The Harbor

"I want to get you wandering out of the great game."

In Gloucesterbook's chapter "The Harbor," Raphael Opsimath visits Doctor Ipsissimus Charlemagne and is taken on a tour of the physical and philosophical Dogtown. This photo essay follows the pair on their journey through the Gloucester that is refracted through Bayliss's lens.

East of the Van less than half a mile, where the oddly terraced city fell off to the contours of the inner harbor, Leviathan Court dove directly down the underfall of Spirit Hill into Front Street's shabbiest depression. Looking up that byway, a short double-dead-end T, Rafe faced a gross of souls domiciled in a dozen disrepaired multiple-dwelling Census units. The tallest of the gray clapboard tenements, all occupied on at least three levels, were backed against the base escarpment of the hill he'd surveyed from the park as apparently the most populous quadrant of the city. Above the shelf scraped for the head of the tau from jagged granite (rusted and blackened by two hundred years of exposure to over-salted air and smoke) the brightened houses on the higher ascent, open broadly to the sky, although set as close as possible to each other at every possible angle and level, gleamed clean and neat.

We begin as Rafe travels from his hotel to Leviathan Court. It's no secret that Doctor Charlemagne is modeled after renowned Gloucester poet Charles Olson, a friend and artistic ally of Bayliss. Olson lived in Fort Square, on a peninsula that juts out into the harbor from a point at the southern end of Washington Street. As Bayliss notes, however, Doctor Charlemagne lives east of the Van. The T-shaped dead end of Haven Court off Rogers Street is the Gloucester counterpart of Dogtown's Leviathan Court. A West Coaster, Opsimath undergoes the first of his several strange Dogtown epiphanies in this chapter even before he's reached Doc's:

Awareness of the orient ocean conflicted with his native expectation of a westering sun. When he turned as he caught his breath to look over the rooftops that delineated the inner waters a segment of the nearly circumferential sea-plain was visible beyond the broad breakwatered valley of the greater harbor. It emanated a peculiar luminosity that terrestrial rotation didn't seem to account for. With no white afloat in the sky to draw attention to its background, the pellucid atmosphere purified his previous distal impression of the panorama he now explored, without denying the broken glass and wastes of packaging that were more profusely strewn upon this paved ravine than upon the rocks and grass of the abused park.

Opsimath manages to find Charlemagne's house, but not before undergoing the interrogation of Doc's landlady Mrs. Laplace. Her name is an obvious reference to Ibicity, but also an homage to the mathematician whose tidal equations described gyres. Vortices are recurring images in the Gloucesterman saga, and were central to Yeats's historical theories. It's no coincidence that Doc and Rafe later discuss the Irish poet over dinner.

The Dantean Dogtown travels of Opsimath and Charlemagne commence when they head down "Spirit Hill" toward town. Doc is intent on showing Rafe the waterfront, which brings them along the old wharf where Rogers Street is now. Olson's Melville-obsession has Bayliss making constant references to whales and other sea creatures. Charlemagne, as director of the local system, provides Rafe with a 360-degree panoramic view: standing ashore at the Inner Harbor, they look west to Fort Point and Western Harbor, south to Rocky Neck, east to East Gloucester ("the Foreside"), north to the nearby waterfront buildings, then back to their position on Whale Wharf.

Doc's finger swung slowly counterclockwise from jumbled waterfront buildings defined only by their occlusion of more distant city lights, past the black gap of the outer harbor, along the elevation of treetops close across the water on Mother's Neck (much of which was blocked in the foreground by the massive septum of a freezer-warehouse on Beauport Fish Pier which divided the slot of deepest water from a broader cove where boats of business and pleasure lay intermingled at other wharves and anchorages), around to the night foliage of East Harbor's ridge, the highly peopled shin of stately Harbor Foreside, and back to the ramshackle structures on their right. Having boxed the compass in reverse, like two parallel magnets in a swinging ship, they again faced the nightlighted hill.

By now the wanderers have walked west along Rogers Street to Flanagan Square, where it intersects Main Street ("Front Street") and Prospect Street (which Bayliss refers to here as "Back Street," though he later uses the name for Middle Street). This is where Gorton's offices are located, where Bayliss worked for decades.

Only from the top of this acclevity (where Back Street spliced into Front) did they first catch sight of neon colors - and then not many: too few in fact to cheer the heart of a ravenous bigspender who'd had his bellyfull of chophouse disappointments all over the most charming parts of North Atlantis. But Doc assured him that the Windmill would still be serving.

Now they're at the east end of Main Street, working westward back toward the Tavern Restaurant on Stacey Boulevard.

They stayed on Front Street, past the Van, along the dip and bend, up the rising double row of storefronts to the wide place called Morality Square where it's intersected by Pleasure. Until they reached the summit of the second wave (longer than the one at Back Street), Dogtown's busiest crossroads by day, everything was closed for the night except the dimmed City Lights Theater (which had already swallowed the last show's last spectator), a couple of liquor stores, and half a dozen ill-lit bars.

The Van, or Blackburn's Tavern as it was known in the old days. Bayliss renames it "Redburn's Needle" in tribute to another seafaring Melville protagonist. Note the light blocking its new moniker: when Opsimath first approaches, he makes out the name "by light from a corner street lamp."

The Fort Gallery, on Pleasant Street near where it intersects Main.

Front Street narrowed as it dropped again, bent northerly, and then veered to opposite bias in a canyon of business blocks that looked the taller for facing each other so closely along the curve, the abbreviated barely lighted markee of another picture theater making a salient on the harbor side. Just beyond it came the only stretch of priceless architecture, early 19C gabled brick or granite, originally residential, which being little prized was given over on ground floors to disfigurements of beauty in the interests of what looked to a Cornucopian like very cramped retail commerce - barbers, cobblers, a locksmithy, more than one Tuscan bakery, a secondhand furniture store, and other such Old World shops, all now darker within the darkness of the street than comparatively they were by day. Front Street's remaining taverns betrayed very little of their animation because it was still too early for argument to burst the doors.

So this brings the travelers through the west end of Main Street. There still are quite a few Italian bakeries and pizzerias along here, and you can see the brick buildings to the right. Its westernmost point, Market Square (Bayliss calls it "Sacrum Square") is the intersection of Main and five other streets: Rogers Street and Commercial Street from the south, Western Avenue ("Serpentine Avenue") and Angle Street ("Bevel Street") from the east, and Washington Street ("Cod Street") from the north.

Sacrum Square, a bleakly exposed slope of cobblestones, was the source or sink of Front Street and five others, each of its asymmetrical radiants rooted on a different level of the original town-landing hollow. The island's circumferential road that Rafe had crossed at the end of his train ride, Cod Street, wended down to anchor from its highland course, below the old settlements now fused into a single city shaped by the cincture here knotted. All paths still met at the irregular hexagon, into which Rafe and Doc now emerged from between two corners that brought an end to the fine old brick opposite the more adorned concrete sales garage of an automobile dealer.

Rafe seems overwhelmed by the chaotic East Coast traffic. This is a shot of Market Square looking northwest: directly to the right is Main. The cars driving toward the upper right-hand corner are going up Washington, straight ahead is Angle Street, and to the left the entrance to Western Avenue. Note the absence of streetlights.

Now the travelers are nearly in sight of the "Windmill" restaurant. Bayliss uses this name for the Tavern restaurant because it was the original site of Captain Webber's corn-grinding windmill.

Crossing a line of residual elms that resembled pillars of a ruined cathedral on the nearly deserted parking garth they went up some steps into the fenestrated clapboard barn set broadside to the harbor on its walled bluff. There on the inn's bucked-up spit of rock the Serpentine's mouthpiece was presented to the southeasterly winds that swept the open Bight of Vinland, the worst seas of which for the last fifty years had been chastened two miles off by the breakwater of chthonic granite hewn and transplanted by direction of the U S Corps of Engineers to provide coastal craft a pasture of refuge outside the inner city's crowded corrals and paddocks. But long before the breakwater was projected the sails of a great windmill on this knoll had been reefed also for northwesterly gales, blowing down the Namauche River valley from John Smith's Bay, and driven by all the world's other airs that were broken or swayed by hills and vales of the islanded Cape.

With the view of the remote breakwater from the Tavern we leave the travelers to their late dinner and their intellectual conversation. Opsimath has received his introduction to the Dogtown system, and for the remainder of the evening fights distraction by starshine both celestial and artificial.