Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #6 "Useless Beauty"

Photo by Robert Polidori for Nick Paumgarten's "Useless Beauty"

As good as Nick Paumgarten is at portraying people, he’s even better at describing places. One of his most evocative pieces is “Useless Beauty” (August 31, 2009), an exploration of Governors Island. What is Governors Island and where’s it located? In the first of three memorable descriptions, Paumgarten tells us:

Seen from the air, Governors Island has the shape of an ice-cream scoop atop a kiddie-cup cone. It is now a hundred and seventy-two acres. Its southern half (the cone) is landfill, detritus from the excavation of the Lexington Avenue subway a century ago. The island is one-fifth the size of Central Park, and more than twenty times the size of Bryant Park. It is less than a half mile from Manhattan, and even closer to Brooklyn, yet a world apart.

Yet a world apart– that’s the key. Governors Island is a “time capsule.” Here’s Paumgarten’s second description:

The fortunate few who were permitted on the island after the Coast Guard left—park rangers, ferry crews, architects, city dignitaries and their guests—discovered a time capsule, with the beguiling anachronisms of Havana and the eerie emptiness of Chernobyl, minus the tyranny and the radiation. Reports came back of spectacular views, shady lanes, weird buildings, ocean breezes, and a wealth of oddball archeology. The island’s history is long on miscellanea. Benjamin Franklin’s nephew oversaw the design of a fort. John Peter Zenger, the first American champion of freedom of the press, had, as a German immigrant, been quarantined here. Wilbur Wright took off and landed here for the first airplane flight over water in the U.S. The Smothers Brothers were born in the island’s hospital. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev held a summit in 1988 in the Admiral’s House. The Burger King was the only one in America that served beer.

But Paumgarten isn’t done. He casts a third description of the Island – this one emphasizing the view:

I’ve since seen the island in foul and fine weather, in fog (you could be in Nova Scotia) and in bluebird Indian summer (you are nowhere but New York). Riding or walking along the promenade, you notice the wind and the tide, and the smell of salt and exhaust. Waves splash up against the seawall, the current rips by, and the water looks swimmable. (It isn’t, really.) The ships are close, creating bizarre telescopic vistas: a gargantuan cruise ship docked across Buttermilk Channel, or the Staten Island Ferry passing by. WaveRunners, police boats, fireboats, rod-studded outboards, garbage barges, tugs, container ships, sailboats, water taxis, yachts: the bustle offers the eternal five-year-old a live-action immersion in a Richard Scarry book. Koch likes to boast that this is the best place in New York from which to see the Statue of Liberty’s face. The view out the Narrows from the south end of the island, Picnic Point (a name selected in a contest on GIPEC’s blog), is unlike any other: the Verrazano Bridge, the loading cranes, the freighters at mooring. It is the wateriest prospect in town. 

Paumgarten’s mention of the extraordinary view (“unlike any other”) leads to what, for me, is the piece’s most striking passage:

One morning last fall, to give me an idea of the view you’d get from the hills, Koch led me up to the roof of one of the condemned structures—No. 877, the Cunningham Apartment Building, named for Earl Cunningham, a Coast Guard boatswain’s mate who died in 1936 in an attempt to rescue fishermen stuck in the ice during a snowstorm in Charlevoix, Michigan. (The building was also the location for some of the drug-factory-raid scenes in “American Gangster.”) We walked up a dingy, moldy stairwell, twelve flights, and stepped out onto a tar-and-gravel roof. The prospect was virtually San Franciscan: three hundred and sixty degrees of New York Harbor—Hoboken, Bayonne, Fort Wadsworth, the Narrows, Red Hook, the Heights, the East River bridges, downtown Manhattan. The skyline, from this perspective, looked as though it could belong to some other American city: San Antonio’s, or Charlotte’s. It was, in other words, an entirely unfamiliar and thrilling view.

That image of Paumgarten and Leslie Koch (President of the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation) ascending the twelve flights of the condemned building’s “dingy, moldy stairwell” and stepping out onto the “tar-and-gravel roof” with its thrilling three hundred and sixty-degree view of New York Harbor is one of my favorites in all of Paumgarten’s writing. I think what makes it so delightful is its specificity, right down to who the old building was named for (Earl Cunningham), why it was named for him (in recognition of his heroic effort “to rescue fishermen stuck in the ice during a snowstorm in Charlevoix, Michigan”), and the intriguing additional detail tucked in parentheses that the building was also the location for some of the drug-factory-raid scenes in American Gangster. 

Paumgarten deals in particulars. That’s one of the reasons he’s able to evoke a sense of place so effectively. “Useless Beauty” exemplifies his approach perfectly.