THE DEVELOPMENT

ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN

I had lived in New York City for six years without a piece of nature that felt like my own, and then suddenly I had one: a long, narrow strip of land abutting the harbor, outside the Staten Island apartment building where I had recently moved from Brooklyn with my then boyfriend. The site was wrecked, abandoned, crowded with different kinds of brambles and leaves, mostly a dull and muddled greenish color. It was a patch of broken concrete shot through by stubborn weeds, some the size of small trees, and marked by eerie details: a fallen streetlamp, a collapsed pier. I walked alongside it most days on my way to the Staten Island commuter ferry, which I rode for twenty-five minutes to Manhattan, and then forty-five minutes more on the subway until I reached the school where I taught. Sometimes I paused on my walk to watch the tough brackish tufts sway in the wind, or I’d press my camera phone up against a gap in the chain-link fencing to take an unobstructed photo of the big cargo ships as they slid slowly out to sea.

As I passed by each day, I noticed new things: tall, stiff, seedpod-topped grasses grew from the basin of a neglected landscaping planter, perhaps twenty feet wide—clearly, they had choked out the planter’s previous occupant, some ornamental species less suited to wild winds and rains. Sometimes I saw fish fins dried out and stuck to the asphalt, or small lemon-yellow songbirds flitting from bush to bush. Buried in the thick brush were remnants of cultivated life: a rosebush nearly enveloped by overgrown juniper, its magenta blossoms mistakable for colorful trash; sprigs of irises growing tilted from a collapsing flower bed. Walking past here in both the daytime and at night, I saw with satisfaction that there was just as much happening in the darkness: unidentifiable scurrying, raccoons crawling out from the trash cans with affronted looks on their sharp faces. One night, under the too-bright cast of a streetlamp, I saw a scrap of red in the brush that made me gasp: as I came closer I saw it was an apple tree, bearing a full load of fruit in mid-November.

The overall effect was apocalyptic—but also beautiful. This strip of land, fifty feet wide at its broadest point and less than fifteen at its narrowest, contained more varied life than anyplace I had been in New York City—or maybe, over time, I had simply put in so much time watching that I was finally able to perceive it, like when you stare at a Magic Eye and suddenly the image appears, projecting from the background. I rarely witnessed anyone else stopping to peer into its disheveled green, to notice the ducks and geese paddling around the base of the blackened pilings. I never saw anybody photograph the night apples, or even recognize they were there. And though this made me feel more alone in the new place I had moved to, surrounded by so much to notice and no sense that we were all seeing the same things, it also made this odd, liminal place feel more specifically mine to love, mine for as long as it remained intact and above sea level. I didn’t yet know that there was a plan to renovate the walkway, to replace what had been destroyed and make the area look safe and normal and whole once again. It was obvious that the sea would reclaim my little strip of nature eventually—but I hadn’t thought to worry about developers claiming it first.

My partner and I had moved to Staten Island because we planned to move in together and thought we might not stay coupled in a Brooklyn railroad apartment, if we had to navigate together a space that was about as wide as he was tall. He had grown up on Staten Island in its suburban middle, and I came from a famously liberal college town in Colorado where you were never more than a few minutes’ drive from a hiking trail. His descriptions of Staten Island read as exotic to me: Catholic school and Italian groceries, Sri Lankan brunch and disco roller-skating. On one of our earliest dates, a few months after Hurricane Sandy ravaged lower Brooklyn, much of coastal New Jersey, and the eastern shore of Staten Island, I asked him whether his parents had been on the island for the hurricane, whether they had been affected. He told me that they had spent Sandy sheltering calmly at home, but Hurricane Irene had hit them hard. He showed me a photo from years back of his mother in the local newspaper. She stood proud and smiling in their kitchen, posing beneath the trunk of a large tree that had crashed through their roof. The hurricane had caused major damage to the house, but nobody had been hurt. This, his mother had told him, was a sign from God. Yes, the world was a dangerous place, but God would ensure that the faithful emerged unscathed.

If she saw the fallen tree as a sign of benevolent protection, I considered it an omen of catastrophic change to come. Hurricane after hurricane had hit Staten Island’s shores over the years, and in the wake of Sandy’s twelve-foot storm surges, a whole neighborhood, Oakwood Beach, was demolished, its residents offered a settlement in exchange for moving out of their homes.¹ Almost five hundred properties were returned to nature.² While I waited out the storm in a tiny room in Williamsburg, far enough inland that the power never stopped flowing, twenty-four lives were lost in Staten Island, most of them in the island’s designated evacuation zones. I knew people in Manhattan or Brooklyn who had lost power and had been trapped downtown for days without cell service or access to public transportation. But here, the effects were much more catastrophic: more than half the deaths recorded in New York City as a result of the hurricane belonged to Staten Island. My partner’s close friend from high school had evacuated with his wife and daughter and returned to find their home inundated. Two years later, we visited that same apartment, which they had renovated and waterproofed since the flood. The floor was covered in tile, the windows brand-new and designed to withstand heavy weather. Few things rested directly on the floor. The newness stood in for what had been destroyed, gesturing toward but not naming the disaster.

Knowing all this, it felt strange to sign the lease on an apartment that sat right on the crumbling waterfront—but the fairly low rent and fairly high ceilings were difficult to pass up. And on a sunny day, almost two years after Hurricane Sandy had hit the east coast, it was difficult to look at the sturdy, well-kept structure and imagine it buffeted by storms. The co-op building we moved into in St. George, a diverse and multicultural area on the North Shore, looked long-lasting. It inspired confidence because it had been around a long time: it was one of a set of converted warehouses built at the water’s edge at the turn of the nineteenth century. (The building we moved into used to store coffee.) Large structural columns left over from when the space had been one continuous open area obtruded and interrupted the layouts of the subdivided units, and the windows looked out onto the sprawling parking lot and a small swatch of open water. Directly adjacent to our building was a company that ran tugboats for the harbor, cute dogged-looking crafts named after real people and bearing their full names painted on the side. In the other direction, a public square that looked populated only during the summer months, when fishermen with their poles came to dangle lines off the railing. After a year of sitting on the same furniture in the same arrangement, gathering my mail in the lobby, and staring out the window at the same quiet view, it became harder and harder to imagine this place as temporary or imperiled. Instead, it simply felt like home.

Time passed. We traded old jobs for new jobs, wrote books, got a dog, got married—and then, when an apartment on our floor went up for sale, we bought our first home together on the side of the building most often battered by the storms, the side with blinding morning sunlight and somber afternoon shadows. From our third-floor window, we looked down directly onto my beloved strip of greenery lining the walkway to the ferry terminal—and with a perfect axiomatic view, I could see into the deepest, densest parts, where feral cats slept beneath the rotting boards of wrecked boardwalk and one long pedestrian pier tilted precariously into the water, paused mid-fall. We built a long desk against one bank of windows and sometimes worked there side by side. I wrote parts of an apocalyptic novel while staring out at the planted pines and the resurgent shrubs whipping back and forth in the wind during heavy rains.

The lush, crumbling landscape was a useful prompt for thinking about deep time and not-so-distant futures: its slumped structures and eroding shapes made the clean-cut, fast-moving world of big-city fashion, culture, and finance feel a little bit like a lie. It opened up a space for imagining what might come next, what the world might look like as the water begins to rise up and claim its space, the world of the future that would replace our own.

Becoming a homeowner was like joining a secret club: our neighbors spoke to us more and told us unexpected things about where we lived. We learned that the homeowners’ association had a policy of trapping and euthanizing the raccoons that lived under the abandoned dock. We learned who was a retired cop and who was a retired nurse, who was a Melville expert and who had voted for Trump. We learned that the entire first floor had flooded during Sandy, with water up to the thigh—and that the wrecked shoreline, hastily cordoned off by chain-link fencing, wasn’t the work of Sandy, as I had assumed, but of Hurricane Irene a year earlier. This fact was alarming—at the same time, it seemed to alarm no one around me, at least not visibly. Maybe they had a head start on coming to terms with the precarity of our position, or maybe what seemed like apathy was actually acceptance, or resignation. It’s difficult to advocate for a piece of land that nobody seems to care much about, and without the backing of developers drawn by the promise of rising property values and new, profitable projects, repair and reconstruction lack a sense of urgency.

Our building sits in stark contrast to the development in Brooklyn Bridge Park, which was hit by Sandy while still under construction. The park’s design was shored up with features designed to resist similar weather events in the future: the grade of the land raised with geographical prosthetics, the edgelands planted with flood-resistant species. Soon after, the park was complete—a model of resilience, affluence, and forward-thinking care. In St. George, the waterfront has simply been fenced off for almost two decades, left to slump a few inches further into the harbor each year: the convergence of a complex engineering problem, low community engagement, and a piece of land whose value was difficult to define, difficult to leverage, and difficult to wring a profit from.

We also learned that the other members of our little complex of converted warehouses saw the damaged waterfront very differently from me—as absent of life, rather than serving as a refuge for it. Many of them were retired and had lived here since the 1980s or ’90s: some remembered when it had been a well-maintained walkway, planned and landscaped with areas where you could sit and stare out at the water. Others remembered the recreation center that had stood there from 1934 to 2010, a 3.4-acre complex built out on a large wooden pier. Where damp-darkened pilings and open water now stood, people had played basketball and taken arts and crafts courses. The center had collapsed years ago, but a small security office still stood by its former entrance, slender young branches growing toward the sunlight from inside its weathered walls.

As a refugee from New York City neighborhoods that had gentrified in time-lapse around me, I found it refreshing to find a piece of land in the city that hadn’t been capitalized on, hadn’t been developed—a space whose exchange value and use value were compellingly obscure. Before moving to Staten Island, I had been pushed from one neighborhood to another by the economic churn of the city—small, homegrown eateries pushed out by snazzy, interior-designed restaurants, and long-occupied family buildings replaced by impossibly tall, impossibly narrow luxury condos. An empty lot allowed to remain empty felt, paradoxically, like a sign that I’d be able to stay. But to my neighbors, the damaged waterfront was a blight, suppressing property values—and now that I was a stakeholder, I was supposed to feel the same way, to root for the eradication of small mammals and look forward to the borough’s plans, long-delayed, to rebuild the walkway and turn the crumbling concrete into crisp new pavement. It was true that the space was not pristine; you sometimes saw odd things in there that had been tossed over the fence—like a bowling ball or a brand-new, blindingly white pair of sneakers. But it was a special place, an unusual place, I had attached to it the way it was, and by the time the city announced that it was going to begin exploring how the area’s renovation might actually be done, I no longer wanted it to change at all.

Slowly, gradually, I realized that the changes had already begun, were already in progress. Of course, I loved the abandoned land because it was honest about its own erosion, degradation, and transformation—about the fragility of seemingly permanent materials like concrete and stone. But at first it seemed like a transformation suspended in time, a permanent ruin, a handful of small seasonal shifts rotating around a steady axis. But after living here two years and then three, I saw exaggerated, ominous versions of the old things emerge, loudly announcing themselves as something new. During storms, the swell now came higher than ever, burying the tips of the pilings under gray water and sloshing over onto the walkway so that the water lapped at the asphalt the way the sea laps at sand. Now, after the storm, I detoured around large glassy stretches of water lingering on the hard surfaces—on the pathway and on the plaza and in the center of the communal lawn. I watched warily as new sinkholes formed in the parking lot, patched sloppily with loose tar and gravel or sometimes stuffed with a bright orange safety cone to warn us away. Last winter, a piece of my abandoned strip of land slid into the harbor, and now, at its narrowest point, the strip is only five feet wide.

Watching the accelerating disintegration of the waterfront made its quiet, melancholy beauty feel less meditative, less serene. When I looked out at the familiar scene, I was more likely to see something unfamiliar in it, an alarming new tilt to the landscape or a gaping hole. I found less solace, and more to worry over—but at the same time, how sad could I be about the loss of a place that I had always known was precarious? When I read news articles about hurricanes, flooding, sea level rise, I always tried to remind myself that these catastrophic changes were part of my home’s destiny, that I would not be living in this apartment far into the indefinite future—or if I did end up doing so, it would be under radically different circumstances. But it was hard not to feel sentimental on a beautiful morning with the heat of the sun reflecting off the harbor’s surface, hard not to feel attached when I thought about the holes we had patched by hand, the wallpaper we had worked all day to install. It was difficult to find the right amount of sentimentality to live with—too much and it felt like I lost touch with the shifting climate, the reality I knew was bearing down on us all, too little and it felt like I lost all sense of home. How can someone live in the present and the future at the exact same moment?

But the strangest thing about living near these changes is attempting to reconcile my view of them with those of my neighbors. On the one hand, nobody who owns property wants to imagine that their property is at risk: flooding is a disaster, but ultimately a random occurrence and one that can be repaired. But once repaired, it’s a matter of chance whether you will be once again unluckily touched by disaster or luckily spared. To live within the basic precarity of life is one thing—to make your home on imperiled land is another. The first-floor residents who were flooded during Sandy sued the building, put their winnings toward new stormproof windows and kitchen floors, and stayed put. The co-op board voted to install new carpets and wallpaper and to try to host a movie night every four months. Walking to the ferry one rainy day, I pointed to the lapping water on the path and said to the woman walking next to me that by next year we might have to find another way to get there. Shaking her head, she replied, “They’ll fix it, they’ll fix it.” A year later, the harbor still comes up to meet the asphalt, and even when the weather is dry the high tide swirls and retracts over the edge of the abandoned strip. When it rains, a pothole the length and width of a Jeep fills with water, and the next day a family of geese come to paddle gently around in it. I watch them from my third-floor window, and keep a count of the goslings.

A few months ago, the city came to test the structural integrity of the walkway, as it worked on putting together a plan for the waterfront’s re-beautification. Week after week, men worked punching long, deep holes through the asphalt crust, and when they had done enough, they packed up and left. The holes are not so small: you could probably drop a baseball down a dark shaft, certainly a tennis ball. One day, while walking my dog along the waterfront, I stopped and crouched down, lowering my ear to the dark mouth of a hole, listening to the swish of unseen water moving down below. The plan for the revitalized waterfront involves building the walkway back out to its original, uneroded width, adding new ornamental plantings and stainless-steel benches. It’s possible that in five or ten years, I could be leaning over the newly installed railing, peering out at the slow, sleepy procession of cargo ships, cruise liners, trash barges.

It’s a possibility, but what seems more certain is that the sea will rise steadily, in accordance with the models of climate scientists, who warn of a 22 to 36 percent chance of a six-foot flood occurring by 2030. As you extend the model further into the future, that chance becomes 96 percent by the year 2100—essentially a certainty. A flood exceeding the nine-foot mark is equally likely within the same time span—and would be disastrous. A nine-foot flood would mean four or five feet of water in the first-floor lobby of my building, water submerging the wall of mailboxes and the glass case where movie nights are announced on home-printed fliers. Under nine feet of water, only the upper limbs of the scraggly apple tree would be visible—and most of the landmarks in my stretch of wrecked rewilding would be drowned.

I wonder what I would recognize of the area where I’ve lived for six years now—longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. Would the chain link topple or would I see the thin fringe of metal cutting through the water’s surface? Would the cars parked in the lot out front go under, or would they float away? To imagine the destruction of a place I’ve spent so many beloved moments in is not only heartbreaking, it’s physically difficult to do—even as I work to conjure the image of a wave sweeping in through my front door, the picture is eroded and replaced by mundane, typical scenes from my life here, the memory of normalcy etched so deep through repetition that it won’t allow for deviation. The closest I can get is imagining a moment far after the disaster when the waters calm again, high and unreceded. From my third-floor window, you could watch the water lap against the flank of my building, licking at the storm-proofed windows on the ground floor. You could spot the gulls riding high on the gray-blue surface, the endless domain of water stretching all around and shifting in the light. All of these things could be seen from my window in a perfect axiomatic view—that is, if there was anyone still there to see them.

Notes

1.Sydney Kashiwagi, “State Purchased Hundreds of Sandy-Devastated Homes on Island, but One Homeowner Still in Limbo,” Staten Island Advance, October 29, 2019, www.silive.com/news/2019/10/state-purchased-hundreds-of-sandy-devastated-homes-on-island-but-one-homeowner-still-in-limbo.html.

2.Ibid.