Eat the City(70)
“Like, if you want a three-year-old to run over to you, you’re gonna offer a cookie. And if you wanted to lure in a thirty-year-old, you would offer really fine whiskey,” says Jane. “You just know how to go after your demographic.”
Her demographic, in this case, is the mature striper, the ocean fish that can grow to sixty pounds or more and come to the Hudson to spawn: the trophy of New York Harbor. A lot of people use artificial lures, says Jane, as if it’s nobler somehow, as though catching a big fish with a little fish requires less human skill. But the big fish of the season have all been caught with bunker, says Jane. “Scientifically, that’s how you catch them.”
Jane is not driven by hunger, but is by the thrill of the hunt, yet she also likes fish, and hates waste, enough to overcome her misgivings about consuming the fruits of local waters. She might smoke her catch or fry it or curry it—she used to do that a lot when she went out on fishing boats. She might put her FRESH FISH sign on her bike and ride it around town. She might give it away to some hungry person fishing near her on the pier. She once gave a big fish to a friend, with a warning about where she caught it, but he cooked up a fish stock for his wife who was eight months pregnant. She notes that a lot of people can’t afford to buy protein, and she imagines that eating fish from the East River is a good option.
“I’m an addict,” Jane says of fishing. Sometimes she stays out till morning and watches the sun come up. Other times she binge fishes for as long as thirty-six hours at a time, updating her Facebook page with pleas to her friends to bring warm clothes, and then turning off her phone to preserve the battery. Her favorite piers are littered with Tyskie and Zywiec beer bottles, which the Polish guys leave behind like a trail of bread crumbs denoting the best fishing spots this side of Brooklyn.
Her hands chafe from the cold and are punctured, repeatedly, by hooks. One of her fishing crew, it turns out, had been a doctor back in Poland, and he said he would take a look. When Jane held out her raw, scabbed, cut-up paws, he stepped back and said, “You’re not a woman!” Jane promised herself a manicure at the end of the month.
One day, Jane cast really, really far—into a pickup truck, and when she reeled back her hook and sinker, they came flying with boomerang force into her face, bludgeoning and piercing her nose—which she accepted with good cheer as nothing more than a slowdown. “Holler when you want to hit the pier,” she texted her friends on her way out of the hospital.
When two cops gave her a summons for fishing alone one night past closing at the Valentino Pier in Red Hook, she wrote on her Facebook page: “Today: The Fisherwoman VS. The City of New York. Wish me luck.” Later she updated: “The judge let me off the HOOK.” A friend commented, “Sounds like you fed him a LINE.”
Late at night, she sometimes goes to the Secret Place, a private property in Brooklyn with a long dock deep into the East River, whose warning signs are not visible in the dark—DANGER KEEP OFF PIER, DANGER NO TRESPASSING. Someone holds up a cyclone fence and she slims her body underneath it to reach shifting slabs of concrete, the cracked remnants of a crumpled Williamsburg pier. Jane walks gingerly from slab to slab while each piece rocks underfoot. When the slab seems to slide toward the blackness of the water, she shifts her weight. She doesn’t speak, in order to avoid the attention of the property’s night watchman.
Carrying fishing rods like rifles in some kind of commando operation, she and the other fishers run down the next section of the pier, which is nothing but narrow I-beams extending like balance beams over a hole of black water. At the end, Jane finds herself on solid cement at the farthest extremity of this part of Brooklyn, with the deepest water and, she hopes, the biggest fish. The shapes of the guys she is with disperse around the edges of the dock to set up fishing rigs. She hears the pale jangling of the bells on the ends of fishing rods, the wind, the whooshing noise of the cars across the river in Manhattan on FDR Drive—like the noise inside a seashell. And she stands, facing Manhattan amid seagull shit and bones, and she waits to catch a fish.
Baiting with bunker one day on a pier off North Fifth Street in Williamsburg, she finally reels in a legendary striper, with the characteristic smooth lines of dark and silver scales. “Yeah!” she yells as the fish flops onto the wooden deck. Measured tail to fishy lip, it is 28.5 inches. Barely legal. Soon she catches another, and another. “Just caught a nice striped bass,” she writes on Facebook. “Will deliver to your home or office. Let the bidding begin.”
MANHATTAN’S legendary Fulton Fish Market was dedicated to fish only in 1822, when local fish were already becoming noticeably scarcer. In 1826, a New York newspaper announced the novelty of a shipment of fresh salmon from Lake Ontario coming up the Erie Canal, to be exhibited for sale in the Fulton market. Soon, steamships and railroads routinely carried fish cargoes, so that New Yorkers ate salmon from Maine and Scotland, prawns from the Carolinas, and black bass from the western rivers and lakes. By the 1830s, Peter Cortelyou, the head of a Long Island fishery, lamented, “All the fisheries in New York harbor are nearly destroyed, and the fish which now supply the markets of that city are brought from the distance of 60, 80, and even 100 miles.” The wild meats of the lands had long since disappeared; now those of the waters were receding from reach.
A century later, in the 1930s, much of the fish coming into the Fulton Fish Market arrived by truck “rattling and jolting along the cobblestoned streets,” and some were flown in by airplane. People wanted less fish as beef and pork arriving from the West in refrigerated railcars became cheap and readily available. Giant slatted pine boxes still bobbed afloat in the East River behind the market as holding cells for live fish. But increasingly, even the boats, sloops, schooners, and smacks brought fish dead, filleted, and even frozen, to be sorted in an icehouse off Pier 17.