Island, the United Nations, and Gracie Mansion, all of which, as a native New Yorker, I had previously ignored. I also interviewed experts, and sampled the mixed pleasures of community board meetings and public hearings.
All along, I kept coming up against certain underlying questions: What is our capacity for city-making at this historical juncture? How did we formerly build cities with such casual conviction, and can we still come up with bold, integrated visions and ambitious works? What is the changing meaning of public space? How to resolve the antiurban bias in our national character with the need to sustain a vital city environment? Or reconcile New York's past as a port/manufacturing center, with the new model of a postindustrial city given over to information processing and consumerism?
No one book can tackle all such questions fully, much less respond to every inch of the waterfront, past and present. Gaps are unavoidable. I have had to restrict my scope to Manhattan, instead of covering all five boroughs and the extended New York harbor. Even so, I have had to be selective: what I've done is to look for representative stories or themes—to take soundings along the edge. In Part One, I make my way geographically up the West Side, from the bottom of the island to the top; in Part Two, I return to the island's southern tip, this time proceeding northward along the East Side's coast. The structure is as follows: I alternate accounts of my walks with digressions, which I call “excursuses,” on individual topics that seemed to me characteristic of a larger pattern. These excursuses have been corralled into separate essays because they seemed to me too complex to deal with as throwaway insights along a walk.
The result is a mixture of history, guidebook, architectural critique, reportage, personal memoir, literary criticism, nature writing, reverie, and who knows what else. Consider it a catchment of my waterfront thoughts.
Writing about the Manhattan waterfront is like writing on water.You've only to characterize some physical part of the cityscape or deliver an opinion on a current situation, for the reality to change next week. I am well aware that in years to come, much of what I have written in this book will sound dated, superseded as it will inevitably be by unforeseen circumstances. What can you do? I have described the waterfront I saw before me. *
The very fact that the waterfront remains so elusive and mutable has ultimately ensured its fascination for me: it has become the ever-enigmatic, alien fusion of presence and absence. Its meanings have needed to be excavated, its poetry unpacked. I hesitate to use that word “obsession,” but, in my own limited way, I have become obsessed with the waterfront. I think about it when I drop off to sleep, and when I wake up; it forms a wavy limit hovering over my subconscious; I am quick to pick up any reference to it in periodicals, films, or overheard conversations. I have acquired the cultist's touchiness.
* Futurists predict big changes for the Manhattan waterfront. Global warming may further melt the ice cap, causing respiratory ailments and power brownouts. Starting in 2080, the raised sea levels may bring on huge storms that will batter the New York coastline every three or four years. By that time I will seriously have to consider doing a revised edition of this book.
A QUICK START-UP OF MANNAHATTA
M ANHATTAN IS SHAPED LIKE AN OCEAN LINER OR LIKE A LOZENGE OR LIKE A PARAMECIUM ( WHAT REMAINS OF ITS PROTRUDING PIERS, ITS CILIA ) OR LIKE A GOURD or like some sort of fish, a striped bass, say, but most of all like a luxury liner, permanently docked, going nowhere.
The Japanese of the early eighteenth century had a word, ukiyo, for the “floating world” of courtesans, actors, and rich merchants and their spoiled progeny who made up the town's most visible element. Manhattan is a floating world, too: buoyant as balsa, heavy as granite. The reason
All along, I kept coming up against certain underlying questions: What is our capacity for city-making at this historical juncture? How did we formerly build cities with such casual conviction, and can we still come up with bold, integrated visions and ambitious works? What is the changing meaning of public space? How to resolve the antiurban bias in our national character with the need to sustain a vital city environment? Or reconcile New York's past as a port/manufacturing center, with the new model of a postindustrial city given over to information processing and consumerism?
No one book can tackle all such questions fully, much less respond to every inch of the waterfront, past and present. Gaps are unavoidable. I have had to restrict my scope to Manhattan, instead of covering all five boroughs and the extended New York harbor. Even so, I have had to be selective: what I've done is to look for representative stories or themes—to take soundings along the edge. In Part One, I make my way geographically up the West Side, from the bottom of the island to the top; in Part Two, I return to the island's southern tip, this time proceeding northward along the East Side's coast. The structure is as follows: I alternate accounts of my walks with digressions, which I call “excursuses,” on individual topics that seemed to me characteristic of a larger pattern. These excursuses have been corralled into separate essays because they seemed to me too complex to deal with as throwaway insights along a walk.
The result is a mixture of history, guidebook, architectural critique, reportage, personal memoir, literary criticism, nature writing, reverie, and who knows what else. Consider it a catchment of my waterfront thoughts.
Writing about the Manhattan waterfront is like writing on water.You've only to characterize some physical part of the cityscape or deliver an opinion on a current situation, for the reality to change next week. I am well aware that in years to come, much of what I have written in this book will sound dated, superseded as it will inevitably be by unforeseen circumstances. What can you do? I have described the waterfront I saw before me. *
The very fact that the waterfront remains so elusive and mutable has ultimately ensured its fascination for me: it has become the ever-enigmatic, alien fusion of presence and absence. Its meanings have needed to be excavated, its poetry unpacked. I hesitate to use that word “obsession,” but, in my own limited way, I have become obsessed with the waterfront. I think about it when I drop off to sleep, and when I wake up; it forms a wavy limit hovering over my subconscious; I am quick to pick up any reference to it in periodicals, films, or overheard conversations. I have acquired the cultist's touchiness.
* Futurists predict big changes for the Manhattan waterfront. Global warming may further melt the ice cap, causing respiratory ailments and power brownouts. Starting in 2080, the raised sea levels may bring on huge storms that will batter the New York coastline every three or four years. By that time I will seriously have to consider doing a revised edition of this book.
A QUICK START-UP OF MANNAHATTA
M ANHATTAN IS SHAPED LIKE AN OCEAN LINER OR LIKE A LOZENGE OR LIKE A PARAMECIUM ( WHAT REMAINS OF ITS PROTRUDING PIERS, ITS CILIA ) OR LIKE A GOURD or like some sort of fish, a striped bass, say, but most of all like a luxury liner, permanently docked, going nowhere.
The Japanese of the early eighteenth century had a word, ukiyo, for the “floating world” of courtesans, actors, and rich merchants and their spoiled progeny who made up the town's most visible element. Manhattan is a floating world, too: buoyant as balsa, heavy as granite. The reason
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