Eat the City(72)

Of course none of the fish here are from local waters, and as fewer fish are available at all, prices continue to rise. Americans eat less seafood, restaurants and grocery stores set up their own direct supply lines, and fish companies at Hunts Point go under. “No one seems to want to be in the fish business anymore,” says Joseph Scibbara from a glass-walled, heated “office” on the fish floor. “When our forefathers came here, all they had to eat was fish. It’s not part of the American dream anymore.”

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WITH salty air and docked boats, and fish for sale when the boats come in, Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn still feels something like a fishing port, though the eponymous sheepshead fish no longer fill these waters—nor do the commercial fishing boats that once trawled them. Instead, “party boats” go out—the Marilyn Jean, the Sea Queen VII, the Ocean Eagle V, the Capt Dave—to take groups of people fishing out on international waters for fifty or sixty dollars a day, as they have as far back as the 1940s. The Brooklyn VI is a white boat with blue trim, a 110-foot supercruiser, powered by three turbo Detroit diesel engines. The ghosts of fish of yore are tangible in the stink from the moment you step on deck.

Wearing rubber overall slickers they call skins, these thirty-odd men—and they are all men—are hunting bluefish, a darker, oilier fish, something like a massive sardine. Not so delicious, unless you know how to deal with the oil by smoking or broiling or barbecuing.

The boat sets off leaving the dim line of the Rockaways behind us. The Brooklyn VI dips and then soars, breaks through each wave taking on the rhythm of the sea, sending spray and foam to the sides. When the horn sounds, two dozen lines are in the water within seconds.

You get out into the deep, and you’re surrounded by gray. You feel the salt on your skin, which becomes a film over all your body until you too are of the sea.

Every boat has its core guys. They are cops, firefighters, real estate guys. Glen Evans goes out as much as possible—Friday, Saturday, Sunday. He used to have a girlfriend, he says, but he didn’t want her to join him fishing. The punch line comes as expected: The relationship didn’t last. The fishing did.

The boat has Furuno fish-seeking radar, so the captain moves when the fish do. Three other boats hover around the same spots. This way, everyone gets his money’s worth in fish.

We’re ducking and soaring. Throwing bunker into the blue sky so it lands in the gray sea. A whirring and then a plop.

One man doesn’t bother closing the door to the tiny bathroom and stands there pissing, the metal door flapping in the wind, the saltiness blowing in, and then turns to walk out, still zipping up his fly.

Sometimes the conversation turns serious: “Do you consider yourself an alcoholic?” “I’m one hundred percent alcoholic—I admit that.” One man says, “My wife died eight years ago, of cancer. I became addicted to fishing, like any other drug.” But most talk is of trivial things: “The only thing worse than cherry Pepsi is Dr. Pepper.” “I kind of like Dr. Pepper.” Days could pass in this kind of talk—and they do.

You cross into another medium, the wet, the dark, the sliminess of it, and you extract life. Back at the dock, you walk off the boat carrying a plastic bag bulging with fish.


“HIS face was dead gray, East River gray,” Saul Bellow wrote in the 1970s, and in fact, by this time the city’s waters had lost life. Summer after summer passed when bluefish failed to move north into New York Harbor. Almost no porgies or sea bass swam in, and only a few summer fluke hovered near Sandy Hook Bay just south of the city. “Inshore, it’s dead,” said one Long Island fisherman. “You have to go out 68 to 72 miles to find the ocean alive.” Many of the fish that could be found could not be safely eaten. In the 1970s, the State Department of Environmental Conservation banned most commercial fishing in the Hudson River and advised children and women of childbearing age against eating any Hudson River fish because of unsafe levels of cancer-causing PCBs.

Yet here are three Bronx men lying on the silken green grass in a park by the water on City Island with their rods against the fence and their lines in the water, talking about fishing the dank, mucoid waters of the half-abandoned city where they grew up.

They remember in the 1970s kitting out a Blue Ribbon or Schaefer or Rheingold beer can with some twine weighted down with rocks or spark plugs they found on the street, for a makeshift fishing rig. They would turn the can like a reel. They would bait with raw dough from the bodega.

They remember tying rope to the window frames of a sunken car and heaving it up out of the Bronx River—just the metal frame, no tires, no motor, no dashboard, no seats—to find it full of fish, clams, and crayfish, so that became the fishing technique, dragging stripped cars from the water, an automobile-caught seafood stew.

They remember catching big perch, crayfish, shrimp, green frogs, and, once, a snapping turtle in the Bronx River where it runs through the botanical garden and the zoo. “The frogs usually come out when it rains hard,” says Emmanuel Nwogu, “the kind of frogs they sometimes sell at delicatessens—not a bullfrog.”

“My mom used to say, ‘Papi, where you get this from?’ I say, ‘I get this from the Bronx Zoo,’ ” says John Rivera, who’s wearing a whistle and a wooden cross around his neck.

They remember using clams, bunker blood, and sand worms as bait—“The fish will strike,” says Emmanuel.