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Post by David on Jul 2, 2018 20:30:04 GMT
Culture Desk
Walking the American Revolution
By Robert Sullivan
Fort Clinton, McGowan’s Pass, 1814.Museum of the City of New York / ARS, NY
I like to walk in the American Revolution. It’s something I do a lot. You get some old maps and pick out a route—a retreat, a long march—and maybe convince a friend to come along, and then you are off into the past. New York is a great place for it anytime, but especially in the fall, especially when it starts to get cold. The Revolution was fought mostly around here, after all, and the angled streets indicate old routes everywhere. Lately, I’ve been remembering that my father, who passed away a couple of years ago, would point to hills and rivers and bridges when I was a kid, often referencing George Washington, who still feels to me like the guy who left the party just after I arrived—in my case, the party is the landscape of New York and New Jersey.
Walking the Revolution isn’t so much about the past, though naturally when you do it you try to imagine you are there. It’s really about seeing where you are now. I got a little more serious about it when I started to read a lot of accounts of what might be called gonzo exploring: climbing into old sewers looking for old streams, breaking into infrastructure. That all rubbed me the wrong way; it seemed too intentional, bringing more attention to the underground explorer than to the old stream. In contrast, walking in the Revolution is less about you, more about the land—call them soft reënactments.
I vary my walks. Once, I walked three days from the site of the Battle of Princeton to a small chain of mountains that New Yorkers generally have no idea is staring them in the face: the Watchungs. The Watchung Mountains are arguably the reason that Washington won the war, a place where he was in defensible striking distance of the British headquarters on Manhattan Island, a place with streams strong enough to run mills, with wood for fuel and shelter, with access to ore. Today, we know the Watchungs as part of the watershed-protecting Highlands that are crucial to the area’s ecological health: four and a half million people in New York and New Jersey get their drinking water from here. About ten years ago, I was researching a book when I realized that the points at which Washington posted lookouts in the Watchungs were all re-used, about a hundred and seventy years later, when the U.S. Army set up anti-aircraft batteries at those same sites to protect against Soviet bombers.
In 2012, I walked the route of the 1776 evacuation of Manhattan, from Fort Lee across the Meadowlands. I did not walk all the way to the other side of the Delaware, but stopped at the end of the day in Passaic, picking up a very famous walk that Robert Smithson, who was also interested in Washington’s routes, did in 1967: he wrote it up in an essay entitled “The Monuments of Passaic.” My walk from Manhattan to Passaic was a week or two after Hurricane Sandy hit the region, and the areas that had been used to hold back the British—swamps, tough-to-cross streams—were brought back to active duty by the storm; like the British, I had to be careful crossing some recently flooded bridges. I noticed that the oldest Dutch houses, as opposed to a lot of developments from the nineteen-eighties and nineties, were built on high ground. You could see, in other words, that we were once always ready for hurricane season, or that, to paraphrase the words on the flood maps of New York City’s Office of Emergency Management, we knew our zones.
As it happened, I got laid up after that walk, and had to put my walks on hold for a while. In that time, I missed walking. I missed that landscape-painter feeling, seeing the shape of the land, seeing its complement, the local watershed. Finally, last year around this time, I resurged and finally got around to walking a route I had long put off, a route that for a long time I had trouble visualizing: McGowan’s Pass, Washington’s retreat through a cut in the hills between lower Manhattan and what was then the village of Harlem, an approximately five-mile-long route, made late in the summer of 1776.
I’d been up and around the northwestern portion of Central Park from time to time, but no matter how hard I tried I just could not see McGowan’s Pass in my mind’s eye. That’s how it works sometimes. Seeing the past in the landscape is something that often sounds easier than it is. Meanwhile, my friend Mark, who is also interested in the Revolutionary War, had e-mailed me when I was laid up to say that after much triangulating (maps, books, walks) he had finally figured out where the old pass in the hills was. “You’ve got let me show you!” Mark said. Eventually, I got up too early on a cold, gray Saturday, took the subway to Twenty-third Street, and walked over toward Kips Bay, to start out at around the point where, in September of 1776, things went really wrong.
“Think about it,” Mark said when we had planned the walk on the phone. “Washington is up at the Morris-Jumel Mansion”—that’s the oldest house in Manhattan, in the Washington Heights neighborhood, and it was Washington’s headquarters at the time—“and he hears the British ships firing, knows they are landing in Manhattan, gets on a horse, races downtown, finds this Connecticut regiment just freaking out, and then he just has a fit, apparently, and then heads back north.” Many historians note that Washington had one of his infamous temper tantrums on the beach at Kips Bay as the largest fleet in the world let cannons rip on some farmers, landing four thousand men in eighty-four boats. A Connecticut soldier wrote that his “head might go with the sound.”
When I got out of the subway and walked across Twenty-third Street, I could see the water ahead of me as well as those words and images that seem underlined or italicized or just emphasized when you are wearing history-colored glasses: Hidden City Café, for example, and an Al Smith Movers van. The beautiful public baths, just off Twenty-third Street on Asser Levy Place, across from Peter Cooper Village, are like a pun on the defeat of the rebel forces that scatted here, headed north. I passed underneath the F.D.R., built here on rubble from Bristol, England, which was bombed out during the German blitz, its brick used as ballast in ships returning from supply runs during the Lend-Lease Act. I got to the water. It was early, quiet. A few joggers passed, armed with headphones, though an earbud-free guy in his sixties looked at me, nodded hello—actually made contact, friend, not foe. Tourists were in the gas station that I never noticed on this shoreline, pointing toward Williamsburg, taking photos, and I was wondering why. I saw no British fleet managing the logistical nightmare of the wide tidal strait coming out of Queens via Newtown Creek. I knew I was on a former beach from my old maps and from the presence of large tracts of post-Second World War housing. In my walks, I have noticed that public housing especially is built on formerly not-solid ground, as opposed to today, when we are beginning to see more and more expensive housing on the waterfront.
The early-morning view across the wide East River is flat, gray, and lonely, and it accompanied me as I walked north past N.Y.U. Langone Medical Center, which was evacuated during Sandy. I started uptown, crossing hills that would be imperceptible if you weren’t walking and, thus, paying a little more attention than usual. It was a long walk; I was not a slave to accuracy, but just tried to guess the way around old watercourses noted in the 1781 British Headquarters map—a map made famous in the book “Mannahatta.” The nineteenth-century street grid has obliterated a lot here, but you can still see the curves of streams up near Hunter College, at Sixty-eighth Street, and I went west on Sixty-eighth to cross into the Park, where I stopped (as I often do) to see the surveyor’s spike that tradition has it is one of the spikes used to actualize the grid. The spike is in a glacier-scratched rock, speaking of various times in the land, or what we might call timescapes.
As far as original landscape goes, being in Central Park below about Ninety-fifth Street is like being blindfolded in 1607 and spun around and dumped into a parking lot in Long Island City in 1978—i.e., it looks nothing like what it originally did. But Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux left things more in place the more north you go. I met up with Mark at 106th Street and Central Park West, at the edge of the park, a big hill at that point. He was with his son, a fifth-grader. They walked me up to the Great Hill; I hadn’t been there since the eighties, when I lived nearby and played football on fall Saturdays and drank beer from cans in paper bags afterward—this was in that less imperial, pre-Bloombergian era.
Mark pulled out his old maps of the British troop positions, a bunch of color photocopies. The Great Hill was, they showed me, the Hessian encampment. You could see the commanding view. We walked down the hill and through the Ravine, a walk designed by Olmsted and Vaux to remind you of the Adirondacks. “This is probably my favorite walk in the park,” Mark said. His son agreed. I felt happy to be walking with them. The boy asked me about the Blockhouse, but I didn’t know what that was, and anyway I was mostly thinking about walking with my kids, who have now grown up and moved away, my advanced guard.
We came out of the woods and now, from our high ground, I could see runners coming up along the main park loop. I kept saying, “Is this it?”
“Not yet,” Mark said.
It had begun to snow, for just about the first time that year. We walked up another hill with a plaque and some old cannons, and now the maps were out again, and we talked a lot and pointed, and suddenly I could see it: McGowan’s Pass, the pass through which Washington et al. passed! As opposed to being invisible to me, now it was very obviously a key high point, protecting the road that heads north along the western edge of the plains of Harlem, which spread out before us, blocks of buildings instead of fields. “And it wasn’t until last night that I realized that that road is Saint Nicholas Avenue, which still runs on that diagonal,” Mark said. “I mean, I’ve lived in Harlem for fifteen years, and I only just figured this out.”
“That’s right,” a man said—a man who had appeared out of nowhere. He was, he said, a Park guide, a new kind of guide that seeks out visitors. “I’m the visitors’ center that comes to you,” he said. We chatted more about the pass, and Mark impressed him with his Park knowledge, and vice versa. At this point, Mark looked at his son, then looked at the man from out of nowhere and said, “Do you have the key to the Blockhouse?”
The man hedged at first, then issued a confession. “Well, yes, I do.”
We walked back into the North Woods, stopping only to look at the stream, a pristine-seeming spring that you can see in the eighteenth-century maps. And then, in a few minutes, we were on top of a hill, the roving ranger unlocking the gate to what he called the oldest man-made structure in the park, a fort built for the War of 1812. I’d never seen the Blockhouse; its existence was a complete shock to me. Meanwhile, Mark’s son was in heaven. “He said this morning, ‘I wish we could go inside the Blockhouse,’ ” Mark told the guide.
The Blockhouse is just walls, so we walked in and immediately looked up at the sky, just as a raven flew overhead. After about ten minutes of poking around, we locked it all up and stepped back out. On the hill just outside the Blockhouse, Mark’s son showed us how the autumn ground was offering up old bits of bottles, oyster shells, bricks. “It was probably a dump,” the guide said. I looked down and didn’t notice anything at first, and then the boy showed me, and I could suddenly see all the old stuff coming up, the ground turning like the bottom of a river.
Robert Sullivan is a contributing editor at Vogue and at A Public Space.
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