Two newly published books mine the artistic and queer social histories of the dilapidated Hudson river piers during the 1970s and 1980s: Fiona Anderson's Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront and Jonathan Weinberg's Pier Groups: Art and Sex along the New York Waterfront.

These are distinct projects, which largely resist comparison. Anderson and Weinberg's shared focus on the piers’ creative ecosystems creates overlaps, but their approaches to studying the waterfront's confluence of art, sex, and sexuality diverge. Anderson begins by adapting the artist and activist David Wojnarowicz's written desire that his death be met with protest rather than toothless commemoration. To this end, she writes that Cruising the Dead River “isn't a memorial; it is a demonstration” (10). Weinberg frames Pier Groups as “a scrapbook or family album,” which optimistically aims to cultivate “a possible blueprint for what to do with the future ruins and debris of our present” (17). Both books balance thick analysis of artworks with intensive historical research, alongside a belief that community building in the margins can foster social and artistic freedoms. But Anderson's foregrounding of a politics specifically around “how New York's gay cruising cultures in the late 1970s are remembered and how they have been historicized” holds the two projects apart (8).

Cruising the Dead River opens by exploring the piers’ lure, offering “a material history of the waterfront area as a cruising ground” (13). This segues into an exploration of the ruin as an aesthetic and a trope, in Wojnarowicz's work as well as that of contemporaries like Peter Hujar and Paul Thek. From here, Anderson explores artistic practices which have cruised through time, such as Wojnarowicz's dialogue with Jean Genet and William Burroughs, and Every Ocean Hughes's 2001–7 reimagining of Wojnarowicz's series Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978–79). The final chapter turns to protest in explicit terms. Anderson posits cruising as a strategy for appropriating urban space, and the piers' artists as preservationists of a minority culture otherwise obscured by gentrification and time.

The ruin – as a site and a metaphor – figures as an additional protagonist, and Anderson theorizes “cruising in ruins” as a model for attending to “discontinuous, fragmentary, and ephemeral erotic and social histories” (8). Like the ruin itself, she proposes that such histories resist normative conceptions of progress and productivity. This model affords her access to the scene, her cruising of the piers sidestepping the slippery terrain of overidentification and embracing (to borrow from queer medievalist Carolyn Dinshaw) an unabashed desire to touch across time.

Anderson underscores that Cruising the Dead River is “not so much a book about Wojnarowicz as around him,” which exposes how the spatial politics of the piers facilitated art and erotics (4). But Wojnarowicz was a fixture in and around the waterfront, one of many who cruised for sex and/or a sense of community, and one of many who made art in response to the scene. Given recent institutional interest (2018 saw Wojnarowicz's most extensive retrospective, at the Whitney Museum of American Art), Anderson's call for demonstration is prescient. Even before his death from AIDS-related illness in 1992, the artist was known for his furious responses to the epidemic. And as visitors to the Whitney noted, pilings which once supported the piers were visible from the window of a room given over to a recording of Wojnarowicz's enraged voice, filling the otherwise empty space with a terse sermon on the violence directed at sexual dissidents. “I wake up every morning in this killing machine called america,” he spits, “and I'm carrying this rage like a blood filled egg.”Footnote ¹

Recent years have seen extensive “revitalization” of the river and nearby Meatpacking District, with the openings of the High Line skyway and the Standard Hotel in 2009, the Whitney's own relocation downtown in 2015, and the repurposing of piers into parks. Manhattan's riverside is no longer derelict, and sometimes dangerous, terrain. Anderson's demonstration centres both on how the waterfront's queer history has been written, and on the gentrification which severed the piers from their ties to the sexual culture of which Wojnarowicz was a part. She addresses gentrification's process in terms of visible urban redevelopment, and in terms of what writer and AIDS activist Sarah Schulman dubs a “gentrification of the mind,” describing the homogenization of culture and political imagination that follows. With Wojnarowicz's blood-filled egg exploding against corporate-sponsored white walls, Anderson's call to interrogate how the artist and his milieu are remembered (and to whose benefit) is relieving.

Both Cruising the Dead River and Weinberg's Pier Groups rally against the moralism directed at public sex following the AIDS epidemic, working together to illustrate the breadth of artistic and sexual practices in and around the waterfront. They expose as apocryphal the piers as sexual utopia, or as a space exclusively populated by gay men. In a welcome gesture, Weinberg reads a 1983 scene by the lesbian photographer Morgan Gwenwald, which shows her leather-clad lover peering through a hole in the plywood fence encircling Pier 46. Interviewing Gwenwald, he ascertains that her testimony “suggests the exclusionary nature of the pier scene, but also how it exerted fascination and stimulated longing among people who never participated in it” (14). Anderson highlights how photographs by Leonard Fink show “older men, some overweight, some visibly disabled” (31) and “document the diversity and playfulness of the libidinal queer community of the piers” (32). Both authors pay their due to the trans activists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, whose efforts to provide food and resources to the homeless trans youth who lived on the waterfront call attention to yet another way in which the space was used.

Weinberg's “pier groups” are expansive, lingering on unexpected influences and connections around the river. Some are serendipitous: Fink's camera chances on Wojnarowicz, while in the gay porn film from which Weinberg takes his title, director Arch Brown's protagonists circulate in view of Gordon Matta-Clark's intervention Day's End (1975), an almond-shaped excision from Pier 52's wall which allowed the sun's progress to variably illuminate its interior. Weinberg's visually lush study is interested in “how the images speak to one another,” and offers a gratifying sense of accretion (155). By lassoing together the usual suspects with those (like Gwenwald) less obviously associated with the scene, the book insists on a densely populated history.

The first chapter of Pier Groups guides readers through a web of erotic “initiations” to the postindustrial Hudson, demonstrating how it absorbed discrete subjects into a communal experience. Subsequent studies take as central Matta-Clark; Wojnarowicz's Rimbaud series; an inventory of the waterfront's key photographers; and back to Wojnarowicz, turning to Pier 34 – the “art pier” – and the ways in which he (and others) shaped and employed it. At points, Weinberg's organic movement through artworks and events feels like Anderson's “cruising in ruins” put to practice, and is likewise permissive in its approach to narrative and the archive. At others, headings are used to single out artists, though sometimes, as with an indication towards Kiki Smith, the lack of information which follows feels disjointed.

Pier Groups dedicates room to Day's End and on-site works by Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, and others, bringing in artists from outside (and sometimes antagonistic to) LGBTQ lifeworlds. But these projects were facilitated by the same material and political conditions which otherwise encouraged the piers’ sexual demographic, a friction which stands to be further explored. Where in Anderson's book these conditions are central, in Weinberg's such detail (though not lacking) is matter-of-fact, perhaps a consequence of his fear that situating “art in its so-called social context” can glue works to stock readings, by which they lose their “ability to astound” (5). Weinberg's answer – to defamiliarize them through seemingly incongruent juxtapositions – is well taken, but his desire to recover the piers’ chance and excitement need not foreclose a more decisively politicized analysis of the scene, particularly given his desire for the book to stand as a “possible blueprint” for the cultivation of future margins.

This point extends to Weinberg's tone. Memoir-like moments reveal that he frequented the piers during the period in question, and he wonders whether he crossed paths with Wojnarowicz or Acconci, slipping towards a sentimentality which is elsewhere disavowed. But grounding and evocative descriptions – “the stench of excrement and garbage on a hot, humid July afternoon” – work in tension with Weinberg's fascination at having been there, and emphasize the environment's strange magic (16). Though he largely avoids deriving authority from his involvement, instead highlighting the slippage between his imperfect memory and subsequent research, Weinberg's first-person account could push further. In the spirit of “creating moments of freedom and liberation in the most unlikely circumstances,” sentimentality might not be a dirty word (17). Were Weinberg to foreground the stakes of historicization as an act of bearing witness, his meticulous social history might be better positioned to echo the defiance posed by the art at its core.

In his final chapter, Weinberg singles out Wojnarowicz's pronouncement that the Pier 34 project was “something possible anywhere there are abandoned buildings. This is something possible everywhere” (187). But for Wojnarowicz to be right demands resistance to physical and psychic gentrification. Weinberg helps us to visualize the piers from a diversity of perspectives. But while sharing his hope for “future ruins,” Anderson asks that we observe the arc of the piers’ dismantling, in order that present possibilities be better equipped to resist a recurring push for normative progress. How can a history of the piers inform new efforts to cultivate social, sexual, and economic liberation? And how can the art they generated inspire new modes of cultural resistance? As the world emerges into the aftermath of a new virus, this attention to possibility and worldmaking will be crucial, and in different ways both books make a timely intervention.