My hurricane

Agnes may now be forgotten, but not by me

The path of Hurricane Agnes from the Gulf up the Eastern Seaboard

I had never lived on or near America’s east and gulf coasts, so when Hurricane Agnes hit in June of 1972, let’s just say I wasn’t ready.  I was living at the time on an old Pennsylvania Railroad barge on the Hudson River in West New York, New Jersey, straight across the river from the 79th Street Boat Basin.  I should explain my circumstances with more specificity, because the words “living” and “barge” can sometimes mean different things to different people.

To me, that barge was a life raft I had escaped to from a $40-a-month apartment on Avenue B and 12th Street in the East Village.  The apartment was palatial for those times and that area, consisting of a tiny hall/foyer, a kitchen, full bath with tub-shower, living room, and at the far end of the place, a decent size bedroom that took a double bed that you could actually walk around on the rare occasions that I went to the trouble of making the bed. 

To make a long story short, I was away from New York on assignment for the Village Voice when every apartment on the sixth floor of the building but mine was broken into and ransacked by marauding junkies.  They broke through the burglar bars of one apartment and then proceeded to go through the walls of the other apartments with an axe.  They did this in broad daylight while everyone was at work.  The first person to return from work entered his apartment to find it burgled and called the cops, sparing my place…kind of.  When I returned from my reporting trip, I found much of the furniture and what was left of my neighbors’ personal belongings jammed into my apartment, because I had given a ballerina who lived on the floor my key so she could take showers in my tub, and she opened the place so neighbors could store their stuff while the walls were being repaired.

That was enough for me.  I checked the Voice on Wednesday, which happened to be the next day, saw an ad that offered “1/2 barge for sale on Hudson,” and I jumped in my car and drove over there and took it.