Standing on Water Street
By Patricia Reilly Giff

In this feature appearing every May, a well-known author tells us what inspired one of his or her best works.

Patricia Reilly Giff is the twotime recipient of the Newbery Honor for Lily's Crossing (Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 1997) and Pictures of Hollis Woods (Wendy Lamb Books, 2002).

Brooklyn is in my bones. I was born there, and my parents, too; it's where my great-grandparents landed after harrowing weeks on leaky ships from the Old Country. Sometimes I go back to stand in front of Aunt Anne's brownstone, or Aunt Ellen's on Washington Avenue, or to pay a visit to Holy Cross where all of them rest, the place where, as children, my sister and I danced under the wings of the stone angels.

Awhile back on a summer day, I stood on Water Street looking up at the Brooklyn Bridge, awed by its grace. Behind me was an old building that must have housed people like my forebears when the bridge was going up.

I walked a few blocks to see a garden so tiny you could put your arms around it. It's dedicated to Emily Roebling, who walked among the workers, rolls of specifications under her arms, and who finished the bridge when her husband was injured. She was the first person to cross it. She rode in a carriage carrying a rooster in a cage, the symbol of victory, while the President of the United States waited to follow her.

Something to think about. My great-grandmother, Elizabeth McClellan Reilly, lived a life that was certainly more humble. She raised seven children in an apartment smaller than most of today's bedrooms. And what I thought of on that sunny day at the bridge was the only fragment I really knew about her. Years ago, an old cousin told me, "Elizabeth couldn't read, couldn't write either. But she birthed babies, sewed gaping wounds and poked holes in the throats of the children who were choking to death from diphtheria. And in her small window, she grew spindly plants, herbs, to cure her patients' diseases."

It was something to think about, Elizabeth climbing up and down tenement stairs with a cloth bag of primitive medicines over her arm, while outside the bridge was going up, built on the backs of immigrants, who descended far under the East River to sink a foundation and who staggered up after long hours, exhausted, or suffering from the bends.

Another Brooklyn story. I wanted to write about all that, the building of the bridge, and my Elizabeth who became Nory Ryan, to set it in the Brooklyn of the 1870s. I called it Water Street (Wendy Lamb Books, 2006).

Most of all, I wanted to give a nod to what we became, Elizabeth's descendants, so I wrote about Nory Ryan's daughter, Bird, and Thomas, her friend, who went to school and who learned to read, one to become a healer and the other a writer, and who made their immigrant parents proud of them.

I loved writing Water Street, loved spending a year of my life writing about Brooklyn. I went back again a few weeks ago, looking for another Brooklyn story. Maybe I've found one. I hope so.

May, 2007, Vol.37, No.8