The End of Broadway by David Rothenberg & John P. O’Grady
“Now what you boys think you’re doing out here,” the cop in the squad car says as he slows his vehicle to a crawl. We are photographing a traffic light at a nondescript intersection at the border of the village of Sleepy Hollow, New York. Highly suspicious activity.
“No harm meant, officer,” I say. “We are on an expedition to the End of Broadway.”
“A foolish task, son,” says the policeman. “And far from a harmless one as well. There is no way that Broadway can end, because it has never begun.”
Where Broadway Ends, the Clouds Begin, © John P. O’Grady
“But sir, you are aware of the fact that Broadway the street goes all the way from the Staten Island Ferry to just right here, that afterwards the road continues as Route Nine or the Albany Post Road and does keep going, but…”
“Sure kid, any fool with his Wikipedia can tell you that, but haven’t you heard what the Downeaster said to the Massachusetts tourist in the woods of Maine when he asked ‘how far from here to Boston?’ You know his answer I reckon: You can’t get there from here. Broadway is a fantasy. And I’m here to tell you there is no parking anytime on the streets of Sleepy Hollow Manor and you boys had best be on your way.”
“We’re sorry about that and we will be leaving shortly, but I am curious about one thing: what’s that you mean about Broadway never even beginning? Surely we’re not the first pilgrims to have shown up to try to eke meaning out of this spot?”
“Every year I run into a handful of your kind and every time I hope it will be my last. You people spend too much time reading books, digging up stories, trying to make this lonely crossroads into something more than it is. History is bunk. There is no such thing as Sleepy Hollow. I’m sure you are well-informed enough to know that this very borough was known as North Tarrytown until just a decade ago, when our people held a referendum to change the name of the place to Sleepy Hollow. The first year the vote was nay. The second it was yay.”
“Why did they have to vote twice?”
“People fear change. Born in North Tarrytown, you want to keep living in North Tarrytown.”
“Doesn’t that just sound like a lesser part of Tarrytown?”
“Well sure kid, but that’s basically what it is. Sleepy Hollow is just some story about a bumbling nicompoop afraid of some ghost story that no one ever believed in.
“So why do we all read it in school then?”
“Right… guess it’s supposed to be the foundation of American Little-raght--sure… like they taught us in first year at the Police Academy. But I’ve lived here my whole life and the only way this town has gone is downhill. There’s no more industry, and there’s no more ghosts.”
“What used to happen here?”
“Well back when this town knew what’s what, and called itself North Tarrytown we had a big-ass automobile manufacturing plant, the pride of General Motors. Offered work for thousands of people in town. But like everything else in this country that’s gone the way of the headless horseman. Gone, gone, gone.”
The Broadest of Ways, © John P. O’Grady
“What’s there now?”
“Nothing… just empty concrete space.”
“Can we go there?”
“You can sure as hell try but next time if I catch you illegally trespassing I will not take the infraction so lightly. So watch out.”
Something had to give. Like so many American towns in between more famous towns, North Tarrytown was nowheresville after its livelihood had been sucked out. The town did have its famous tale of the headless horseman who rode across the apocryphal bridge in Washington Irving’s Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, published in 1819. But that was a long time ago, and the town had long since given up its name to join the once prosperous manufacturing city of Tarrytown. But today it’s all wan suburbia at the foot of the aging Tappan Zee Bridge. How do we save our communities? What keeps them bustling and alive? Urban theory has done little to comfort us except to say that history matters, culture matters, and stories and walks might save us if we take them seriously. But ten years ago, no one remembered the end of Broadway or has much of an idea of how to fix this town except to change its name.
Welcome to Historic Sleepy Hollow, © John P. O’Grady
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is one of the most famous tales in early American literature. Everyone reads it in school. It’s supposed to be scary because there may or may not be a scary figure who rides across a rickety bridge at night without a head. A classic ghost story. In college you learn it’s one of the first examples that convinced those Europeans that those independent former colonists could write. A glimmer of possible culture in the New World. They’re still teaching us how to read the story. We have to keep the past alive.
The present of Sleepy Hollow is another thing altogether. This town renamed itself upon a story! It had to do something once the livelihood of the town was taken, its very head chopped off. The place tried only half-heartedly to be a tourist destination. There’s a beautifully restored ancient Dutch villa called Philipsburg Manor, put back together with money from the local barons of last century, the Rockefellers. It sits right along Broadway smack in the middle of town. This time it was closed for the season. We see two hipsteresque characters walking on the other side of the blocked gate. “How did you two get in?” I ask.
“Oh, I’m one of the circus monkeys,” says one fellow in a long black coat. The other says nothing. I wonder if they too walked here from the End of Broadway, but I dare not ask. It seemed a futile quest, another anomaly in a day full of puzzles.
The true tourist attraction here is the space filling what is not. The blank concrete plane that once held the factory. Where once streamed out Chevrolet Luminas and Oldsmobile Silhouettes now is the actual present and the imminent future… wide open former industrial space, exactly what ‘made in America’ means today. We have to get in.
I consult a Google Map. It seems that a waterfront green space called Kingsland Point Park ought to be the ticket. It extends between the river and the site of the General Motors Plant right to the West off Broadway, south of the Philipse Manor railway station.
The park still looks somewhat ravaged by recent storms. There were empty playgrounds and benches. A large boulder on the water sits surrounded by orange plastic construction fence. It was identified as Captain Kidd’s Rock, where the legendary pirate met with Lord Philipse to handover his contraband. A handful of lonely runners circle the peninsula round and round. A fenced sandy doggy park with the sign, “no one allowed in without a pet” All in all, a lonely place.
Heading toward the south end of the park we see the 1883 Lighthouse in the distance. But there is a locked chain link fence. How hard will we work to get through? Turns out enough other people have had this same idea, the bottom right edge has been bent back, and we easily slid through. Beyond is an asphalt path above a rocky beach on the right, a sinuously curved concrete wall on the left. A few big shiny murals suggesting a happy, riverfront scene. But beyond the great wall are high piles of silt and sand. Is this all the space it takes to grind up an entire factory that operated for more than half a century? I doubt it.
Light House Closed, © John P. O’Grady
The lighthouse prods out into the Hudson, appearing either closed forever or fully automatic. Beyond is the forlorn Tappan Zee Bridge, mysteriously built at the very widest point of the Hudson River. In the 1950s Governor Dewey picked this unlikely spot so the State of New York could reap the benefits, not the City’s Port Authority which controlled all narrowed spans closer to town. Soon it will be replaced by what its builders claim will be the world’s widest bridge. It will have tall abstract suspension spires that will once again transform the view. Will it, like its predecessor, also be ever-clogged in traffic both directions from morning on into night?
But most excitingly for us, just to the left is a full and clear opening into the concrete wasteland. At last a gateless gate.
The concrete wasteland is utterly magnificent, a forbidden zone that surely many travellers have been desperate to enter, and that’s why the hole in the fence is here. This is the magnificence of Sleepy Hollow, the empty expanse at the Hudson’s edge.
This, at last, is a worthy vista for the end of Broadway, something utterly lacking at its beginning… space, emptiness, remembrance of industries past. Think of the long extent of this breedeweg from its humble Dutch colonial origins, snaking diagonally through the city and beyond, continuing all the way to this? We no longer make anything so proudly in this region, who can afford to build cars up here with this tax structure? Got to move all that making South, or to China or Korea.
But this vista through the gate is something else. Here is the contemporary equivalent of the Hudson Valley sublime, those big dark Frederick Church and Thomas Cole mountains looming over the narrows at Cold Spring, another day’s walk beyond the end of Broadway, the trumped-up romance of the Catskills and Hudson’s own dream that this was the beginning of the fabled Northwest Passage. Now it’s the twenty-first century and the real Northwest Passage is open to shipping as the oceans heat up and the ice all melts, but here we have the ruins of industry creating its own concrete sublime.
And beyond, beneath the obsolete bridge, the tip of the Empire State Building peeks through, barely, underneath the huge pylons and towers of the ailing bridge. It’s an odd, humble view, not one often photographed or remembered. We are at a crossroads with the wasteland up here, the kind of place you sell your soul to the devil in order the learn how to sing the blues, write real good, or even see.
What use can this vast concrete expanse ever be put to? A huge skateboard park? An obstacle course for drag racing? Later I ask the bartender at the Bridge View Tavern what’s going to happen to the place. “Well, it’s finally been approved,” he says with a shrug. “They’re going to put in a huge shopping mall.”
They used to say that what’s good for General Motors is good for America. Did they mean to close up the plant and put the whole town out of work, or to bail out the company with our goddamn money. Tell that to the people of formerly North Tarrytown, now Sleepy Hollow.
The mess will be cleaned up and we have yet another place to shop, just a stone’s throw from the end of Broadway, if anyone has any money left. Why does it all seem an endless circle of activity, going nowhere in particular? Is that what the guy in the squad car meant when he said this street has never even begun? I overhear a businessman at a nearby table exclaim to his colleagues, two Sinhalese brothers, as I finish up my half-Cuban half-Vietnamese sandwich. “A bird in the hand’s worth two in the bush! Oldest fucking trick in the book….”
I leave the town but I start to see Sleepy Hollow everywhere. Driving in New York City traffic I am stuck behind an old green Sentra with a red fading bumper sticker saying “I lost my head in Sleepy Hollow, NY” In the supermarket I see the headline of the Journal-News, saying “Another Shooting in Sleepy Hollow.” It was three days after we visited, just down the street from the Bridge View at another bar called Match. They caught the guy, named Ward, who tried to kill two people who both survived. By no means the only incident like this in the past few months.
Plenty of comments about the situation online. Tarrytown Girl Forever said, “If this place was still North Tarrytown, this incident probably would not have happened.” What did she mean by that? Did she suggest that the recall to history promoted only anger and local despair? On the other hand, Critical Observer wrote that “if this shootout had happened at the Writers Centre, there would have been an uproar the likes no one has seen in this village in a very long time.” Writers Center? How did we miss that? Turns out it is just a few streets off Broadway, right by the shore. A sure reason to go back. I lost my head at Sleepy Hollow. The place gave me no answer for the reason America’s small towns tend to be dying anymore than I found the reason why Broadway stops here. Washington Irving may have been right, it is only in stories that the New World proves it has culture at all, and finally deserves to be taken seriously.
Beyond the End of Broadway, © John P. O’Grady