Essay for a Sunday Night
Governors Island
Brooklyn sucks in the summer. Here’s a nice escape:
Sleep in. Eat a bit of breakfast. Pump the tires on your bike; maybe throw some grease on the chain. Pack a novel, the Sunday Times, some water and, if you remember, a couple of sandwiches. Ride down to Brooklyn Bridge Park at the foot of Atlantic Avenue. Get on the line for the five-minute ferry ride to Governors Island. Make sure it’s the first ferry of the day; sometimes they don’t charge for that one, and it’s usually not so crowded. Stash your bike wherever they tell you to stash it, and take a seat. If you can’t help yourself, you can take a photo for Instagram as the boat backs out into the Buttermilk Channel. Try to help yourself.
Hurry off the boat at Governors Island. Get on your bike as soon as you’re off the dock. Seriously, don’t worry about the toddlers; they can get themselves out of the way. Speed to Hammock Grove. Find an open hammock. Sit in that open hammock. Sigh, take out your book and watch the sky for a peregrine falcon on the hunt.
If you get tired of sighing and reading, tour the abandoned fort, and the castle built with circular walls to deflect cannon fire from British ships that never arrived, and the empty buildings spread all over the island’s north end. If you forgot food, buy lunch from the Italian sandwich truck on King Avenue. If you need a toilet, there’s a nice one in the long building near the dock where the Manhattan ferries come in.
In the late afternoon, have friends come meet you for a beer at the thing that used to be called Water Taxi Beach. It’s not called Water Taxi Beach anymore, but the new name is even more lame, so don’t use it. You can express worry, if you like, about what will happen to Governors Island when they finish building all the nice public parts of the public-private partnership and start in on the private parts. You can remember Governors Island when you first came here — has it been 10 years already? — when it felt like a suburb where everyone had been raptured, and you could try the back doors of empty homes, and sometimes one would open and you would sneak in and wonder if this was really New York City, and whether whoever was insuring the place had ever made a site visit.
And then you can take out your iPhone and go to the section of the Governors Island Trust website titled “Governors Island Real Estate Development Opportunity” and scroll down to the part where they list “permitted uses,” and read: “Recreation and entertainment… Hospitality and retail… Commercial office and mixed use….” And over those beers at that place that used to be called Water Taxi Beach, you and your friends can spin nightmare visions of the Governors Island Megamall to come, and wonder how many feet tall the name “TRUMP” will be on the side of the Governors Island Trump International Hotel, and ask whether BuzzFeed will wrangle another tax break when they build their new Governors Island headquarters in 2019.
Later, take the ferry back to Brooklyn. The line might be a little long. While you wait, look back at Governors Island and wish you had the guts to pull off a “From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” caper. Imagine hiding under a bench when the park closes, and watching the sunset over the Statue of Liberty, and spending the night under the stars on the old parade ground, and never leaving.
Then leave.
Published this week in The Forward. If you don't want to receive more of these emails, you can click "Unsubscribe" below, or just respond to this message and tell me to take you off the list.
Josh