. It's all just old conservative assholes!" Some things never change.
During this time a DEA directive called Operation Push was trying to rid the Lower East Side of all the dangerous drugs sold on the street. Anyone arrested within a red-lined area was drug tested and examined at Bellevue. When the suited agent came to collect me for testing, Officer Jimmy, Sweet Officer Jimmy, sent him away as follows, "No, he was outside your area. We arrested him over the river."
I was charged with Reckless Endangerment and released without bond. On the way walking to Sally's I looked through my bag and found a rolled joint. I smoked it.
When I got to Sally's, Mikey, the 10-year old New Yorker, offered this sage advice, "Well you should have known better than to be up there waving your shirt around on Sunday. That's the busiest day for that bridge."
After three court appearances, it became clear that Officer Jimmy had done a terrible job of keeping track of the paperwork and the city had no choice but to drop the charges.
I have not returned to the scene of the crime, so I hope when they were renovating the bridge the right person found that pipe.
