Hiding in plain sight

Four months after it was published in the New Yorker, I finally stumbled today upon Nick Paumgarten's article on New York's thoroughly strange Governors Island, a 172-acre strip of land in the New York Harbor, where the Hudson and the East River meet. It's only 800 yards away from the southern tip of Manhattan and is even closer to Brooklyn--i.e., within spitting distance of some of the most densely populated real estate in North America--and yet this island has been uninhabited since the Coast Guard closed its base there in 2003.

I first saw it in the fine 2005 horror film Dark Water, and when, a couple years later, I went with the kids on one of those corny river tours the sudden appearance of it intrigued me more than any bridge, any skyscraper, any 100-foot-tall woman holding a torch. I yearned to be there--yearned terribly, the way Van Morrison yearns for Caledonia.

I'm drawn to its obvious ghost-town qualities, that lighthouse-like solitude, its creeping vegetation and overgrown, empty buildings, its impossible quietness and neglect amidst such feverish industry. It has somehow been left alone, in a place where nothing is ever left alone. I'm drawn also to the way it imparts something of the old, I mean old, New York. How Joseph Mitchell would have loved to write about this place. When I read about Governors Island, I think of Mitchell's Beneath the Harbor and that book's waterfront rats, abandoned hotels, and that magical description of a giant sturgeon surfacing in the Hudson.

I could live pretty happily here, but I'll never make it. Neither will you: New York's not sure what it's going to do with the place, but there's a heap of federal and local funding attached to it and part of the deal is that residential development is prohibited. To see what you're missing, here's Paumgarten's video tour.

Like most islands, this one has its own blog.