Customer Reviews

Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan

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3 star:		(1)
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This is a decidedly uneven book, and coming from such a talented writer it really seems a bit tossed off. There are the moments that make the book really worth reading, such as his elegiac descriptions of Manhattan's beauty, and notes on how our ruined industrial landscapes are so powerfully heartbreaking. Lovely. He is best at his descriptions of how the waterfront is tied deeply into the urbanity of all Manhattan. And while it's somewhat fruitless to wax nostalgic about the bustle of the port since it will never return to a working port city again, Lopate is wonderful on why it is powerfully tempting to do so.

The book has its uneven moments, as the discussion of Westway is so flat and tedious you are amazed that any editor would have left it in the book. And Lopate sometimes does seem a little obtuse in what he passes by - what kind of grump would call the aircraft carrier Intrepid "maritime junk"?

But he has accomplished a decidedly dubious achievement in writing perhaps the most self-absorbed, navel gazing recounting of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center that I've ever seen in print. In his brief three page discussion, he manages to use the words "I" "me" and "myself' exactly 102 times, quite an accomplishment. Incredibly he says that he walked in from Brooklyn to be closer to it but couldn't because of the ashes, and he was "envying everyone who had actually witnessed the buildings on fire and collapsing." Having been down there that morning I find this simply cretinous.

One of New York's premiere writers, Phillip Lopate, has written this wonderful book, WATERFRONT: A JOURNEY AROUND MANHATTAN, about his trek up the Hudson, through the harbor, and up the East River. This is not a long journey in length, but it evokes decades upon decades upon centuries of the history of New York.

What Lopate has evoked, at the same time, is an awareness that somewhere in our development, we have lost touch with the fact that Manhattan is an island, and that our formidable legacy was derived from the fact that, for centuries, we were a powerful port city. Goods and immigrants arrived to our shores by ship well into the 20th century. And then, for several reasons and not all of them good ones, we began to shun the river, the tidal strait (East River), and our harbor.

For the most part though, Lopate delights in seeing the city the way our forebears saw it. And then, sometimes, the effect is enormously sad: specifically, his journey to North Brother Island, the site where the General Slocum burned and partially sank, where so many bodies washed ashore as others died in the island's hospital. This section is eerily poignant and, to me, the best written. Lopate and his companions did not escape North Brother unscathed, physically and emotionally. And I doubt most readers will put down WATERFRONT without feeling unchanged. This is a wonderful book for New Yorkers and/or history fans.

Phillip LoPate's "Waterfront" is an elegantly structured, beautifully written book. The central narrative thread takes him around the perimeter of the island of Manhattan, and anyone who's even a little bit curious about ruins, industrial archaeology, and odd and forgotten spots will read about his adventures and travails with great pleasure.

LoPate is also well versed in urban design, architecture and New York's history and uses each neighborhood as a chance to discuss everything from the politics of urban renewal to Manhattan's history as a center of piracy.

In addition to the neighborhood-by-neighborhood travelogue, LoPate also includes several short "excursions" on other topics of related to New York's history and present, ranging from a discussion of shipworms to a revisionist look at the much-loathed Robert Moses.

Not only is LoPate's own writing wonderful, but he drops in lots of pointers to other works -- I'm really tempted to look for "Heartbeats in the Muck" (about the ecological revival of NY harbor) if only to have the title on my bookshelf.

Frankly, I picked this book up because I thought it would be a good before-bed book -- not too engaging, nice sleep aid. The joke was on me: I ended up staying up all night and reading the entire thing.

As someone who lives in Washington heights in an apartment overlooking the GWB, runs along the bike path by the Little Red lighthouse, swims at Riverbank, and was recently married at the boathouse at Swindler Cove (in fact to a woman who plays tennis under the Williamsburg bridge and leads a volunteer swim program at Asphalt Green for kids from the Stanley Isaacs Houses), I was obviously the perfect audience for Lopate's wonderful book. I read it in dribs and drabs, and each time I picked it up I found a renewed affirmation for my own musings on all the things I adore about this city and its interface with the water, as well as a poignant commiseration with all the things I mourn about it.

As others have mentioned, this is an uneven book. It's quite true that Phillip Lopate is far better at philosophical impressionism than the presumably harder work of reporting, but I don't think that the intent of the book was purely journalistic. In fact one of its charms is that it ebbs and flows, just like the tides of the rivers themselves, from philosophical musing to blandly informative reportage and back again. A more seamless flow between the two would have made the book perhaps a more comfortable read. Indeed, if Lopate had been able to achieve a more transparent transition between the philosophical and the mundane this might have been one of a handful of the great books ever written on New York, on a par with "Up Over the Old Hotel" even. The long Westway retrospective toward the front of the book and the long analysis on the success of NYC Public Housing could be tedious if taken all in a gulp, but they were certainly not without interest or wisdom.

Some have complained, perhaps legitimately, about Lopate's incessant navel-gazing, but this didn't bother me. Anyone who has taken the time to wander alone in some of the more deserted places in Manhattan will know how this isolating experience can be a powerful conduit leading inexorably inward. I can understand how trying to express this experience might cause one to appear self-absorbed to the uninitiated. But for me, it was a very comforting source of identification, and one of the book's pleasures. Even Lopate's completely irrelevant aside on his memory of 9/11 had it's own sad and selfish merit. It revealed how many a New Yorker would remember the day if they were a little more honest about their character weaknesses (although had I been his editor it would have been the first thing cut).

Lopate anticipates the inevitable comparisons with the great Joseph Mitchell's seminal essays on the NY harbor, and he even preemptively addresses them by including a chapter on Mitchell himself. He needn't have been concerned, because it's unfair to expect from any writer in this day and age the same kind of hard-edged black & white picture of blue-collar Gotham that Mitchell so charmingly portrayed. Blue-collar Gotham no longer exists in Manhattan. New York in the 21st century is a vague and evasive city compared to those great days. In fact New York has become more significant as a phenomenon than as an actual place, and this is a problem that Lopate grasps very well. Perhaps the only way this complex fact can be expressed is in the form of a (necessarily uneven) personl journal, and this is how "Waterfront" actually reads most of the time.

The New York of today is a strange creature, composed of a densely populated body, supported by a massive urban skeleton, with a blandly suburban mind attached to it. Today's New York continually cannabilizes its own history in order to rid itself of the threat of its past, something that it seems to unconsciously fear and loath. One of the things that makes Lopate's book so valuable to me is that he shows, time and again, how the New York waterfront impassively exposes the clash between the recent influx of the suburban bourgeoisie and the remnants of the city's low-life past. New York's moral fibre is found in these remnants, and their continued loss has to a large degree trivialized the New York experience.

But like Lopate I finished the book loving New York as unconditionally as ever, and with the renewed hope that its resilience will help it survive as a vital cultural metropolis, and that somehow its lovely and mysterious waterfront will play a role in its moral and cultural survival.

Thank you Mr. Lopate for delivering such a highly personal and passionate ode to New York and its waterfront. I am a lover of New York (I even have a t-shirt that says so). But in all seriousness, I read everything and anything I can get my hands on regarding the city and its history. This "walk-a-thon" is part history, part cultural examination, part city planning cautionary tale, and part preservation plea. All of it works but I think only for those deeply familiar or interested in NYC.

Lopate lopings up the West and East sides of Manhattan are a treasure trove of musings, observations, facts, and digressions that only add to its richness. He takes us to the Battery to Washington Heights and the South Street Seaport to Highbridge Park. I particularly love his takes on the Chelsea Piers and the Seaport for their poor attempts at honoring the city's nautical roots. His attempted resurrection of Robert Moses is intriguing given the overall tone and lament of where the city now finds itself.

An accomplishment he brings to life in the book is participating in the Great Saunter. This annual walk around the island is on my list of must-dos and when I do make the effort, it will be a much richer experience having read this original book.

This is a great regional history book by Phillip Lopate (Leonard Lopate's brother), one of the many gifted New York historians fixated on uncovering hidden gems and forgotten haunts in the city. This book focuses on New York as an island city, circling Manhattan's waterfronts and offering up stories and facts regarding much of the region's once water-based economy. As a Brooklynite, I wished there had been more information about the Red Hook/Erie Basin history, Gowanus, etc, but I was qute happy to come across this book while researching NYC's connection to shipping and water-centric transport.

I taught this book during the summer of 2005 as the anchor text of a content-based ESL curriculum at CUNY entitled "Stories of the City, Stories of the Sea" - it was sort of an examination of how water shapes New York Cit, literally and figuratively. First off, I should say that this is not an ideal ESL text - the narrative is too digressive, the sentences are too complex, and his style could never be translated into 5-paragraph-essay format (which, truth be told, is all most of the student want to learn in order to pass the CUNY entrance exams).

That said, it's a highly entertaining, well-researched work organized around Lopate's own walking journey around the periphery of Manhattan island. He fills tales of his own adventures with historical and literary anecdotes, giving the entire waterfront a mythic grandeur. I know much of the area he's transversed, but many of them felt new to me from his takes. Some, like his descriptions of the Fulton Fish Market, are sadly already history as the market was moved to the Bronx at the end of 2005 to make downtown area more tourist-friendly. (One of my students that summer, an Israeli named Kobi, spent the entire summer going to the market at night once he heard it was to be closed; he said it was one of the last great things about New York)

You can tell he's the brother of an NPR commentator (Leonard Lopate), but he has enough spunk and a few breaks from standard liberal party-line analysis to make for a dynamic read. For example, he has a chapter entitled "Robert Moses: A Revisionist Take" where he reassesses New Yorkers' and his own ingrained hostility toward the much-reviled Moses, shaped mostly by his attachment to Jane Jacobs' pedestrian utopian ideals and his reading of The Power Broker. It didn't change my mind about Moses, but it made for some interesting reading.

Move between the two rivers and one comes to Central Park in mid-Manhattan. Inside the Park, The Ramble, a maze of paths on which one can easily, but not hopelessly, get lost amidst the plants, trees and wildlife of the park. It's fine if you've got a couple hours to kill on a gorgeous day, not so fine if you stumble into it expecting to find your way quickly from the East Side to the West Side. So too with Waterfront. Much of it is informative and interesting as Lopate explores both the waterfront along the East and Hudson Rivers and diverges into tales of people and places from NYC's past.

The work is somewhat dulled, for me, by its detours into Lopate's personal past and his occasional churlish, ungracious, and inaccurate comments. For example, even if it were true -- and it's not--, who cares if the parking lots at the Fairway where I shop near 125th Street on the Hudson are filled with daytrippers with New Jersey license plates stocking up on food?

Lopate gets very right, however, the point of how hard it is for New Yorkers to get down to the water almost anywhere along the two rivers. Physically and spiritually, only rarely do the city and the water join and that is disappointing. Lopate also has a judicious and balanced reading of Robert Moses and his impact on the city. That type of insight makes Waterfront a book I'll always keep on my shelves and occasionally take with me as I do my own rambles along the rivers. That more than overcomes its annoyances.

I love this book. Everyone who lives in, works in, or even visits Manhattan should read this book and take a walk to the waterfront. Incredibly well written and researched. My favorite NY book since E.B. White's Here is New York.

The editorial and customer reviews on Amazon describe this book well, including its strengths and weaknesses. Despite its weaknesses, this book will greatly enhance a hike or bike ride around the island.

I've hiked around the island six times over the past 30 years. The Manhattan Waterfront Greenway project has greatly enhanced the experience. You can find up-to-date information at the New York City website and search on Greenway.

"The New York Times" reported in 2005: "Though there are still gaps in the waterfront loop that require use of about nine miles [of 32 miles] of city streets, large swaths of both the West and East Sides already have separate bike and walking paths. Recently completed sections include the nearly two-mile Harlem River Speedway at the northeast end of Manhattan and the Hudson River Park along the West Side, with five miles of bike and pedestrian paths."

I've hiked the route in between nine and ten hours, depending on how much dawdling and eating I've enjoyed along the way. Suggestion: start at the George Washington Bridge around 6:00 am and hike north [clockwise] around the island. The sunlight effects on the Palisaides in New Jersey in the morning, and on Queens and Brooklyn in the afternoon, are quite splendid. You also avoid looking into the sun much of the time.

Robert C. Ross 2008