Free The Bottom of the Harbor by Joseph Mitchell

bricks and brownstone blocks and plaster and broken glass from hundreds upon hundreds of condemned tenements in the New Grounds. The ruins of the somber old red-brick houses in the Lung Block, which were torn down to make way for Knickerbocker Village, lie there. In the first half of the nineteenth century, these houses were occupied by well-to-do families; from around 1890 until around 1905, most of them were brothels for sailors; from around 1905 until they were torn down, in 1933, they were rented to the poorest of the poor, and the tuberculosis death rate was higher in that block than in any other block in the city. All the organisms that grow on wrecks grow on the hills of rubble and rubbish in the Subway Rocks and the New Grounds.

    The comings and goings of the baymen are watched by a member of the staff of the Bureau of Marine Fisheries of the State Conservation Department. His name is Andrew E. Zimmer, his title is Shellfish Protector, and his job is to enforce the conservation laws relating to marine shellfish and finfish. Mr. Zimmer is a Staten Islander of German descent. He is muscular and barrel-chested and a bit above medium height. He is bald and he is getting jowly. The department issues him a uniform that closely resembles a state trooper’s uniform, but he seldom wears it. On duty, he wears old, knockabout clothes, the same as a bayman. He carries a pair of binoculars and a .38 revolver. He is called Happy Zimmer by the baymen, some of whom grew up with him. He is a serious man, a good many things puzzle him, and he usually has a preoccupied look on his face; his nickname dates from boyhood and he has outgrown it. He was born in 1901 on a farm in New Springville, a truck-farming community on the inland edge of the tide marshes that lie along the Arthur Kill, on the western side of Staten Island. In the front yard of the farmhouse, his father ran a combined saloon and German-home-cooking restaurant, named Zimmer’s, that attracted people from the villages around and about and from some of the Jersey towns across the kill. Picnics and clambakes and lodge outings were held in a willow grove on the farm. His father had been a vaudeville ventriloquist, and often performed at these affairs. Specialties of the restaurant were jellied eels, clam broth with butter in it, and pear conchs from the Lower Bay boiled and then pickled in a mixture of vinegar and spices and herbs. As a boy, Mr. Zimmer supplied the restaurant with eels he speared in eel holes in the marshes and with soft-shell clams that he dug in the flats along the kill. Until 1916, when the harbor beds were condemned, Prince’s Bay oysters were sold from the barrel in the saloon side of the restaurant. Friday afternoons, he and his father would drive down to the Oyster Dock in Prince’s Bay in the farm wagon and bring back three or four barrels of selects for the week-end trade. In 1915, after completing the eighth grade, Mr. Zimmer quit school to help his father in the restaurant. In 1924, he took charge of it. In his spare time, mainly by observation in the marshes, he became a good amateur naturalist. In 1930, he gave up the restaurant and went to work for the Conservation Department.
    Mr. Zimmer patrols the harbor in a lumbering, rumbly old twenty-eight-foot sea skiff. It has no flag or markings and looks like any old lobster boat, but the baymen can spot it from a distance; they call it the State Boat. Some of Mr. Zimmer’s duties are seasonal. From March 15th to June 15th, when pound-netting is allowed, he makes frequent visits to the nets at pull-up time and sees to it that the fishermen are keeping only the species they are licensed for. When the mossbunker seiners come into the harbor, he boards them and looks into their holds and satisfies himself that they are not taking food fishes along with the mossbunkers. Now and then during the lobstering season, he draws up alongside the lobster boats inbound from the grounds and