By Steve Janoski
It’s on River Street that Hoboken’s past and present
converge in a restless tidal pool of characters sauntering past one another in
the steam bath air of a July night.
I had been covering amateur fights at one of the city’s
most opulent hotels before finding myself out on the streets afterward fumbling
with a new camera that I had yet to get the hang of.
Looking toward Manhattan, it’s no wonder this is referred
to as the “Gold Coast” — New York Harbor yawns out from the shores, and the
eruption of lights from that city of islands and towers creates an oppressive
presence even from across the river.
But while I’ve always loved New York, I’ve always had a
love-hate relationship with Hoboken. The nights I’ve spent in its finer (and
not-so-fine) drinking establishments never ended early enough, and the
preponderance of yuppies and aging frat boys makes my stomach turn.
Still, there’s always a drama playing out against the
draping backdrop of row houses and storefronts, and I love this city as I love
all cities, mostly because of their peculiar ability to be the axis around
which not only history, but “right now,” revolves.
It was in Weehawken Cove that Henry Hudson anchored the
Halve Maen (Half Moon) in 1609 before going on to explore the river
that now bears his name. And, just a mile or so away, is Sybil’s Cave, which
houses a natural spring whose waters were once sold because it was said they
had medicinal powers; an 1841 murder there would become the inspiration for
Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Roget.”
And then there’s the middle of the twentieth century,
that golden age of Terry Malloy’s rough-and-tumble waterfront dominated by the
Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants that had come swarming off the boats
during the 1920s and 1930s.
Being born in 1984, I remember Hoboken only at the very
tail end of its hardscrabble existence, just before gentrification came in and
gouged out its violent heart.
But the grit is still there. It’s harder to find, like a
roach that’s scampered away from Washington Street’s glittering lights and
crawled into the shadowy nooks of the boulevards — but it survives.
I walk down Frank Sinatra Drive, catching bits and pieces
of the conversations as I snaked through the soul of the city while stories en
media res were written around me.
“Stop, stop, JUST STOP! There’s no one like you,” a
young, perplexed-looking man with glasses and a blue polo tells his cross-armed
girlfriend before he realizes how loud he’s being and drops his tone. She’s
breaking up with him, I think.
On one bench, a college-age girl in New Balances talks on
her cell phone about how a guy she met looked so much older than he really was;
on another, two young, attractive women talk about what sounds like a boyfriend’s
drinking problem.
Definitely Hoboken.
Right behind them though, an older black man with naked
feet and a bald spot the size of a half-dollar on the crown of his head lays
sprawled out on a cold concrete slab, all his belongings stuffed into bags next
to him. Across the street, the plate-glass windows of a bar reveal young guys
wearing plaid-shirts and khaki shorts drinking beer and watching sports on
wall-mounted flat-screens.
Down on Pier A, the lawn is crowded with those escaping
stuffy apartments, and a group of shirtless black men sit on the ledges,
bursting with laughter before exploding into curses. The situation, for a
second, grows tense.
“You disrespect me? I don’t want to hear you!” one
man yells in a thick island accent into the face of another, the striations in
his muscles showing sharply under the lights. “I don’t want to hear you!”
Further down, an ample middle-aged white woman wearing
baggy jeans and a billowing white t-shirt walks by, talking loudly into her
cell phone and assuring her man that she’s not coming back to him.
“Yo, you lost me, yo. You lost me foreva! I’m puttin’ a
restrainin’ order on yo’ ass,” she says.
Other itinerants gather under a pavilion near the water’s
edge, their shopping cart lives now sheltered from rain.
And all the while, a willowy blonde wanders up and down
the pier clad in an extraordinarily sheer yellow summer dress — with very
little underneath — stopping at intervals to pose for an imaginary
photographer, her haunting, dilated pupils boring into the darkness.
The city’s still here. Sometimes closer than we think.
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
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