On the Gowanus, birdsong or the rhythmic shhhtik of a lawn sprinkler are alien things. At night, I listen for the low groan of foghorns in the harbor, watch shadows cast by the headlights of passing trucks dance across the ceiling, trace the occasional red flash of onrushing ambulances and firetrucks, and the relentless clanking of an invisible behemoth echoing across our backyards: the overhead crane in Golten’s Yard lifting marine boilers and diesel engines the size of freight cars.
Golten’s Yard runs like a spine from Third Avenue to the Gowanus, ribbed by our row houses on one side and Golten Marine, a WWII-era ship repair operation on the other. An artifact of a Brooklyn peopled by Scandinavian and German immigrants that existed before my Italian great grandfather and his seven sons arrived on the canal, in my mind, the beginning of time.
Scattered everywhere are the rusting hulks of ship engines and superstructures looming like disembodied dinosaurs over my head, fantastical machines with steel hatches, tunnels and ladders running in all directions. There are propulsion and navigation panels with needle dials and brass levers out of Jules Verne. Electrical transformers, acres of pipes, spools of wire, overturned barrels filled with glittering crystals and industrial chemicals. Cardboard boxes stuffed with trash, and sometimes unspeakable things.
On the Gowanus, there is one playground, on Degraw Street, but its kiddie pool is clogged with trash, rotting benches, overrun by nodding junkies. Prospect Park might as well be Jurassic Park and Red Hook Pool the Amazon.. I live in a world lifted—families, priests, culture, traditions and animosities intact--from the small towns and villages south of Naples and deposited on the banks of a poisoned waterway; it’s a cynical, riotous, often hilarious, place, three generations of families and their unruly kids, priests, and gangsters spilling all over each other. There are ghosts everywhere, and the feeling that momentous events, vague history and restless spirits hover just beyond my ken in this rundown, forgotten corner of motherless Brooklyn. The feeling that I live in a tribal village separate from the rest of NYC place among kindred people—alive to this day—transforms the poverty, violence, decay and dysfunction around me into savage joy.
I have no idea that in the 17th century, ingenious Dutch settlers built dikes and millponds on a pristine salt water estuary across the East River from Wall Street; no idea that George Washington clashed with the British the 18th century—his men fighting and dying in the ancient farmhouse on Fourth Avenue and Third Street where I play softball on a field glittering with broken glass. No idea that a rapacious19th Century railroad baron carved the Gowanus estuary, renowned for its oysters, into a bustling commercial waterway lined by gasworks, factories, coal yards, docks and slaughterhouses, the beginning of monumental pollution that defines Gowanus to this day.
No playgrounds, but I have Golten’s Yard, a Coney Island of danger and mischief big as a football field, admissible through a hole in the fence in Honey’s backyard. After school, on weekends, in summers, we disappear, dozens of us, like Alice through the looking glass, into a world where there are no adults, no rules, no cops, certainly no safety net. A three room shack on Third Avenue becomes a fort we assault and defend with homemade slingshots firing extruded rubber pellets that litter the ground, and then rocks and bolts, until bleeding and exhausted we collapse to the ground. We climb and crawl over the machines searching for swag neighborhood junkies—my cousin JuJu among them—steal from the freight depots and trucking companies alongside the canal. We unearth a box of expensive leather handbags—Gloria’s Mothers’ Day present—before the mariuoli (thieves) can return to fence it. Another day, we haul off an enormously heavy Carrier air conditioning unit, purely for the joy of pissing them off. And one time, we discover a bloody fetus wrapped in a towel, the handiwork of the neighborhood abortionist, dumped among the trash. (http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/…/fly-fishing-on-gowanu… )
We do this over and over until one morning the FBI corners us standing astounded before a 15-foot tower of cases of Del Monte pineapple juice. Hunting an interstate ring of hijackers, they bag a raggedy crew of a 15-year-olds. A kick in the ass and we’re gone.
A day comes when Golten Marine shuts down. The overhead crane that haunted my childhood goes silent. A single watchman—in my mind a German—is left behind to look after the premises, a gray, wooden structure, 50 yards long, walls lined with hundreds of small pane glass windows, so many it takes months to break them all. Sometimes, after school, I slip into the yard alone, climb a pile of scrap metal and spend 20 minutes sailing rocks through windows, working my way, like Clem Labine, up, down, sideways. I don’t know why I do this. Other boys are playing baseball, studying, taking piano lessons, walking girls home from school. I smash windows. Sure enough, the “German” strikes back, hooking up a scratchy recording—machine gun fire, bombs bursting, shouts and screams—to the foundry’s powerful PA system and blasts me off the mound.
It works once. When the watchman quits, packs of teens from other neighborhoods descend on Golten’s smashing, trashing, wilding. I spend days systematically driving a v-shaped steel beam—balanced on a horizontal cement-filled barrel—along the the bottom of a masonry wall; When the structure collapses I barely avoid being crushed. Someone else ties a thick braided ship’s line to the bottom of overhead crane and soon boys are leaping from the catwalk and sailing 20 feet above the rubble-covered concrete floor on the super swing…until it breaks. Ernesto Benevento, Sal and I are the first to reach the abandoned laboratory finding row upon row of gleaming beakers, test tubes, pipettes, sulfuric and hydrochloric acid, every kind of chemical in brown glass bottles. We grab what we can and stash it in the back of an abandoned truck for “experiments.” A few days later, I’m run over by a yellow taxi as I’m darting across Flatbush Avenue (near today’s Barclays Center) and have my knee smashed and my front teeth knocked out. I was trying to buy a WWII-vintage gas mask at an Army & Navy store;because I want to conduct my “research” safely. When I recover, we head straight to our “lab,” now illuminated by a kerosene lantern, and begin randomly mixing chemicals. Soon, the Pyrex beaker is glowing a hellish yellow and fulminating liquid spilling over the sides. My gas mask doesn’t work. I stagger out of the truck, gagging, vomiting, nearly asphyxiated.
The next Saturday morning, the three of us make our way down into Golten’s basement once again hunting for junkies’ swag. The power is out, so we roll newspapers into makeshift torches. Our torches burn brightly, illumination enough to show us we’re standing ankle deep in shit from the shattered toilets.
“Screw this!” I toss my torch seconds before it sets my sleeve on fire and head up the stairs. It’s lunchtime.
Half-an-hour later, I’m sitting in the kitchen eating a salami sandwich leaking Gulden’s mustard. I hear sirens in the distance. They grow louder and louder crescendoing in a deafening scream. Firetrucks racing along Third Avenue, past Carroll, then, silence.
“Jesus!”
Stomach churning, I get up from the table, walk to the front door, pull it open and look outside. A crowd is already gathered on the corner, the air pungent with acrid black smoke.
Golten’s, a block-long structure, is ablaze. Flames soar 100 feet in the air. Firemen, the same men I hit with eggs at our Election Night bonfire, are racing frantically to hook up hoses, break through the front door, into a cascading Niagara of fire to search for workers trapped inside.
I’ve burned down Golten’s Yard.
