The Bottom of the Harbor by Joseph Mitchell Read Free Book Online

Prices. World Building, New York.” All at once, while looking at the old bottle, I became conscious of the noises of the market seemingly far below, and I stepped over to one of the boarded-up windows and tried to peep down at South Street through a split in a board, but it wasn’t possible. Louie continued to go through the bureau drawers. “Here’s something,” he said. “Look at this.” He handed me a foxed and yellowed photograph of a dark young woman with upswept hair who wore a lace shirtwaist and a long black skirt and sat in a fanciful fan-backed wicker chair. After a while, Louie reached the last drawer in the last bureau, and looked in it and snorted and slammed it shut. “Let’s go in the rear part of the floor,” he said.
    Louie opened the door, and we entered a hall, along which was a row of single rooms. There were six rooms, and on their doors were little oval enameled number plates running from 12 to 17. We looked in Room 12. Two wooden coat hangers were lying on the floor. Room 13 was absolutely empty. Room 14 had evidently last been occupied by someone with a religious turn of mind. There was an old iron bedstead still standing in it, but without springs, and tacked on the wall above the head of the bed was a placard of the kind distributed by some evangelistic religious groups. It said, “The Wages of Sin is Death; but the Gift of God is Eternal Life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Tacked on the wall beside the bed was another religious placard: “Christ is the Head of this House, the Unseen Host at Every Meal, the Silent Listener to Every Conversation.” We stared at the placards a few moments, and then Louie turned and started back up the hall.
    â€œLouie,” I called, following him, “where are you going?”
    â€œLet’s go on back downstairs,” he said.
    â€œI thought we were going on up to the floors above,” I said. “Let’s go up to the fourth floor, at least. We’ll take turns pulling the rope.”
    â€œThere’s nothing up here,” he said. “I don’t want to stay up here another minute. Come on, let’s go.”
    I followed him into the elevator cage. “I’ll pull the rope going down,” I said.
    Louie said nothing, and I glanced at him. He was leaning against the side of the cage, and his shoulders were slumped and his eyes were tired. “I didn’t learn much I didn’t know before,” he said.
    â€œYou learned that the wages of sin is death,” I said, trying to say something cheerful.
    â€œI knew that before,” Louie said. A look of revulsion came on his face. “The wages of sin!” he said. “Sin, death, dust, old empty rooms, old empty whiskey bottles, old empty bureau drawers. Come on, pull the rope faster! Pull it faster! Let’s get out of this.”
    (1952)

The Bottom of the Harbor
    The bulk of the water in New York Harbor is oily, dirty, and germy. Men on the mud suckers, the big harbor dredges, like to say that you could bottle it and sell it for poison. The bottom of the harbor is dirtier than the water. In most places, it is covered with a blanket of sludge that is composed of silt, sewage, industrial wastes, and clotted oil. The sludge is thickest in the slips along the Hudson, in the flats on the Jersey side of the Upper Bay, and in backwaters such as Newtown Creek, Wallabout Bay, and the Gowanus Canal. In such areas, where it isn’t exposed to the full sweep of the tides, it accumulates rapidly. In Wallabout Bay, a nook in the East River that is part of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, it accumulates at the rate of a foot and half a year. The sludge rots in warm weather and from it gas-filled bubbles as big as basketballs continually surge to the surface. Dredgemen call them “sludge bubbles.” Occasionally, a bubble upsurges so furiously that it brings a mass of sludge along with it. In midsummer, here and there