Our canoe launched from a cluster of old dock posts jutting out of the water, near a curious white crab and a partly-submerged, ancient nudie magazine. We paddled down the Maspeth Creek towards a wide and calm turning basin in the much more notorious Newtown Creek. As we neared the Shoofly Pie, the tugboat built in 1941 that would act as the floating stage for the band, one of the crew members emerged from the cabin.
“They’re talking about us on the radio,” she reported. “Saying, ‘There’s a bunch of canoes under the Pulaski and some… stuff… happening?”
The band, the Wollesonics, warmed up as the first signs of the audience trickled in by canoe, dinghy, and zodiac, floating genially around the tug’s black hull. The Wollesonics were eleven members that day, though the lineup of the band varies, bandleader Kenny Wollesen, who started the band in 2004, explained: “The band fluctuates according to people’s crazy schedules. But anybody can play. Nobody is turned away. There’s no barrier to entry.” Today’s lineup included saxophones, cymbals, maracas, a guitar with an amp strapped to the guitarist’s back, and a self-made instrument called a “ribaphone,” consisting of pots and pans, cymbals, bells, a bamboo marimba, and a xylophone, among other parts.
As the band started to play, several hype-men and women took turns dancing and waving a black flag from various points on the boat. The band moved en masse from the roof to the back deck, to be closer to the audience, which was starting to grow. A couple of long canoes from the North Brooklyn Boat Club arrived, bearing a dozen or so people in each, both children and adults. A little girl with a unicorn painted on her face had brought her goldfish aboard in a plastic container; she gently tilted it slightly towards the music so they could both see the band a little better.
“This one is called Makeout Machine!” Wollesen announced, to scattered applause and canoe-thumping. The audience cheered supportively throughout, occasionally raising their oars in enthusiasm. In the end, a rough count showed 76 audience members in 19 boats. “I was kinda expecting like five boats and twenty people, so that really blew me away,” said the captain of Shoofly Pie, N.D. Austin, “Three canoes got lost —don't ask me how — and ended up paddling around Dutch Kills. Never made it to the concert.”
The performance is part of an ongoing series, dubbed “Lost Islands of New York.” The spot in Newtown Creek where it was held was once Mussel Island, at the confluence of the Maspeth and Newtown creeks. No one ever lived there, and commercial boats were, to their annoyance, constantly forced to swerve around it. In 1929, it was dredged to create the turning basin, vanishing forever beneath the water.
The event was conceived of by the Tideland Institute, a small organization dedicated to bringing arts and culture to the waterways of the city and beyond. “We wanted to bring people together to celebrate on the water,” explained Danielle Butler, one of Tideland’s founding members. “When you come to a space to celebrate, you can also come to a moment of realizing, inside that time of celebration, how we change our natural environment.”
“Many places in the New York harbor that were once land are now water,” added N.D. Austin, also a founder of Tideland. To make this event happen, Tideland Institute collaborated with the HONK NYC! brass band festival and various NYC boat clubs, including the North Brooklyn Boat Club, Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club and the Long Island City Community Boathouse.
The band marched fore and aft, circling the boat as they played; the audience paddled in gentle circles to keep up. A couple in an inflatable dinghy offered fish crackers to the occupants of a canoe as they drifted past one another. The sun dropped behind a large fuel tank as the sharp glints on the water faded into a general green murkiness.
As the concert drew to a close, the Shoofly began to motor back to her home. The audience followed for a while, then broke away, paddling towards the rest of their evenings as the sun set and the band played a few final numbers from the bow, facing toward the darkening and colorful sky.
“The various NYC boat clubs have a bunch of different events where people are invited out onto the water, but I think this was one of the largest joint events in several years,” said Celeste LeCompte, of the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club.
“This was a fun experience,” Wollesen, the Wollesonics band leader, said meditatively, as the band packed up. “Usually when you play music, the audience is one place. Here, the audience was floating all around us. It wasn’t a stagnant situation.” He laughed, and soon enough the concert and the band had vanished altogether, echoing Mussel Island, another lost blip in time on the waterways of a changing city.
