On the Waterfront

Around the gritty Brooklyn neighbourhood of Red Hook, Steve Tarpin is better known as the ‘pie guy’. I found the Miami native at the end of a trail of hand-painted signs saying ‘key lime pies’ and pointing, more or less, in the direction of a restored Civil War-era warehouse at the foot of Pier 41.

Outside it was all New York waterfront: a line of ships lay at anchor in the bay like ducklings on a pond, the nearby Statue of Liberty keeping a motherly eye on them; squatty tugboats ran in and out of the Erie Basin, their throaty roar mingling with the shrieks of hovering gulls. But once inside Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pies, it was all tropics: the burbling sounds of Hawaiian slack-key guitar mingled with the citrus aroma of freshly baked pies; colourful beach ephemera, postcards from Florida and snaps of fishing trips covered one wall; and then there was Steve, his shirt a vibrant maze of blooming flowers. 

I asked Steve about pictures of him posing with metre-long silver fish in his hands, an equally big smile beaming through his salt-and-pepper beard. I tipped Gulf of Mexico, maybe Key West. “No, right here,” he chuckled. “Those are stripers – striped bass – they spawn in the Hudson and run through the bay right past Red Hook. A few of us keep boats over in the basin; we call it the Red Hook Yacht Club.” I took a closer look at the photos and sure enough, there in the distance were the cranes and the detritus of an industrial waterfront. Welcome to urban living, Brooklyn style. 

Not all that long ago, Brooklyn was considered what one commentator recently called an outer-borough punch line – the unsophisticated butt of Manhattanite jokes. To them, New York City’s most populated borough was inhabited by the ‘bridge-and-tunnel’ crowd of big-hair, Saturday-Night-Fever holdovers who occasionally sneaked across the East River to queue outside Manhattan’s classier nightclubs.