On July 4th, 1979, the Waterways Project’s first event, a marathon poetry reading, was held at the South Street Seaport. Barbara had dealt with city agencies through her activist roles in the artist tenants movement and as the director of a children’s theater. When organizing each fair, before coming into the community, she contacted local arts organizations, small presses, and planning boards to assure that the communities wanted the event, that local presses would exhibit, and local poets would have an opportunity to read. We were able to get a poem from each reading poet in advance which we then published in the Waterways Magazine that was issued at each fair site and served to document each event.
We arrived on a rainy morning at the Seaport with books, tables, umbrellas, and our dog. The poets performed under an umbrella in the rain.
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The second event that summer was held at the Stapleton Pier, two Staten Island Rapid Transit stops from the ferry terminal, and a walk over glass strewn, cracked concrete streets. The Staten Island poetry community joined us on the abandoned pier which would be torn down in 1980’s for a proposed Navy base. There’s no longer a Stapleton Pier. There is no Navel base. Like many things in Stapleton, Staten Island, there remain only unfulfilled dreams of a revitalized community.
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We held the next book fair on the Manhattan pier where the Navy would later exhibit the Intrepid. One of our community partners brought a portable stage with microphones and amplifiers on a truck. But the rains again forced us to pack away the books.
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We were rained out at the newly opened pier-park at Long Island City. We took a borrowed car full of tables and books to the site in case the downpour stopped. Other optimistic souls (poets and publishers) also arrived and joined us for coffee and banana bread in the car where we stayed with the dog for several hours. Interestingly enough, people did arrive in cars to see if there would be an event and a reporter from Newsday showed up to photograph the fair had there been one.
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Our first Greenwich Village event was held on August 19th at the North River Bulkhead, Bank and West Streets. The wooden tables we made for the fairs, cartons of books, a portable microphone, and the rest of our family were loaded onto our heavy duty green dolly and I pushed the Waterways Project of Ten Penny Players along the cobblestone streets from Greenwich Street to the Hudson River. We set up a collective exhibit for publishers who could not attend. There was no rain.
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We held our sixth event under the Brooklyn Bridge. We set up tables at the Brooklyn Ferry Landing in the space next to Barge Music.
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On September 8th and 9th we were in Kingston at the opening of the Maritime Museum in Roundout Creek.
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We published an October issue after the first New York Is Book Country event, which was held along Fifth Avenue. Our small poetry presses were swallowed up by the huge event which exhibited the work of the city’s large publishing industry along many midtown blocks. The NY Book Fair had a booth where Barbara helped out and I emceed the small press poetry readings in front of the Museum of Modern Art.
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The last 1979 issue of the New York State Waterways Project magazines was published in December when we presented a book fair and reading as part of the NYC celebration of the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics.
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