Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (Crown Journeys) (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Unlike other great cities, as eminent essayist and New York devotee Lopate (Getting Personal) observes, "Manhattan is almost pathologically averse to letting you wander to the river's edge and get close enough to touch the water." In this loose circumnavigation, first up the West Side from the Battery to Washington Heights and then up the East Side from South Street Seaport to Highbridge Park, he takes the reader up close on an information-packed journey—dipping, as the particular location suggests, into memoir, history, current events, marine biology, city planning, literature, architecture, interviews, biography, films, ecology and more. Anyone who relishes the company of Whitman, Melville, both Cranes, even Sara Teasdale, among many other celebrants of the New York waterfront, will particularly enjoy the vicarious sojourn. The trek includes Chelsea Piers and the U.N., Gracie Mansion and the Brooklyn Bridge, Captain Kidd and the Gulf filling station on East 23rd Street. "Sewage and salsa," Lopate invokes in describing Riverbank State Park, and that mix of the problematic and the delightful pervades his account, "saturated with history," of the waterfront's metamorphosis from "a working port, to an abandoned, seedy no-man's-land, to a highly desirable zone of parks plus upscale retail/residential." This is a demanding book—formidable in some of its detail, complex in its broad approach. Tourists will find it enriching but only borderline useful. Its ideal reader, a New Yorker who cares as deeply as Lopate does about the waterfront as "the key to New York's destiny," will find it compelling as well as entertaining.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

At the tail end of the Reagan years, I left Minneapolis, a city with one river, and came to a city with two: New York. The water was everywhere. I remember the East River and the Hudson pinching Manhattan as I swooped in to LaGuardia, their great blue swatches covering the subway map I got the first day, and the way the waves sloshed over the rail of the Staten Island Ferry and shimmered a thousand feet below the Empire State Building's observation deck that first week. But it soon became clear that all this water was pretty much a mirage: In the everyday paved life of the city, the rivers were nowhere. The East River turned out not to be a proper river at all but something called a "tidal strait," and the subway map's seas could have borne the legend "Here Be Dragons" for all I knew of them. Before long I inched away from the shore and learned to cling to Broadway like everybody else.

In this sense at least, New York hasn't changed a bit. Early on in Phillip Lopate's lollygagging book about the waterfront, he quotes a writer declaring, "You would think, to cross the city anywhere from river to river, that there was a general hydrophobia -- the entire population crowding to the high ridge of Broadway, and hardly a soul to be seen on either the East River or the Hudson." That was in 1843.

Waterfront is based on two Manhattan walks, one up the west side and one up the east; it seeks to put the rivers at the center of the story. Lopate, best known for championing the intensely subjective "personal essay" and for editing the recent Writing New York anthology, is a garrulous and good-natured guide. At his best, he evinces a passionate curiosity, an unapologetic lack of expertise and an eye for the ironies of history. He provides a useful capsule history of the late-19th-century development of New York's piers, "that heroic and ingenious, if now mostly forgotten, effort -- the greatest public-works project of its period -- to improve the New York waterfront." He draws out the hidden history of ubiquitous buildings that line the shore, like the Starrett-Lehigh Building at West 26th Street and the Con Edison Waterside power plant at East 38th. And his long digressions are often fascinating. Who knew that New York is spending $1 billion to combat the ongoing destruction of wooden piers and foundations by the lowly shipworm, the prosaic seawater pest that bores its way into wood "like a crawling prisoner who digs an underground tunnel with a spoon"? Or that the defeat of Westway (the proposal for a submerged highway on the west side of Manhattan) "haunts every choice made in its stead"?

Lopate mourns New York's loss of the "casual kasbah feeling [that] used to be the genius of cities" without slipping into misty-eyed reverie for every old thing. He supports the gentrification of the Lower East Side as benign compared to the concerted effort to remake the western edge of Manhattan as a place primarily designed to allow financiers to rollerblade near water. He challenges received ideas, criticizing the sacrosanct Frederick Law Olmsted and defending the reviled Robert Moses. And he can be a sharp and pithy critic: Battery Park City, he says, "seems to have everything you would need for a good Manhattan neighborhood, except a pulse."

But Lopate has no reporter's eye and, worse, no reporter's will. "The sense you most often get," he writes, "is that everything the city doesn't want to deal with, everything 'repressed,' has been pushed to the water's edge." He's right, but content to leave the details to others. At a natty westside motel he declares, "Surely the reader can imagine the kinds of rooms upstairs, without my having to inspect the décor." Later, he declines to ask any tough questions of a waterfront expert: "If I were an investigative reporter, I would certainly do so. But I'm too lazy. I'm a belletrist, for God's sake!" And in a Manhattanville diner he asks a Greek immigrant whether much has changed and leaves it at that: "I can't be bothered to question him further about the past while decoding his accent. . . . Besides, what is there to ask? He washed up on our American shores thirty-eight years ago, and this is as far as he got. Joseph Mitchell would have squeezed at least twenty pages' worth out of him."

Mitchell's ghost hangs over Lopate's book. Lopate lauds Mitchell's prose but criticizes him as too objective, too focused on facts and details, too willing to repress himself in favor of the story. "He wrote unfailingly well; I'll write badly, or at least unevenly." Whatever the quality of its prose, Waterfront is more than subjective; it is relentlessly confessional. We learn that Lopate can "recite the list" of New York City mayors "with [his] eyes closed"; that he's got "perennially sinusitic nostrils" and is "notoriously clumsy"; and that he "placed" the doctor his first wife saw for an abortion in his "harem of erotic fantasies instantly, jerk that I am." When he describes undistinguished buildings as "grunts enlisted in the great war against the horror of emptiness," one can't help thinking of Lopate as fighting the same war himself.

In the end, Lopate ignores the waterfront as much as any other New Yorker. Waterfront turns inward, not just to New York's high ground but to its inner heart; there is a serious argument about the city's character here. After the successive shocks of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, the civic deterioration of the 1980s, the suburban-style retail and housing development of the 1990s and the terrorist attacks of 2001, Waterfront feels like a stolen glance over the parapet, a rearguard reconnaissance to gauge the city's sense of itself. Though Lopate says New York is "between mythologies," his conclusion is plain. Waterfront doesn't have the succinct charm of E.B. White's Here Is New York or the eerie resonance of Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer or the intrepid verve of Robert Sullivan's The Meadowlands, but it shares with all of them a heartfelt wonder at New York's abiding vitality.

Reviewed by Matt Weiland

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1 edition (February 24, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609605054
• ISBN-13: 978-0609605059
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #309,128 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A mixed bag: great insights, some tedium, and a dubious achievement, December 14, 2005

By	A. McDonald (New York) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (Paperback)

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Big and small distances around Manhattan, June 29, 2004

By	Rocco Dormarunno (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Book I've Read on New York in a Long Time, December 15, 2004

By	Mark K. Mcdonough "Mark McDonough" (Reston, VA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.