Underwater, a Train, a Dinette and Don\'t Forget the Chevy

September 16, 2012, 11:00 am

By JAMES BARRON

Nicki Pombier Berger, who is listed as one of the speakers at an event called Underwater New York, is unequivocal: She is “terrified” of diving. She has never wanted an up-close-and-personal look at what she will be talking about at the South Street Seaport Museum, namely, the stuff that has piled up over time at the bottom of the Hudson River or the East River or New York Harbor - the jetsam of New York.

“Oh, no. You probably couldn't pay me enough to go down there,” she said, adding that she is claustrophobic and that wriggling into diving gear and venturing into the deep “sound so awful to me.”

So the list she helped compile of more than 75 objects beneath the waters around New York is “speculative information that we find through old newspaper articles,” she said.

And what will take place on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. are readings of original stories from Underwater New York, a Web site that focuses on objects reported to be down under, from a Formica dinette table to a grand piano to 1,600 half-ton bars of silver.

“For us it's what can you imagine from your own situation, about an imagined life” - the life of an object that ended up sharing space with the fish, Ms. Berger said.

“The easiest metaphor is the hidden life beneath the surface,” she said. “Fiction imagines it; oral history asks about it; this project asks people to do both.”

The inspiration for Underwater New York was a 2009 article in New York magazine that mentioned dead bodies, stripped cars and even a baggage train. The train had plunged into the river in 1865 near Peekskill after smashing into a drawbridge that was open ed for a sloop to pass through. “The signal-man says he showed the usual danger signal, which the engineer on the train did not see or unheeded,” The New York Times reported the morning after the accident.

There are shipwrecks, of course. But the New York magazine article also said the river and harbor bottoms constituted a huge underwater parking lot. Every make and model had been dumped there. The article quoted a police diver who gave directions like these to another diver: “Go to the Chevy, make a left, and if you come to the Dodge you've gone too far.”

Underwater New York held its first event aboard the Frying Pan, a former Coast Guard lightship docked at Pier 66a, at West 26th Street and the Hudson River. Appropriately enough, the Frying Pan spent three years underwater after it was decommissioned by the Coast Guard - it sank in Chesapeake Bay. Marine salvage experts brought it to the surface, and new owners moved it to Manhattan.

The readings at the South Street Seaport Museum coincide with an exhibition there prepared by the American Folk Art Museum called “Compass: Folk Art in Four Directions.” Nicole Haroutunian, a co-editor of Underwater New York with Ms. Berger and Helen Georgas, is a longtime museum educator at the folk art museum.

“Maybe there's a character to the objects around the city that is more colloquial” than at sea, Ms. Berger said, adding: “When I imagine the ocean, it's a bottomless thing. There's a shipwreck sense of what I think underwater must be. Here, you find a dinette at the bottom of the East River that's standing upright and may not find its way to Europe, and you realize there actually is a landscape that's denser in the way our thin island is denser than maybe the middle of the country.”