Customer Reviews

Heartbeats in the Muck

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There hasn't been such an intimate look at New York Harbor since
Joseph Mitchell's classic "The Bottom of the Harbor". John
Waldman captures the mystique and dark romance known only to a few
New York bayman. Readers will become familiar with New York events
like "Floaters week", underruns, blow out tides; fishing holes
with unlikely names such as Aquatic Appalachia, Tin Can Grounds, Acid
Grounds, and Cholera Banks; flotsam that will never be found in any
dictionary like "Coney Island Whitefish" and "blop-blops";
nautical entrepreneurs like the "Belford Pirates", illegal
pinhookers, Kenney's Killer Killifish, headboats and even an urban
sports fishing guide. John Watchman takes you to backwaters and
commercial dead ends where the "Fiftteenth Ward Smelling
Committee" once searched for the source of health-giving vapors,
sludge bubbles, perfume wagon stenches; and a criminal defense lawyer
even tried to use the black, bubbly water of the bay as a possible
neurological "The river made me do it" defense.

I spent many
of my early years wandering New York Harbor and it's many tributaries
in search of stripped bass, jacking for blue claw crabs, ice boating,
racing sailboats or simply drifting down the Harlem River on a warm
summer night listening to the urban mixture of steel bands, fire
engine horns, police sirens and elevated trains. It was a treat to
hear that you can still do many of these things and the hostilities to
this great body of water are being addressed by special people like
John Watchman. We owe him a lot.

Richard Quis now lives in Southern
California where the colorful flotsam is oranges, lemons and tennis
balls.

Perhaps not as much as it used to, New York City has always been dependent on its waterways. From the get-go in the early 17th Century, it was a port city. However, no sooner did development expand the city when the East and Hudson Rivers became sewers, dumping grounds for tanners, chandlers, and dyers. By the late 19th Century, the pollution extended all the way out to the Harbor, the Narrows, and then the Atlantic. John Waldman's HEARTBEATS IN THE MUCK traces this sad history and then, to the surprise of many readers, describes the comeback staged by these waterways.

In a way, this book is quite inspirational, in as much as that it gives the reader hope that, when confronted with an ecological crisis, local and state governments can and will intervene, even if it needs to be put under pressure. Villains abound, but so do heroes, and the anecdotes about local seafarers do more than just entertain; they make you proud of them for their determination.

Lastly, even to the most seasoned New Yorker, this little tome will provide information about his/her city's remarkably complex network of rivers, streams, "kills", and canals. Having grown up near the Gowanus Canal, I remember how awful it smelled even on good days. Now, it is so clean, it seems strange. In any event, Mr. Waldman deserves a great deal of credit for his dogged research and his sea legs.

This book was a quick, enjoyable, informative read. It's over 10 years old so some of the stuff was a bit dated, but that just encouraged me to research the current status of many of the mentioned projects and environments.