The View From the Bridge

From the window of the Eagle's Eyrie I can see five of the old piers that for so many years were part of Brooklyn's thriving shipping industry. The photo above shows these piers and our Brooklyn Heights neighborhood from the Manhattan side of the East River.   Today, after twenty years the city opened Pier One,  the first of an ambitious plan to turn these old docks into the Brooklyn Bridge parks.  I've been wondering what life must have been like in Brooklyn when these piers were the lifeblood for many immigrant workers and the mob controlled the wharves as in the great  1954 Elia Kazan movie On the Waterfront  which starred Marlon Brando.  Back then the struggling immigrants were Italians, who fled Europe to earn enough money to feed their starving families back home and would stand outside the docks and hope that the longshoremen bosses would choose them for the daily jobs unloading the boats.  This doesn't sound much different than the Hispanic "illegals" who hope they'll get some day labor in New York or on Long Island or in the meat-packing towns in the mid-west does it?

Saturday night Greg and I went to see the revival of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge which stars Scarlett Johansson and Liev Schreiber.  This play is classic Miller-an understated tragedy that occurs in the confines of family and home.  Apparently the plot was based on a true story that Miller heard from a lawyer friend when Miller lived in Brooklyn Heights.  It concerned an Italian longshoreman in the Red Hook nieghborhood (which is about 3 miles from here) who snitched on the illegal cousins who were living with him because he was jealous when his young ward (his niece) fell in love with one of them.  A tragic, violent ending results from this act of jealousy and treachery. There were some background stories about Miller's intent in writing this play.  These range from his appreciation of the tragic influence lust can wield on a seemingly good person (based on how he treated his wife after he met Marilyn Monroe) to a response to Elia Kazan for his testimony ("snitching') to the 1952 House Un-American Activities Committee).  The acting and production of this play was excellent, although it didn't grab Greg and me as much as we expected it to.  In retrospect I think its because Miller did too good a job of being understated.  Now that plays and movies have dialogue that holds no bars, his dialogue outlining  the underlying tensions in the family seemed almost too subtle.  The view from my "eyrie" is of a Brooklyn waterfront that has lost its dynamic economic past and is now being groomed to be a pastoral recreation destination but still hovers in a state of sad underdevelopment and lost influence.