By Jacqueline Podewils
As water splashed up and over the railing that linked the Brooklyn Bridge with South Street on late Monday afternoon, we smiled, we soaked our clothes, and we ran back to the seaport. Here comes Hurricane Sandy.
The NYPD cars which had been circling our neighborhood all day, blaring the evacuation advisories, had disappeared. But soon, the calm before the storm was over. I stood on Front Street, all of a sudden alone, and looked to my right; water was beginning to flood. I looked in front where guards with flashlights retreated into the buildings. I turned to my left and broke into a slightly panicked speed walk as I trudged through the rushing water towards home.
The electronic doors of my neighbours building were open. The power had already shut down. I swung open the door and water flowed into the lobby up to my knees. I trucked up the six flights of stairs in the pitch-black stairwell. We were safe and we were staying in the seaport but Sandy was about to hit hard.
Faster than you could tie your shoes, Front Street filled with water. The surge began to rise and within an hour the South Street Seaport of Lower Manhattan was submerged. October 29, 2012: there goes the neighborhood.
Across the street, the water inside the lobby of the Best Western Seaport Inn reflected and glistened through the glass in their front doors. We went out onto the breezy deck and shone the flashlight in the darkness, communicating with the other flashlights in windows around the block. It appeared as though 20 per cent of the locals had stayed behind.
The sandbagging, the boards, the tape together we had built up a common hope that we might all be okay. After all, Irene had cried wolf this time last year. The night before we gathered at our neighbourhood bar, the Nelson Blue, where everyone knows your name and not just because so many of us, including owner Michelle Noble and her husband Ricky, is a native of British Columbia.
Suddenly it felt like we were living in a ghost town. Decorative Halloween cobwebs hung from ceilings and spooked an even more so isolated neighborhood. Debris began to float in the murky water. We looked down the stairwell and found the watery sludge rising in the concrete corridors. It was not unlike the images from the movie Titanic. You would have had to swim underwater to open the door and come up and out on the other side if you had any desire to escape the building.
We spent the night listening to the walls glass panels buzz. I had thought it was going to be an exciting storm with loud rain; we would bundle up and watch with excitement. Instead it was as if someone dumped eight feet of sewage water into Front Street and just left it there. Would it go away? Were we stuck?
By 3am the water had disappeared due to low tide. It came back during high tide around nine but, by then, those who had witnessed the flood were already on the streets taking in the damage of the wreckage.
The smell was awful. The water in the street was a yellowy-green brown. I climbed into Nelsons that Tuesday morning. Ketchup and liquor bottles drifted behind me. Large benching was tossed on its side. The water mark could be spotted by a line of residue on the doors. The writing on chalkboard which usually listed the different types of draft beer had been washed away; it now simply said DRAFTS at the top. Was I not just sitting at this bar laughing the other night? Now its glory was covered in slime.
Farther down Front Street ,soaked clothing from the seaport shops and dead mannequins lay. A street pole was down. Croissants and blue cheese were spotted outside Barbarini, a favourite Italian spot. The owner declared, All the prosciutto is ruined, and proceeded to show me how the pasta on the lower shelves had been softened by the water; the pasta on the high shelves still hard.
It wasnt just the prosciutto that was ruined. Parking garages pumped out water from where cars on the lower floor had swam. Stores were closed because of flood damage. The pleasant walk home through the oldest part of Manhattan was a memory.
Sandy changed our world except for one thing the neighbours.
Neighbours pitched in to clean the Nelson Blue, where I often sit to write. I was beyond willing to take down the hanging ladles, still full from the flood, and the dishes layered with a yellow residue, and stack them on the trash-filled sidewalk. John Corr and his dog Marley invited us all up for a glass of wine in the candlelight before chauffeuring us to an uptown phone charge station. The guy at the pizza place that was in a zone with power became our saviour when he handed us a box and said, correctly, Here, you probably dont have any food. We didnt have any cash, either, because the ATMs were down. Or hot water. But you immediately find out that what you need is here for you when you need it.
Its as times like this when we keep together, especially those people called New Yorkers. The title in and of itself is whats worth protecting. We get through anything because spirits only die if you let them and no one around here is going to let the spirit of New York die. And thus this citys unlike any other; it jumps back fast. Theres not only a sense of family during a tragedy, theres pride what doesnt kill us only makes us stronger.
Flashbacks and comments referencing September 11th are not unusual in Lower Manhattan. The mentality is to simply spring back, however frustrating it was. What else is there to do besides shout profanities at the wind, quite literally? Move uptown? I dont think so. Move out of town? Never.
Where were you when Hurricane Sandy hit downtown Manhattan? I was in downtown Manhattan. Ill never forget it. I was in the heart of it, where I belong. I may never see the Freedom Tower in total darkness again and quite frankly I dont want to. But Ill never forget the day Sandy came to visit and the days surrounding her arrival and departure; they may make up the worst memories but they also make up the best of my life. What a surreal moment in time.
Jacqueline Podewils is a New York-based writer who was born in Kelowna and grew up on Vancouver Island. She was a frequent visitor to Vancouver, where he mother was raised. Michelle Noble, one of the owners of Nelson Blue, was born in Nanaimo and is a former Vancouver resident, as is her husband Ricky.
