{"id":251438,"date":"2026-06-01T22:02:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T22:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/251438\/"},"modified":"2026-06-01T22:02:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T22:02:15","slug":"joana-avillez-revisits-her-waterfront-childhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/251438\/","title":{"rendered":"Joana Avillez Revisits Her Waterfront Childhood"},"content":{"rendered":"

Down in the bones of old New York, in the historic waterfront district of Lower Manhattan, Joana Avillez clutched her tattered copy of \u201cThe Bottom of the Harbor,\u201d a 1959 book by Joseph Mitchell<\/a> filled with tales of the neighborhood\u2019s fishmongers, bearded sailors and giant rats.<\/p>\n

Avillez, a 39-year-old illustrator who grew up here along the brackish East River, sipped an iced coffee as she roamed the cobblestone streets, telling me about this vanished world.<\/p>\n

In place of the joggers on the promenade and tourists in the plaza, fishmongers once barked out prices for halibut from the pungent stalls of the Fulton Fish Market. Steps away from a McNally Jackson bookstore, there was Sloppy Louie\u2019s<\/a>, a seafood restaurant where Mitchell had kippered herring with scrambled eggs for breakfast.<\/p>\n

Avillez was retracing Mitchell\u2019s footsteps, but also her own. She spent the past six years illustrating a new Modern Library edition of \u201cThe Bottom of the Harbor<\/a>,\u201d a collection of stories that first appeared in The New Yorker, where Mitchell was a fabled staff writer. \u201cSometimes I feel like I\u2019m chasing Mitchell\u2019s ghost, or that he\u2019s following me,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m always seeing him down here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walking down Water Street toward Peck Slip, she watched some teenagers skateboarding on the square.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was a girl, this was part of the Fulton Fish Market, and there were still burning trash cans,\u201d she said. \u201cI saw the last breaths of the world Mitchell wrote about. I still remember the early morning shouts of the fishmongers. My father used to buy clams at the market to bring home. I stepped over crabs to get to the school bus, and the kids would say, \u2018Pee-yoo!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think drawing this area also has lots to do with my father for me,\u201d she continued. \u201cHe\u2019s not alive anymore, but we were kindred spirits. Drawing was our secret language. We would say we drank from the same water.\u201d<\/p>\n

While trying to bring new life to \u201cThe Bottom of the Harbor,\u201d Avillez went deep into the world captured by Mitchell. To illustrate \u201cMr. Hunter\u2019s Grave<\/a>,\u201d she visited the lonesome Staten Island cemetery at the heart of the story. For \u201cThe Rivermen<\/a>,\u201d Mitchell\u2019s study of shad fishermen, she rode ferries up and down the Hudson to sketch the Palisades.<\/p>\n

The work also became a Proustian undertaking, as Avillez found herself excavating memories of her 1990s seaport girlhood and the death of her father, Martim Avillez, who taught her how to draw.<\/p>\n

A native of Lisbon, which straddles the Tagus River, Martim was drawn to this waterfront neighborhood when he immigrated to New York. Having fought in the Portuguese Colonial War, he struggled with alcoholism and post-traumatic stress. When Joana was 16, he had a bad fall in the stairwell of the building where they lived, on desolate Front Street. After that, he was never the same.<\/p>\n

\u201cMitchell\u2019s book shows me things I can\u2019t ask him about,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

In the rear of the Fulton Stall Market, she heaved open a service door, which was still stamped \u201cSloppy Louie\u2019s\u201d on the back. She moved through the crumbling remains of the Fulton Ferry Hotel<\/a>, which Mitchell depicted hauntingly<\/a> in \u201cUp in the Old Hotel.\u201d But the place dearest to Joana was the building on Front Street, where she had grown up in a rent-regulated loft apartment.<\/p>\n

At the entrance door, she slid a MetroCard into the crack. She jimmied the lock, and we were in. A mailbox in the tiny vestibule still bore her father\u2019s name and that of Lusitania Press<\/a>, a culture and politics journal he founded in the 1980s. She approached the narrow staircase.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are the stairs he fell down,\u201d she said. \u201cThere was blood in his brain after that. I guess the trauma of my childhood is all right here. Sorry to get so intense on us.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the top, she pushed open the door to the roof. She went to the ledge and looked out at the East River.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think he was always suffering after the war, but he found some peace down here by the water. I think he was running from something when he got to New York. He could try to get away from it, but he couldn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finding Her Subject<\/p>\n

In the early 1990s, Martim bought a loft in the nearby Tribeca neighborhood, which he converted into an office for Lusitania Press. Joana moved into it when she was in her 20s and now lives there with her husband, Sean Fabi, a Legal Aid Society lawyer, and their 4-year-old son, Nino.<\/p>\n

On a recent evening, Nino\u2019s toys littered the floor next to her drafting table, where she was finishing an illustration for The New Yorker. Strewed across her desk were party invitations and drawing commissions she had done for New York media figures like Emily Sundberg and Risa Heller. The library contained books she had illustrated, including \u201cNot That Kind of Girl\u201d by Lena Dunham, a childhood friend of hers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was at the party for Lena\u2019s new book last night, at the Algonquin Hotel,\u201d Joana said. \u201cThe spritzers were nonalcoholic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beside her pens and erasers was a framed photograph of Joana and her father. It showed them drawing together at a beach cafe in Portugal when she was 8.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a part of me that\u2019s always avoided the seaport,\u201d she said. \u201cI almost don\u2019t even want to remember all the details about what happened. I guess Mitchell\u2019s book lets me imagine more about my father\u2019s life.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the 1960s, Martim was drafted into the Portuguese army and served in West Africa as a lieutenant. Later, he fled the dictatorial regime of Ant\u00f3nio Salazar<\/a> to study art at the Cooper Union in Manhattan. He moved to the seaport in the late 1970s and started contributing political drawings to Harper\u2019s and The New York Times. At Lusitania Press, which ran work decrying censorship and fascism, he published writing by Coco Fusco<\/a> and artwork by Larry Clark and Carolee Schneemann.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember asking him how often he thought about the war,\u201d Joana said, \u201cand he immediately replied: \u2018All the time.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Martim met Gwenn Thomas<\/a>, a photographer and painter, in the downtown art scene. They married, and she moved in with him on Front Street when she was pregnant with Joana. At their parties, their daughter would crawl through the legs of artists and intellectuals like Joan Jonas and Sylv\u00e8re Lotringer<\/a>, the publisher of Semiotext(e). Tucked into bed, Joana would stare up at the old wooden beams to read the messages \u2014 \u201cYou Are No Good, Jim Dillon\u201d \u2014 scrawled long ago by Irish sailors. To lull her to sleep, as tugboat foghorns bellowed from the East River, her mother read her the books of Beatrix Potter<\/a>, and her father read her William Steig<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Martim\u2019s demons emerged at night. He would drink until last call at Carmine\u2019s<\/a>, an Italian restaurant down the street. Sometimes, she would overhear him talking about the war in feverish phone calls to friends in Portugal.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe tide would swing for him,\u201d Joana said. \u201cAt night, I\u2019d hear the key turn, and I just knew.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her mother also remembered Martim\u2019s struggles.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was the most fantastic father to Joana, always drawing with her, and he\u2019s the reason she became an illustrator,\u201d Gwenn said. \u201cBut after she was about 15, he grew more and more challenged by, as she says, his \u2018demons.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMartim wouldn\u2019t talk to me much about the war, but there was one thing that happened to him that he did talk about,\u201d she continued. \u201cHe was maybe 22, stationed in Guinea-Bissau and leading a group that had to cross a bridge. He saw some blades of grass sticking up very stiff, which he knew was the sign of a land mine. He had to deactivate that land mine with his bare hands. He saved the lives of 30 men. He was awarded a medal, but he didn\u2019t want to accept it.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Martim\u2019s fall in 2001, he underwent brain surgery for a hematoma. Gwenn and his siblings eventually moved him to a veteran\u2019s rehabilitation center near Lisbon. He died at 70 in 2014.<\/p>\n

Much like her parents decades earlier, Joana fell in with a downtown<\/a> crowd<\/a>, a scene filled with rising talents including the director Josh Safdie, the fashion journalist Chloe Malle, the entrepreneur Audrey Gelman and Dunham, who was starting to write \u201cGirls.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joana\u2019s subject matter \u2014 like Mitchell\u2019s \u2014 soon became the city. She would roam the streets with pen and pad, sketching the people she saw. It wasn\u2019t until the coronavirus pandemic<\/a> froze New York that she discovered \u201cThe Bottom of the Harbor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reached by phone, Nora Mitchell Sanborn, a daughter of Mitchell who oversees his estate, considered the idea of a young illustrator falling under the spell of her father\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, I think he would be happy to hear his writing has helped her,\u201d she said. \u201cHe would be moved to know that his writing was still helping someone \u2014 so long as the person wasn\u2019t a yuppie.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Graveyard<\/p>\n

When things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries down there.<\/p>\n

So begins Mitchell\u2019s 1956 story \u201cMr. Hunter\u2019s Grave<\/a>,\u201d which tells of George Hunter, one of the last survivors of a Black oystering community known as Sandy Ground<\/a>. The piece is a rumination on mortality told through the poetic ramblings of Hunter, who speaks of his plan to be buried with his wife in the local cemetery.<\/p>\n

Joana spent many hours in the graveyard when she was drawing it. Early on a recent spring morning, with her work on the book finished, we boarded the Staten Island Ferry to see it again.<\/p>\n

\u201cI brought sandwiches, just like Mitchell,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

From the St. George Ferry Terminal, we didn\u2019t take a bus to Sandy Ground, as Mitchell had, but ordered an Uber. Through the car windows, we saw a landscape of suburban houses in place of the swamps, goat farms and meadows described in \u201cMr. Hunter\u2019s Grave.\u201d<\/p>\n

We arrived at a lonesome old chapel<\/a>, the Rossville A.M.E. Zion Church, and wandered a while until we found Crabtree Avenue. Soon, we came upon a tiny burial ground enclosed by a rusted fence. No one else was there.<\/p>\n

We followed a weedy trail to the grave<\/a>, which lay near the foot of a sassafras tree. Joana sat on a rock and unwrapped a tomato and sprout sandwich.<\/p>\n

\u201cLike so many Mitchell stories, \u2018Mr. Hunter\u2019s Grave\u2019 is about getting closer to death,\u201d she said. \u201cAbout how life is death. How life and death coexist. Hunter\u2019s talking about his grave, his wife\u2019s grave, his son\u2019s grave. All this death \u2014 wait, there\u2019s an ant on my sandwich.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI know I\u2019ve been talking about my dad so much, and I\u2019ve been thinking about it,\u201d she continued. \u201cMaybe I didn\u2019t really feel Mitchell as the ghost. I mean, I felt he was with me but \u2014 is Mitchell my father?\u201d<\/p>\n

She took a bite of her sandwich.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing here makes me think about how his ashes are in Portugal,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019re in a little tomb, in my family\u2019s village, not far from Lisbon, where they\u2019re in a canister on a shelf, with my grandmother. I\u2019ve always wanted to get them and bring them back to New York.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think about death now,\u201d she added. \u201cHaving a kid does that.\u201d<\/p>\n

She stood up and dusted off the dirt. Then she looked at Hunter\u2019s grave.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wish I\u2019d brought flowers,\u201d Joana said. \u201cI\u2019ll have to bring them next time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Down in the bones of old New York, in the historic waterfront district of Lower Manhattan, Joana Avillez…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":251439,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[98111,36197,174,98114,98110,98112,27816,98113,9,11,10,49,51,50,56,98115],"class_list":["post-251438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-avillez","tag-books-and-literature","tag-content-type-personal-profile","tag-east-river-nyc","tag-fulton-fish-market-manhattan","tag-joana","tag-joseph","tag-mitchell","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news","tag-ny","tag-the-bottom-of-the-harbor-book"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/251439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}