Waterfront : A Journey Around Manhattan

Rating:
Summary: Big and small distances around Manhattan
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Best Book I've Read on New York in a Long Time
Review: 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.