The Hell Gate

Stuck on North Brother Island

The building of the prison-city on Rikers Island in the early thirties, during the depths of the Depression, was made even gloomier by a lesser-known marine disaster: the explosion and sinking of the steamship Observation. It was originally built in 1888, but despite her tired condition the steamer ferried hundreds of construction workers back and forth between Rikers and Port Morris in the Bronx. As she was pulling within a few boat lengths of her berth on a fair and clear morning, September 9, 1932, the ship's boiler exploded. A cement-company lighter, the Gypsum, was moored astern of the Observation's intended berth. In the vessel's pilothouse the Gypsum's captain was changing his clothes. "I had turned for a moment," he told a New York Times reporter, "to get a pair of trousers when the explosion came. All I could see was a cloud of dust and smoke. When that cleared away, there was no Observation left, only wreckage." Construction workers and sailors were thrown far into the air, most killed instantly. The search for the dead and missing took some days and was complicated by the death and disappearance of the ship's fare collector and the death of the captain. In the end, the police determined that 72 people out of 127 on board that day perished. Most of the casualties were ironworkers, staunch union members of the Bridge, Structural, and Ornamental Ironworkers Association, as were my mother's brothers, my ironworker uncles, although they never worked on Rikers or anywhere on that tormented stretch of the river.

I reached for our charts and the tide tables, making sure for the sixth time that I had read the tides correctly, and confirmed that it would indeed be about six hours before we could resume our course to the sound's entrance. As I mused over the charts, I caught the flashing light of a speeding police boat. It raced toward us from the direction of Rikers and approached our temporary resting place. Two New York City cops, their faces partially hidden behind dark sunglasses, were standing at the controls. As they approached, one of them spoke into his hailer: "MOVE OUT. THERE IS NO ANCHORING OR DOCKING ALLOWED ON THE ISLAND. MOVE OUT." I tried to answer over the noise of their motor. We had no hailer on Tradition, but I shouted as loud as I could. They seemed not to hear my faltering explanation that we were only tied up for repairs. "MOVE ON, NOW. YOU ARE IN ILLEGAL WATER. THIS ISLAND IS OFF-LIMITS." I tried again to make myself understood. The dogs had awakened and were barking at the police boat. I could see the two officers scowl and wave their arms to shoo us away. Susan stumbled up on deck, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. She pointed to the engine box and held up a wrench. Then she held up the tide book. The police boat came closer. The officers could easily see that there were only the two of us and the dogs aboard. The sight of a woman seemed to change their demeanor for the better. Susan shouted that we were only waiting for the next tide so we could continue heading east. Then came a final blast from their hailer: "BE OUT OF HERE ON THE NEXT TIDE OR YOU WILL BE TAKEN IN." Then they roared off again.

"Who the hell wants to be here in the first place?" Susan said. "This is one spooky island."

She didn't know the half of it, as I hadn't told her the story of the General Slocum. But even with no historical background to conjure tormented spirits, the screeches of gulls and the black cormorants stretching their wings in the broken windows of the island's ruins made this one of the most fearsome-looking places in the city. Susan was heartened by the news that our engine was fixed, though. Together we made some sandwiches and shared a cold drink from the cooler below. The hazy late afternoon sun was descending over the Triborough Bridge and the South Bronx shores, and I could see the summer traffic slowing to a stop. Our situation was the boating equivalent of being stuck along the side of a sun-baked highway, cursing into an overheated engine. On the water the heat was oppressive. Rivulets of sweat ran down my neck. My hat was drenched from my mechanical exertions. We had hours to wait for the tide to turn. It was August 15, our thirty-second wedding anniversary.

"Well, happy anniversary, ducky," I said, with as much cheer as I could fake. Susan was not about to be either friendly or ducky, yet plainly there was some softening around the edges of her anger. "Right," she muttered. "I'm going to celebrate with a good read in the cabin." She and the dogs resumed their sprawl on the wide bunk. Alone on deck, I listened to the screech of birds from the ruined windows of the old contagious disease hospital. From far across the river on Flushing Bay, came the intermittent roar of planes taking off and landing at La Guardia.

I needed to do something to get my mind off the gloomy late-afternoon shadows falling across the gaping ruins. In the fifties, before the buildings fell into ruin, the island had been used as a drug rehabilitation center. There were stories about kids sneaking ashore in rowboats to see girlfriends. Then I thought about these old typhoid grounds becoming a bird sanctuary, and the likelihood that the city's birders would be successful in their efforts to protect the uninhabited Brother islands, North and South, as part of a chain of bird-nesting islands in the city's river system. In a clump of marshland at the island's edge I noticed a squat night heron coming out of the shadows to pick along the shore. A flight of cormorants descended on a broken strand of riprap not far from the heron. The cormorants stretched their black wings against the drying wind, as if to ward off the curious passerby. Far above my head and farther into the island, gulls and crows careened through the vacant windows of the ruins and disappeared into the darkness.

Suddenly drowsy, I stretched out on one of Tradition's long benches, my head cradled on a flotation cushion, and fell into a fitful sleep.

Each time I dozed off, I was awakened by dreams or thoughts of crime and violence, inspired no doubt by the Rikers prisons across the river and the dark ruins of North Brother Island. I kept picturing young men and women I had known over the years who had been caught in the drug world and had fought addictions. Some of them had spent time on Rikers, but more had been helped over their crisis by youth programs and drug rehabilitation. In one of my dream fragments, I was standing alongside roaring water pouring over a dam. Shapes that I thought were salmon were jumping over concrete steps alongside the cataract, many falling back in exhausted failure. Later I dreamed that I was on the darkened shore of North Brother Island. The only other visible shapes were the prison blocks on Rikers. Tradition was nowhere to be seen. My heart beat as if it would explode.

"Yo, Bill. It's time to go."

Susan was poking my shoulder. Bosun licked my face. Without looking at Susan, I turned the key in the ignition and the engine started immediately. Our running lights and cabin light surrounded the boat in a warm glow and we untied our lines. In the gloom, the outline of the ruined North Brother hospital seemed to be leaning over us, about to fall. Across the river the lights of Rikers Island twinkled with an illusory warmth. Then in an instant we were headed into the dark and swiftly ebbing waters of the East River.

Across from Rikers on the Bronx shore, we passed a dark prison barge the size of an apartment house, moored as if waiting to catch the criminal effluent. Incoming jets curled off toward La Guardia deep into Flushing Bay. When they passed overhead, their roar was deafening. I looked across the water to the shore of College Point on the Queens side of the river and wished we could stop for a cold beer in Behan's Tavern on the shore, but I doubted that the old haunt of my Flushing youth would still be there. Tradition coughed and limped along steadily, and I could see beyond her bow a line of flashing buoy markers disappearing into the distance. Above them arched the roadway lights of the Whitestone Bridge, and beyond were the lights of the Throgs Neck Bridge, where we would tie up finally at the dock by my mother's apartment house and pile into a car for the forty-five-minute ride back to Long Beach.

Copyright © 2002 by William Kornblum. All rights reserved. Converted for the Web with the permission of the publisher, Algonquin Books.