Dead rivers and Day’s End: cruising and preserving New York’s queer imaginaries

By Fiona Anderson

[Figure 1. A view of the pilings from the Hudson River Park, near Bank Street. Photograph by the author.]

Whenever I’m in New York, I make a point of spending time looking at the wooden pilings that stand in the Hudson, remnants of the warehouses and piers that occupied the waterfront until the mid-1980s. Gathered together in intimate coalition, they jut up and out along the riverside like rugged swimmers leaping in to rescue a drowning comrade. They look both like placeholders for future construction and hardy traces of a long-lost culture, like a forgotten work by Robert Smithson or an American Pompeii. This area is the subject of my recent book Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront (University of Chicago Press, 2019), which looks at how and why this site hosted a vibrant cruising scene and art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The cruising scene is well documented in photographs by Alvin Baltrop and Leonard Fink, which capture the ruination of these spaces and their appropriation at day and night for cruising, sex work, shelter, and the building and sustaining of queer community. The artistic and literary appeal of the piers was almost as legendary as its erotic scene. Baltrop captured the vast cat’s eye of Day’s End, Gordon Matta-Clark’s illegal intervention into Pier 51 in the summer of 1975, a work which made use of and created gaps in the fabric of the warehouse, an example of Matta-Clark’s practice of architectural cutting as a critical commentary on municipal neglect and urban decay. In the spring of 1983, the artists David Wojnarowicz and Mike Bidlo invited hundreds of friends to join them in filling Pier 34, the former Ward Line pier, with murals, sculptures, and performances.

This queer kind of preservation, enacted through writing and artmaking, did not stem from a concern to preserve these buildings in any normative material sense. The failure of municipal preservation was, of course, one of the conditions that made their queer re-use possible. Creative preservationist work like this was motivated partly by a desire to preserve the conditions for the existence of sites in the city where its heteronormative functionality was compromised or became unsustainable after abandonment. Cruising was a way of preserving these sites as places for queer worldmaking in the face of imminent redevelopment. A lot of Cruising the Dead River deals, then, with the erotic charge of ruins, but it is not a work of ruin lust. A story about the piers which only focuses on the lustful appeal of ruins misses the fact that these were sites for shelter and queer organizing as police raids on queer bars persisted and violence against queer and trans people, particularly those of color, in the areas on and around the piers gathered pace as a consequence and a strategy of gentrification — a violence that persists today. Queer activist groups like FIERCE have long battled with neighborhood associations against police harassment on the waterfront and lobbied for a dedicated space for homeless queer youth there. As the artist Every Ocean Hughes (formerly known as Emily Roysdon) points out, even a cursory glance at Baltrop’s photographs make clear that the culture of the piers was much more than “white men with their pants around their ankles.”[1]

In Hughes’ book West Street (2010), photographs of the waterfront and the pilings in the early 2000s share space with Baltrop’s photographs of the same sites thirty years earlier alongside text which imagines fantasy public artworks and queer memorials around the theme of ethical communication about the queer New York imaginary across time, about what is remembered and how. Part of the West Street project, Hughes said, was about “exploding the myth that only gay men used that place and only for sex,” but it was also about the experience of the littoral more imaginatively.[2] The sense of a space lost or ruined that these pilings project also render them and the water around them a node from which Hughes could commune with Baltrop across time. The pilings persist because they provide a habitat for marine life and act as plugs in the riverbed, preventing pollutants in the silt, remnants of the area’s industrial past, from entering the water.[3] They are an industrial leftover and a protective boundary, keeping other waste in its place. They became increasingly visible in downtown public life with the launch of the Hudson River Park in the late 1990s and the High Line in 2009. The pilings mark multiple boundaries: they are traces of the past in the present, emblems of the queer and outmoded in the gentrified and redeveloped, symbols of failure and persistence simultaneously. They stand between recreation piers and storage facilities. They are not still here as a memorial to queer appropriations of the waterfront, but we might think of them that way. These “pile fields,” as Hughes calls them, “are stunning reminders of a city past and “[demand] that we acknowledge the physical history of this place, its decay, and the topography of desire that is New York City.”[4]

In West Street, the pilings stand like shadowy figures stuck cruising the now-departed piers. They act as sentinels preserving the memory of those queer uses and as an opportunity to meaningfully underscore other uses of the space in the face of redevelopment. “Key to the gentrification mentality,” novelist and historian Sarah Schulman argues, “is the replacement of complex realities with simplistic ones.”[5] Queer experimental records of these appropriations can challenge false municipal and corporate narratives of the nature of the waterfront’s abandonment. Working on this project Hughes said that she had “one foot in the queer and feminist archives and another in [her] lived experience of collectivity,” understood in West Street as a material practice and an imaginative energy.[6] Hughes finds political and personal potential in the characteristic playfulness of the cruising encounter. Hughes generates an active identification with the past in order to sustain queer life in the present.

[Figure 2. Every Ocean Hughes and Alvin Baltrop, West Street, 2010. Artist book.]

This kind of ecstatic multiplicity, sparked by the temporal suggestiveness of the ruined piers, also informed a riverside intervention by the artist Xaviera Simmons who took Baltrop’s archive as the point of departure for a set of performances in which his photographs were referenced and reperformed on this grand empty stage by women and non-binary performers.[7] For Simmons, the cruising practices that developed at the piers and the photographs and architectural ruins that remain and recall them drew upon a unique visual vocabulary, a “body vernacular,” which is specific to cruising but can be meaningfully deployed as a language through which to speak of or represent it in the present, a means of preserving this queer visual and erotic culture without flattening it out.

[Figure 3. David Hammons, Sketch for Day's End, 2015]

The pilings in the Hudson have recently been joined by another semi-public artistic intervention: David Hammons’ Day’s End (2021), a tribute to Gordon Matta-Clark’s work, proposed by Hammons and supported by the Whitney Museum of American Art, which now stands by the waterfront. Hammons’ Day’s End is a thin drawing of the frame of the demolished warehouse come to life in steel, intended to shimmer in the water and slip between presence and absence. In publicity films produced by the Whitney, the work is described by multiple interviewees as a ghost and as a monument, as a tribute not just to Matta-Clark, but to the cruising cultures of the piers.[8] Appropriation and re-use are at the heart of Hammons’ work, a radical readymade practice which has made use of found images, discarded tires and bottles, snow, and Richard Serra’s sculpture T.W.U. (1980), a large COR-TEN steel structure temporarily installed at the intersection of Franklin Street and West Broadway.

Occupying the site of the former municipal sanitation pier but evoking it through an evanescent outline, Hammons’ Day’s End may well open the gentrified waterfront up for critical reflection on public memorialisation, monumental sculpture, and spectral occupations of increasingly privatized city space. But, as Tavia Nyong'o wrote recently, while Matta-Clark’s work “was built at a low point in the wealth cycle of the Hudson River waterfront,” Hammons’ is “burdened by a newer question: can art ever play a role in the depreciation of capital’s power over the city?”[9] In Hammons’ original sketch, the pencilled outline of the warehouse sits over a pile field, unlike the realized work. Its emptiness alone invites imaginative projection and appropriation, as rotting pilings appear to gather in and around its vacant vault like cruising men out of time, like a Baltrop photograph. In a practice which has often come into public consciousness by way of rumor and after the fact, the elusive cultural language and historical imagery of urban cruising as a transgressive practice of urban reuse seems to have shaped this work even in its most tentative form.

“Given its touristic location,” Nyong’o cautions his readers, “Day’s End may risk being misread as the latest folly in the garden of postmodern urbanism.”[10] He argues that “the floating simplicity, even austerity” of Hammons’ design resists such misreadings. But it also offers the Whitney an opportunity to quote this area’s queer pasts and make use of the temporal suggestiveness of the pilings, their potential to invoke various queer New York imaginaries, to lend historical weight and proprietorial legitimacy to their presence downtown and in the Meatpacking District more specifically. This is queer ruination deployed in the service of gentrification, where complex narratives get replaced with simplistic ones. The Whitney is in a temporal and spatial bind which informs so much gentrification; banking on the destruction of these sites to acquire financial capital and space and depending upon the persistence of raggedy traces and evocative stories of them to accrue cultural capital. I know that the queer temporal dualism that I write about in Cruising the Dead River, the waterfront ruins that I’m drawn to, that Hughes and Simmons embrace, as Wojnarowicz and Baltrop did also, is being used here too, as the waterfront’s pasts and present rub up against each other. Day’s End is, arguably, part of a wider project of cultural legitimization which has included a temporary programme of queer history tours of the area during the run of the Whitney’s 2018 David Wojnarowicz retrospective exhibition. At the same time, there were no sustained references to the cruising cultures of the piers in the exhibition itself, with the blinds closed on windows which looked out to the waterfront and the extant pilings.

The relationship between the Whitney and this landscape, the long history of displacement and gentrification that has shaped them both, is addressed with greater directness and nuance in a recent work by Sasha Wortzel, This Is An Address (2020). Wortzel’s film brings together archival footage of the legendary trans activist Sylvia Rivera and others who were living on the piers in the mid-1990s, in which they describe “being blocked access to HIV/AIDS care on the basis of having no address, … being harassed and surveilled by the police, and … living under the constant threat of eviction”, and documentation of present-day building projects around the Whitney, where Wortzel was working in the education department.[11] Looking out to the waterfront, Wortzel reflected on “the long legacy of displacement and erasure at this particular location”, from the forced removal of the Lenape to gentrification in the present. “The structures that Sylvia spent her life resisting are intimately tied to the past,” Wortzel said recently: “[t]hough erased and rendered almost invisible, their traces and imprints remain, inextricably shaping the present moment.”[12] Bringing the past and the present together technically and imaginatively through the medium of experimental film makes it more difficult to distance contemporary real estate and cultural developments in the area from these violent histories of displacement, and frustrates efforts to allude to or quote from these practices of queer reuse and community building without acknowledging that direct line.

In the midst of these interventions, the pilings persist and continue to invite anthropomorphisation and projection. They are still not a memorial, but we might, like Every Ocean Hughes, think of them that way. Their proclivity for projection can be comforting, but it also speaks to a less articulable sense of loss on the waterfront, to the invisibility of the AIDS crisis in New York public life relative to the scale of its impact on this city, and the toll of anti-queer violence, gentrification, and displacement in this area.[13] Perhaps it is the fact that the pilings remain as both industrial waste and protective boundary, as ruins and plugs, that has invited multiple artists to try and render that narrative complexity by working with them and the various queer New York imaginaries that they invoke. That’s how I will try and think about it when I look out to Day’s End, walking down to the water, my back to the Whitney.

Fiona Anderson is senior lecturer in art history at Newcastle University. She is the author of Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront (University of Chicago Press, 2019). From 2016-2019, she was UK PI for Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures (CRUSEV).

[1] Carlos Motta, “An Interview with Emily Roysdon,” We Who Feel Differently, April 15, 2011, accessed June 14, 2021, https://wewhofeeldifferently.info/interview.php?interview=112

[2] Patricia Maloney, interview with Emily Roysdon, Bad at Sports, in collaboration with Art Practical, February 21, 2011, accessed June 14, 2021, https://www.artpractical.com/column/interview_with_emily_roysdon/

[3] See Raymond W. Gastil, Beyond the Edge: New York’s New Waterfront (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002)

[4] Every Ocean Hughes, West Street (New York: Printed Matter, 2010), n.p.

[5] Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 36.

[6] Every Ocean Hughes, “Ecstatic Resistance”, C Magazine, no.104 (2009), 17.

[7] High Line Art, Pier 54, n.d., accessed June 14, 2021, http://assets.thehighline.org/pdf/HLA-Pier54Newspaper.pdf, 45.

[8] Whitney Museum of American Art, “Coming in Spring 2021: Day’s End by David Hammons,” August 29, 2019, YouTube video, 5:39. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv3rVp3g9Ic

[9] Tavia Nyong’o, “David Hammons’s Empty Cathedral Echoes an Old New York,” Frieze, March 30, 2021, accessed June 14, 2021, https://www.frieze.com/article/david-hammons-days-end

[10] Nyong’o, “David Hammons’s Empty Cathedral Echoes an Old New York”

[11] Douglas Greenwood, “This short film captures the gentrification of Sylvia Rivera’s New York,” i-D magazine, 20 October 2020, accessed June 16 2021, https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/xgzqm4/this-is-an-address-short-film-by-sasha-wortzel-on-sylvia-rivera-lgbtq-new-york. You can watch This Is An Address at https://fieldofvision.org/this-is-an-address   

[12] Greenwood, “This short film captures the gentrification of Sylvia Rivera’s New York.”

[13] The Hudson River Park AIDS memorial, which sits between Pier 46 and Pier 51, near Bank Street, was unveiled in 2008. The New York City AIDS Memorial at St Vincent’s Park was dedicated on World AIDS Day, December 1, 2016.