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Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront
In the 1970s, Manhattan’s west side waterfront was a forgotten zone of abandoned warehouses and piers. Though many saw only blight, the derelict neighborhood was alive with queer people forging new intimacies through cruising. Alongside the piers’ sexual and social worlds, artists produced work attesting to the radical transformations taking place in New York. Artist and writer David Wojnarowicz was right in the heart of it, documenting his experiences in journal entries, poems, photographs, films, and large-scale, site-specific projects. In Cruising the Dead River, Fiona Anderson draws on Wojnarowicz’s work to explore the key role the abandoned landscape played in this explosion of queer culture. Anderson examines how the riverfront’s ruined buildings assumed a powerful erotic role and gave the area a distinct identity. By telling the story of the piers as gentrification swept New York and before the AIDS crisis, Anderson unearths the buried histories of violence, regeneration, and LGBTQ activism that developed in and around the cruising scene.
203 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 14, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 8, 2024
Cultural studies can be dry and abstract, or they can be controversial. This book has an academic tone, but also is surprisingly readable — bearing in mind it took me weeks to get through it. Some of the nuances of the politics of dock re-development in New York were not that interesting, and assertions were often illustrated with extracts from fiction, which made me wonder: Is John Rechy actually a reliable documentarian?
Of course there can be a lot of truth in fiction, but the challenge is being able to filter out the fantasy.
Anderson seems to have been afflicted with a somewhat sentimental approach towards the dilapidated ruins. They were a dangerous playground, and not just because of muggers and queer bashers — one could fall through rotten floors, stumble into broken glass, or be caught in a fire. I understand that gentrification is an exclusionary process, but romanticizing ruins is also a kind of dead end.
And yet —paradoxically—part of the strange allure of this book is the utopian appeal of a ravaged landscape. A ruin is the past, living on, still vital and present. Repurposing ruins is another manifestation of vitality.
This book really gets you thinking. (Or at least as much as I was able to do so).
Of course there can be a lot of truth in fiction, but the challenge is being able to filter out the fantasy.
Anderson seems to have been afflicted with a somewhat sentimental approach towards the dilapidated ruins. They were a dangerous playground, and not just because of muggers and queer bashers — one could fall through rotten floors, stumble into broken glass, or be caught in a fire. I understand that gentrification is an exclusionary process, but romanticizing ruins is also a kind of dead end.
And yet —paradoxically—part of the strange allure of this book is the utopian appeal of a ravaged landscape. A ruin is the past, living on, still vital and present. Repurposing ruins is another manifestation of vitality.
This book really gets you thinking. (Or at least as much as I was able to do so).
January 16, 2024
incredibly engaging, interesting analyses, touched on a lot of my favourite artists/writers and introduced me to many more.
December 18, 2019
This was one of the best books that I have had the pleasure to read in a longtime. It belongs on any shelf devoted to queer theory and practice; that includes Jack Halberstam's In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Anderson who is a lecturer in Art History at Newcastle University looks at the relationship between the decaying waterfront in NYC during the 1970s and 1980s and how it informed the artistic work of a group of young artists, including David Wojnarowicz. It is a beautifully written and nuanced study exploring the relationship between queer spaces and queer identity.
"A long history of corrupt unions and gangsters, brotherhoods of stevedores and itinerant sailors, echoes in this cloistered symbolism. In economic decline since federal crackdowns on the harbours extensive Mafia networks in the mid-1950s, the rise of air transportation and white-collar urban labour in New York in the 1960s, and subsequent "white flight," the once-bustling Lower West Side Manhattan waterfront sat, ostensibly empty, and fell into ruin. Its abandonment coincided with a crackdown on gay male cruising in the borough's public parks, restrooms, and subway stations in the years leading up to the 1964-65 New York World's Fair. Its emptiness drew men toward the water. For a time, empty haulage vehicles that were parked unlocked overnight along the West Side Highway provided spaces for anonymous sexual encounters. But as these trucks disappeared, along with the shipping companies that owned then, men moved further out, cruising the vast crumbling structures of the formerly industrial riverside. Their migration highlights the complex political dynamics governing public and private sexual association in the dense urban environment of Manhattan, careful management of which was essential to police regulation of homosexual behaviour in the 1960s." 2
"As he cruised there, Wojnarowicz was reminded "of sailors, of distant ports," that, even as maritime trade declined and disappeared, cast a long erotic shadow on the waterfront." 3
"The piers were, the novelist Andrew Holleran wrote, a space of "peculiar magic." This book examines the combined erotic and aesthetic pull of the abandoned waterfront, exploring the queer appopriation of its piers and warehouses in the 1970s and early 1980s." 4
"In contrast to the postindustrial anti-glamour of the trucks, many of the bathhouses of the 1960s modelled themselves on the sexual decadence and imagined luxury of the ancient world. The Continental Baths, located in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel, uptown at West Seventy-Fourth Street, boasted an Olympic-size pool, steam room, sauna, restaurant, and overnight accommodations." 16
"Like the perpetual threat of violence inherent in the decaying piers and warehouses on the waterfront, cruising in the late 1960s was marked, according to Rechy, by a dialectical energy of despair and "frantic" pleasure." 17
"In 1971 the Club Baths chain of exclusively gay bathhouses had opened fourteen branches across the country. By the mid-1970s clubs and bars were charging expensive membership fees." 18
"For the art historian John Paul Ricco, the baths are "the placeless place of erotics," where 'individuals forfeit their subjective selves and are reconstituted as parts of a collective assemblage in which personal identities are exchanged for a multiplicity of desiring bodies." 21
"Though the clubs and bars in Greenwich Village and along West Street were culturally distinct from the cruising space of the piers and warehouses, the populations that used them were not mutually exclusive. Their location on the fringes of Manhattan rendered them a kind of queer thoroughfare between the then-abandoned, dangerous waterfront and the increasingly commercial gay bar and club scene of the West Village and the Meatpacking District." 22-23
photographers: Leonard Fink, artist Alvin Baltrop
"Leonard Fink, whose amateur photographs were donated to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Centre in New York after his death in 1993, also recorded the bodily variety and racial diversity that the waterfront, as an unregulated, non-commercial space, permitted." 26
"Collapsing piers and warehouses," Wojnarowicz wrote in a journal entry from June 1980, "brought back images that smelled young and cleared the world of its weariness." These were lustful ruins. In an unpublished poem from 1979, "Dream of Federico Fellini/Pasolini," Wojnarowicz wrote of men "curving their bodies along" the walls of a Roman coliseum and of the warehouses and piers as "late night walkways where history strolls." In "End Street," cruising men "among the loading docks of shipyards," are likened to "pillars," like the rotting pier footings that punctuated the Hudson shore." 32
poet Tim Dlugos
"Hujar's visual interest in the monumentality of the ruin, its memorial potential, and its queer object hood, can be traced back to a much earlier series of photographs he took on a trip to the catacombs at Palermo, Sicily, in 1963 with his friend and lover, the artist Paul Thek." 60
"In his introduction to the 2013 exhibition Katz suggests, paraphrasing Harvey, that the pleasure Huja, Thek, and Raffael found in exploring the boathouse ruins stemmed in part from their sense that this was "historically gay ground," since James Deering, a confirmed bachelor, had designed Villa Vizcaya with the artist and interior designer Paul Chalfin, rumoured to be his lover, and had entertained other artists thought to be queer there, including the American painter, John Singer Sargent." 63-64
"A photograph, Hujar stated in a recorded interview with Wojnarowicz from the mid-1980s, is not a frozen moment, but "an echo" of one; it takes on its own life and exists according to its own temporality." 66-67
"The establishment of certain space in the city as 'public'," he argues, "is a reminder, a warning that the rest of the city isn't public. New York doesn't belong to us." 73
Andreas Sterzing,
"In Spectres of Marx (1994), Jacques Derrida introduces his theory of hauntology, a pun on ontology that elucidates what he calls "the spectral moment." This moment, he argues, "no longer belongs to time," is "beyond the living present in general-and beyond its simple negative reversal." 96
"Informal but systemic neglect by civic authorities since the late 1950s had separated the Manhattan waterfront from mainstream urban existence, with its ceaseless drive toward economic production. The collapse of the West Side Highway in 1973, cutting off traffic south of Thirty-Fourth Street, reinforced that exclusion. Municipal ineffectiveness had, then, produced a zone ideally suited not only to appropriation as a queer space, but to the production of queer time, inadvertently creating a public space that was always almost not present, disappearing and reappearing." 117
"This practice recalls Allen Ginsburg's notion of a seminal line of "transmission" between himself and Whitman, a literary sensibility transferred, as he saw it, through oral sex, where "the older person made love to the younger person, blew the younger and person, and there was the absorption of the younger person's electric vital magnetism." This succession was, he explained in a 1972 interview, "an ancient thing....it's very old and very charming for older and younger to make it." 119
"As Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Wendel Ryan have argued, urban neglect in New York in the 1970s was a largely not a matter of negligence but a considered political strategy, "abandoning buildings, harassing and evicting tenants, and rapidly turning over neighbourhood property in order to escalate real-estate values." By 1984, for example, the city had acquired 60 percent of property on the Lower East Side by way of tax defaults and abandonment by incompetent or insolvent landlords. "Contingent lots" of derelict of neglected housing were "put together to form what is known in the real estate business as 'assemblages' ...sold for large sums of money at municipal auctions to developers who thus amass entire blocks for the construction of large-scale upper-income housing." 133
Arch Brown's film Pier Groups (1979)
"Seen in this way, the erotically and historically promiscuous practice of waterfront cruising in ruins in the "pre-AIDS moment" of the later 1970s emerges as a model for the production of queer memory and the experience of queer time in a hostile environment."161
"A long history of corrupt unions and gangsters, brotherhoods of stevedores and itinerant sailors, echoes in this cloistered symbolism. In economic decline since federal crackdowns on the harbours extensive Mafia networks in the mid-1950s, the rise of air transportation and white-collar urban labour in New York in the 1960s, and subsequent "white flight," the once-bustling Lower West Side Manhattan waterfront sat, ostensibly empty, and fell into ruin. Its abandonment coincided with a crackdown on gay male cruising in the borough's public parks, restrooms, and subway stations in the years leading up to the 1964-65 New York World's Fair. Its emptiness drew men toward the water. For a time, empty haulage vehicles that were parked unlocked overnight along the West Side Highway provided spaces for anonymous sexual encounters. But as these trucks disappeared, along with the shipping companies that owned then, men moved further out, cruising the vast crumbling structures of the formerly industrial riverside. Their migration highlights the complex political dynamics governing public and private sexual association in the dense urban environment of Manhattan, careful management of which was essential to police regulation of homosexual behaviour in the 1960s." 2
"As he cruised there, Wojnarowicz was reminded "of sailors, of distant ports," that, even as maritime trade declined and disappeared, cast a long erotic shadow on the waterfront." 3
"The piers were, the novelist Andrew Holleran wrote, a space of "peculiar magic." This book examines the combined erotic and aesthetic pull of the abandoned waterfront, exploring the queer appopriation of its piers and warehouses in the 1970s and early 1980s." 4
"In contrast to the postindustrial anti-glamour of the trucks, many of the bathhouses of the 1960s modelled themselves on the sexual decadence and imagined luxury of the ancient world. The Continental Baths, located in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel, uptown at West Seventy-Fourth Street, boasted an Olympic-size pool, steam room, sauna, restaurant, and overnight accommodations." 16
"Like the perpetual threat of violence inherent in the decaying piers and warehouses on the waterfront, cruising in the late 1960s was marked, according to Rechy, by a dialectical energy of despair and "frantic" pleasure." 17
"In 1971 the Club Baths chain of exclusively gay bathhouses had opened fourteen branches across the country. By the mid-1970s clubs and bars were charging expensive membership fees." 18
"For the art historian John Paul Ricco, the baths are "the placeless place of erotics," where 'individuals forfeit their subjective selves and are reconstituted as parts of a collective assemblage in which personal identities are exchanged for a multiplicity of desiring bodies." 21
"Though the clubs and bars in Greenwich Village and along West Street were culturally distinct from the cruising space of the piers and warehouses, the populations that used them were not mutually exclusive. Their location on the fringes of Manhattan rendered them a kind of queer thoroughfare between the then-abandoned, dangerous waterfront and the increasingly commercial gay bar and club scene of the West Village and the Meatpacking District." 22-23
photographers: Leonard Fink, artist Alvin Baltrop
"Leonard Fink, whose amateur photographs were donated to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Centre in New York after his death in 1993, also recorded the bodily variety and racial diversity that the waterfront, as an unregulated, non-commercial space, permitted." 26
"Collapsing piers and warehouses," Wojnarowicz wrote in a journal entry from June 1980, "brought back images that smelled young and cleared the world of its weariness." These were lustful ruins. In an unpublished poem from 1979, "Dream of Federico Fellini/Pasolini," Wojnarowicz wrote of men "curving their bodies along" the walls of a Roman coliseum and of the warehouses and piers as "late night walkways where history strolls." In "End Street," cruising men "among the loading docks of shipyards," are likened to "pillars," like the rotting pier footings that punctuated the Hudson shore." 32
poet Tim Dlugos
"Hujar's visual interest in the monumentality of the ruin, its memorial potential, and its queer object hood, can be traced back to a much earlier series of photographs he took on a trip to the catacombs at Palermo, Sicily, in 1963 with his friend and lover, the artist Paul Thek." 60
"In his introduction to the 2013 exhibition Katz suggests, paraphrasing Harvey, that the pleasure Huja, Thek, and Raffael found in exploring the boathouse ruins stemmed in part from their sense that this was "historically gay ground," since James Deering, a confirmed bachelor, had designed Villa Vizcaya with the artist and interior designer Paul Chalfin, rumoured to be his lover, and had entertained other artists thought to be queer there, including the American painter, John Singer Sargent." 63-64
"A photograph, Hujar stated in a recorded interview with Wojnarowicz from the mid-1980s, is not a frozen moment, but "an echo" of one; it takes on its own life and exists according to its own temporality." 66-67
"The establishment of certain space in the city as 'public'," he argues, "is a reminder, a warning that the rest of the city isn't public. New York doesn't belong to us." 73
Andreas Sterzing,
"In Spectres of Marx (1994), Jacques Derrida introduces his theory of hauntology, a pun on ontology that elucidates what he calls "the spectral moment." This moment, he argues, "no longer belongs to time," is "beyond the living present in general-and beyond its simple negative reversal." 96
"Informal but systemic neglect by civic authorities since the late 1950s had separated the Manhattan waterfront from mainstream urban existence, with its ceaseless drive toward economic production. The collapse of the West Side Highway in 1973, cutting off traffic south of Thirty-Fourth Street, reinforced that exclusion. Municipal ineffectiveness had, then, produced a zone ideally suited not only to appropriation as a queer space, but to the production of queer time, inadvertently creating a public space that was always almost not present, disappearing and reappearing." 117
"This practice recalls Allen Ginsburg's notion of a seminal line of "transmission" between himself and Whitman, a literary sensibility transferred, as he saw it, through oral sex, where "the older person made love to the younger person, blew the younger and person, and there was the absorption of the younger person's electric vital magnetism." This succession was, he explained in a 1972 interview, "an ancient thing....it's very old and very charming for older and younger to make it." 119
"As Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Wendel Ryan have argued, urban neglect in New York in the 1970s was a largely not a matter of negligence but a considered political strategy, "abandoning buildings, harassing and evicting tenants, and rapidly turning over neighbourhood property in order to escalate real-estate values." By 1984, for example, the city had acquired 60 percent of property on the Lower East Side by way of tax defaults and abandonment by incompetent or insolvent landlords. "Contingent lots" of derelict of neglected housing were "put together to form what is known in the real estate business as 'assemblages' ...sold for large sums of money at municipal auctions to developers who thus amass entire blocks for the construction of large-scale upper-income housing." 133
Arch Brown's film Pier Groups (1979)
"Seen in this way, the erotically and historically promiscuous practice of waterfront cruising in ruins in the "pre-AIDS moment" of the later 1970s emerges as a model for the production of queer memory and the experience of queer time in a hostile environment."161
May 15, 2024
Cruising the Dead River by Fiona Anderson
I have been meaning to read this book for a couple of years now. Last year, I was walking around one of my local bookstores, and found this book - which was very exciting given how niche the book is. Finally getting around to reading it.
I have been deeply drawn to the 1970-1980s era, perhaps the most due to the art that came out during this time, but also the sheer devastations that happened due to the AIDS/HIV crisis. I have also been drawn to David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar, two landmarks artists in my opinion from that era, along with the cruising culture for sometime in my life as well - so this book fit a lot of the niche inclinations and likes I have been drawn to - and the book (mostly) delivers.
Fiona’s research is meticulous - she has touched Sarah Schulman, Samuel Delaney, Cynthia Carr, and many others to explore this book - pioneers in my mind from that point of time - still alive and those who capture the raw sentiments (rage) given how systematically they were failed during that time by the government. I have found other artists that I didn’t know anything about - Peter Thak, Alvin Baltrop. The book is also full of fantastic art reviews by Fiona, and glossary of images that are timeless. You can tell these topics really drew Fiona a lot - but unfortunately I found that the thread slackened across the multiverse that she explored. Fwiw - I appreciated her curiosities but when she was toying around the cruising culture anchored by David Wojnarowicz’s writings from last 1970s to 1980s, it started to feel far too stretched by also invoking the 1971 queer liberations / stone wall riots led by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Given how slim the book already is, I wish she stayed with some of the topics she explored - such as Peter Hujar’s photography about the Piers, or police brutality monitoring queer lives after the AIDS / HIV crisis. The disparate topics are indeed connected, I am wholly aligned with that, but Fiona’s bridging them together felt unfinished and rather haphazard.
However, I really enjoyed her spending time around gentrifications and how they are all interrelated. For example, when the AIDS / HIV crisis was taking a hold of the queer community - the first inclinations by authorities was to shut down bathhouses or places where anonymous encounters happen - not once taking a pause to consider these places could be safe haven for people to share notes, safe practices (even if feels counter intuitive - to whom really? The book argues those who have no idea about these spaces other than their ignorant viewpoints, were the staunchest supporters of policing these spaces) and help each other, at a time when these communities needed it the most. As Sarah S. explored in Gentrification of the Mind, gentrifications has always been about smashing / annihilating complexities in favor of homogeneity and simplifications, which robs things so much of their original essence (of what is being removed). This book does a great job of reminding us just that. That cruising in the ruins, the art it evokes, the emotion it fills the person cruising, the curious observant - is worth understanding and protecting.
I’ll close with this - I have done cruising myself, and continue to do it, and hope to going forward. It’s been something complex over the decade that I have engaged in, but with each passing year, it has made me realize the vitality for it, at times when queerness at its core is under fire. To explore this space - which suspends class, and a lot of other barriers, and bring myriad of people in closeness, with the hope of exploring sense of belonging and sexuality, it’s worth shining a light and not let it be burned to ground. This book does just that, for which, I am grateful for Fiona.
I have been meaning to read this book for a couple of years now. Last year, I was walking around one of my local bookstores, and found this book - which was very exciting given how niche the book is. Finally getting around to reading it.
I have been deeply drawn to the 1970-1980s era, perhaps the most due to the art that came out during this time, but also the sheer devastations that happened due to the AIDS/HIV crisis. I have also been drawn to David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar, two landmarks artists in my opinion from that era, along with the cruising culture for sometime in my life as well - so this book fit a lot of the niche inclinations and likes I have been drawn to - and the book (mostly) delivers.
Fiona’s research is meticulous - she has touched Sarah Schulman, Samuel Delaney, Cynthia Carr, and many others to explore this book - pioneers in my mind from that point of time - still alive and those who capture the raw sentiments (rage) given how systematically they were failed during that time by the government. I have found other artists that I didn’t know anything about - Peter Thak, Alvin Baltrop. The book is also full of fantastic art reviews by Fiona, and glossary of images that are timeless. You can tell these topics really drew Fiona a lot - but unfortunately I found that the thread slackened across the multiverse that she explored. Fwiw - I appreciated her curiosities but when she was toying around the cruising culture anchored by David Wojnarowicz’s writings from last 1970s to 1980s, it started to feel far too stretched by also invoking the 1971 queer liberations / stone wall riots led by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Given how slim the book already is, I wish she stayed with some of the topics she explored - such as Peter Hujar’s photography about the Piers, or police brutality monitoring queer lives after the AIDS / HIV crisis. The disparate topics are indeed connected, I am wholly aligned with that, but Fiona’s bridging them together felt unfinished and rather haphazard.
However, I really enjoyed her spending time around gentrifications and how they are all interrelated. For example, when the AIDS / HIV crisis was taking a hold of the queer community - the first inclinations by authorities was to shut down bathhouses or places where anonymous encounters happen - not once taking a pause to consider these places could be safe haven for people to share notes, safe practices (even if feels counter intuitive - to whom really? The book argues those who have no idea about these spaces other than their ignorant viewpoints, were the staunchest supporters of policing these spaces) and help each other, at a time when these communities needed it the most. As Sarah S. explored in Gentrification of the Mind, gentrifications has always been about smashing / annihilating complexities in favor of homogeneity and simplifications, which robs things so much of their original essence (of what is being removed). This book does a great job of reminding us just that. That cruising in the ruins, the art it evokes, the emotion it fills the person cruising, the curious observant - is worth understanding and protecting.
I’ll close with this - I have done cruising myself, and continue to do it, and hope to going forward. It’s been something complex over the decade that I have engaged in, but with each passing year, it has made me realize the vitality for it, at times when queerness at its core is under fire. To explore this space - which suspends class, and a lot of other barriers, and bring myriad of people in closeness, with the hope of exploring sense of belonging and sexuality, it’s worth shining a light and not let it be burned to ground. This book does just that, for which, I am grateful for Fiona.
Read
January 19, 2025Firstly: delicious index. An interesting and accessible account on the gay artists who frequented (cruised) the Hudson River through the 70s-80s-ish. Wojnarowicz’s life and work serve as a lens for the writer to look through as they give history of the waterfront, but it’s not really an examination of his writing or art. Other artists including Peter Hujar and, surprisingly, Paul Thek get some play as Anderson explores the themes of queerness, cruising, and expression. Thek is a mostly forgotten artist in most circles and I’m always happy to encounter his name in the wild. (Side note—a 2023 personal research project of mine was creating a comprehensive… text? on Thek’s life and found that Artist’s Artist is essentially the Thek bible. My boyfriend gave me a copy of Paul Thek: Italian Hours for the holiday and, while the art is nice to look at, the essays in Artist’s Artist are really king. Viva Paul.) The third essay was my favorite—I don’t remember the name of it and will come back to edit this at some point—but perhaps that’s because the focus was on Wojnarowicz specifically, and Close to the Knives is my favorite book of all time. Foucault, Barthes get some of the spotlight, too.
August 13, 2025
For those interested in the topic of ruins and their role in providing both a physical and psychic landscape for artistic activity in New York City before and during the AIDS crisis, this book is necessary and illuminating.
Anderson does a great job surveying the history of the city’s piers, the artists who frequented them, and the art that they made, while expanding on interesting academic concepts around the ruin as a metaphor for belonging (or lack thereof) and desire in the broader context of the American political landscape during that time.
I recommend reading this as a companion to Close to the Knives by David Wojanarowicz.
Lots of great images, high quality printing :)
Anderson does a great job surveying the history of the city’s piers, the artists who frequented them, and the art that they made, while expanding on interesting academic concepts around the ruin as a metaphor for belonging (or lack thereof) and desire in the broader context of the American political landscape during that time.
I recommend reading this as a companion to Close to the Knives by David Wojanarowicz.
Lots of great images, high quality printing :)
April 13, 2025
I’ve always been fascinated by this artistic moment in American history, but this book is just not particularly interesting in its discussion of tensions between gentrification and queer art. Also it misspells Miss Havisham’s name, and while this may be an intentional John Rechy homage, I’m not convinced.
July 5, 2023
overall a good read but it really bothered me that the author refers to the last shot in News from Home as "from a ferry near Governor's Island" when it's so clearly the Staten Island Ferry lol
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