Manhattan’s hills tend to get flattened, not forged. And yet one morning, sidewalk mountains of luggage raised the modest slopes of Fort Washington Avenue into a ravine. The building supers there, without clear cause and seemingly all at once, had become possessed of a tidying spirit and finally cleared out the countless long-since-forgotten items from the storage areas of their basements. These were primarily old steamer trunks that former residents had left behind when they’d died or moved to new homes, new neighborhoods, and new cities in the preceding decades. Jewish refugees, fleeing the Nazis on ships, had brought the huge wooden boxes to the Heights; many would have transported entire families’ material lives to New York. Now they lay disinterred on the street.
"You would open them up and there'd be drawers and hangers. They were fantastic,” Jim Dwyer, the longtime columnist and chronicler of New York City, told the NYPL’s Community Oral History Project in 2015. "Not little—they were substantial things. People would practically rent them out now for parties." Given the timespan of his tenure in the Heights, this cleaning spree probably took place sometime in the 80’s or 90’s, though Dwyer did not specify a year.
Out on the curb some half-century post-voyage, the trunks announced their individual histories to passersby. Their weathered sides were covered with stickers indicating sailing points of origin and modes of transport: Hamburg, White Star Line, any number of unnamed others. As time flowed through Washington Heights and everywhere else, these shed skins of past lives sat hidden deep within old apartment buildings. By then, the neighborhood’s once-substantial Jewish population had decreased, replaced in part by new generations of immigrants from the Caribbean. As with the former trunk owners, circumstance had sent many of the new arrivals uptown, often to many of the same buildings.
It would be understandable if many people living in the area didn’t often think about their close connections to 1930s Germany. We are busy people who must live in the now to survive. Even for someone like Dwyer with an unusually abiding interest in the local past, I’m sure the day-to-day logistics of life tended to be more front of mind than neighborhood biography. But for a day (or maybe a week, knowing the Department of Sanitation), all that history was briefly visible, piled on the curb. And then, in a flash, it was gone again.
The antique chests so moved Dwyer that he made sure to squeeze in a mention of their appearance when he was interviewed decades later about his nearly forty years living in Washington Heights. I listened to this conversation in October, shortly after his death at 63 from lung cancer. The discussion sparkles with the love for New York and curiosity about its residents that shone through Dwyer’s writing, filtered through the idiosyncratic refractions of memoir, and apparently recorded in a massive, bustling room with a carnival of instruments competing for airtime. “I didn’t want to not mention the steamer trunks,” he says, returning to them a second time in just a few minutes, tangled in reverie. “That was a big memory for me.”
The interviewer doesn’t seem interested in the anecdote. Maybe she’s a little spent after more than an hour of attentive listening, or running short on time. Maybe she is just bemused by this mawkish recollection of garbage day. Whatever the reason, she moves on quickly, attempting to wrap up the interview. But I’ve lingered on it.
Recently, I helped to compile a list eulogizing 500 businesses that have closed during the pandemic—a fraction of the estimated thousands of such losses across the city. The compendium spans glamorous, century-old stalwarts, to community hubs, to short-lived brunch spots whose overpriced mediocrity will be remembered by few and missed by fewer. While working on it, I was repeatedly struck with the vertigo of so much change happening at once, the scenery of so many eras now debris tossed to the street.
Change is obviously a New York constant, but it can be destabilizing to feel history happening so apparently, instead of incrementally accumulating its casualties unnoticed. Imagine waking up on your birthday and glancing at the bathroom mirror, having aged a year (or ten) all at once the night before. Whether or not Lenin actually claimed the opposite, there are no decades where nothing happens. But the weeks where decades take place can make time’s arbitrariness feel like a joke—a sadistic inversion of the parable of the loaves and the fishes, where a supposedly finite interval is somehow dilated for further immiseration.
Processing all this, I’ve often thought back to the trunks stacked along Fort Washington Avenue. Maybe this is how Jim Dwyer felt one lucid morning, waylaid during his rush to the subway, when entire decades appeared for a moment at the top of Manhattan in great heaps to tell their stories. And maybe some of this year’s baggage will re-emerge fifty years down the line to do the same.
Fascinating story!