Zusatztext A wonderfully observant, elegiac, and far-reaching historical meditation. The New York Times The celebrated essayist takes a tour of the city's ever-changing perimeter, sharing his knowledge of New York's history, mythology, and plans for the future. Poring over his informed, readable prose is like taking a stroll with a favorite professor: he is opinionated, casual, and erudite in equal measure. Conde-Nast Traveler A vivid blend of history, guidebook, white paper, and urban sketch. In Waterfront Lopate has enriched and refined his style by taking it quite literally to the vortex's watery edge, and for anyone wondering about that shoreline, his book will be a lively and trusty compass. The Nation Part personal essay, part municipal history, part architectural guide, part criticism and part utopian musing . . . Waterfront makes excellent reading for all those who feel the romance of the city's past and . . . for those with an interest in the growing healthiness of the city's waterways and in architecture and urban planning. The New York Times Book Review Phillip Lopate has surrounded his subject and been surrounded by it in turn. His Waterfront is an elegant, elegiac, scrapwork masterpiece. Jonathan LethemWhere less keen observers see only ugliness, Lopate discerns the raffish beauty that once was, the bright possibilities that might be. Newsday Phillip Lopate . . . demonstrates that you don't have to go to the ends of the earth to be a great explorer. Anyone who finds Manhattan fascinatingthere should be several million of uswould do well to read Waterfront , his beautiful ramble into its heart and soul. E.L. DoctorowFor strangers to New York, Waterfront will be an inviting introduction to the city's underappreciated edges. Natives will find surprising ideas and places in a metropolis they thought they knew. Newark Star-Ledger Philip Lopate is a walker in the city like no other since Charles Dickens: He is archaeologist, historian, explorer, poet, observer (an observer of himself observing), muser, muller, and mooner; and all the while he is leading us through streets and crannies and old politics and hidden sights and right-in-front-of your nose scenes and structures, compelling our poignant or astonished notice. Cynthia OzickOne man's saunter through a city he loves. . . . The stories are presented with tenderness and genuine concern . . . without the faintest whiff of sentimentality. The Oregonian Lopate is a fantastic writerhumane, wry, and always astonishingly willing to take on the ineffable, attuned to the complexities of symbiotic relationships we only intuited before his dazzling collage was created. Ann Beattie[Lopate] writes like cream pouring from a jug. . . . Richly entertaining. Kirkus Reviews (starred) Waterfront is a potpourri of astute architectural critiques fresh readings of shoreline classics (literary and cinematic), snippets of autobiography, and a string of vest pocket histories (the one on Westway is by itself worth the price of admission). By turns amusing and acerbic, gently playful and bracingly argumentative, it's a moveable feast. Mike Wallace, co-author of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 A native New Yorker, avid walker, and impeccable stylist . . . Lopate seamlessly blends witty and candid accounts of his ramblings along the bedraggled edge of this great metropolis to create a fascinating narrative that encompasses historical, literary, cultural, aesthetic, and environmental perspectives. Booklist (starred)An intensely and delightfully personal account of the Manhattan waterfront, full of insight and information, that weaves together one man's life and New York history for a rare, readable bookAda Louise HuxtablePhilip Lopate makes the waterfront that has vanished as vivid as the one that has survived . . .the ...

Autorentext

Phillip Lopate is the author of numerous books, including Getting Personal: Selected Writings, the essay collections Bachelorhood*,* Against Joie de Vivre, Writing New York, and Portrait of My Body, and the novels The Rug Merchant and Confessions of Summer. Most recently, Lopate authored Seaport: New York’s Vanished Waterfront, a book of photographs of maritime Manhattan. He is also the editor of The Art of the Personal Essay, and his work has appeared in The Paris Review, Esquire, Vogue, and many other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter, and teaches at Hofstra University.

Klappentext

East Side, West Side, from the Little Red Lighthouse to Battery Park City, the wonders of Manhattan's waterfront are both celebrated and secret-hidden in plain sight. In his brilliant exploration of this defining yet neglected shoreline, personal essayist Philip Lopate also recovers a part of the city's soul.
A native New Yorker, Lopate has embraced Manhattan by walking every inch of its perimeter, telling stories on the way of pirates (Captain Kidd) and power brokers (Robert Moses), the lowly shipworm and Typhoid Mary, public housing in Harlem and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. He evokes the magic of the once bustling old port from Melville's and Whitman's day to the era of the longshoremen in On the Waterfront, while appraising today's developers and environmental activists, and probing new plans for parks and pleasure domes with river views. Whether escorting us into unfamiliar, hazardous crannies or along a Beaux Arts esplanade, Waterfront is a grand literary ramble and defense of urban life by one of our most perceptive observers.

Leseprobe
1

The Battery

My closest estimation of the bulbous V-point, the magnetic southern tip of Manhattan Island, is the Staten Island Ferry Terminal.

It's a sunny winter day and, fortified by two cups of coffee and a poppyseed bagel, I head to the terminal where one catches the boat to Staten Island.

For as long as I can remember, the scuzzy-looking terminal that was here until recently, abounding in pizza outlets, couldn't have been less impressive if it tried. It was to have been replaced long ago, first by a sober office tower designed by Kohn Pederson Fox, then by Venturi, Scott-Brown and Associates' playful terminal with a giant, iconic clock. But Staten Island politician Guy Molinari objected to having to stare at this whimsical timepiece, which he found insufficiently respectful of his oft-late-to-work commuters, and it was scrapped. Then architect Frederick Schwartz got the assignment, and has remade the terminal into an attractive, if very modest, corrugated steel box with waterfront views from an elevated public deck wrapped in blue and aquamarine glass.

I enter Battery Park, or, as it is historically known, the Battery (so named because of its cannons, which originally protected the harbor). It remains one of the most congenial parts of New York, its tree-filled grounds decompressing you from the financial district. Along the promenade, with its new, ergonomically correct walnut benches and pink marble backrests, you have the luxury to gaze out at the bay, then back to the parade of foreign tourists, locals, teenage girls arm-in-arm. "My imagination is incapable of conceiving any thing of the kind more beautiful than the harbour of New York," the visiting Frances Trollope wrote in 1832; "I doubt if ever the pencil of Turner could do it justice, bright and glorious as it rose before us . . . upon waves of liquid gold." The unhurried, ceremonial pace of meanderers along the promenade suggests a Spanish paseo-in any case, not what one usually associates with New York. The fact that the Battery has functioned in this way for so long adds to its appeal.

"In the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and four," wrote Washington Irving, "on a fine afternoon in the glowing month of September, I took my customary walk upon the Battery . . . where the gay apprentice sported his Sunday coat, and …