Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate Page A

pheromones, energy is eternal delight—they can match their speed with and even surpass the sluggish New York traffic; but for the walker, the sensation is something like the retreat from Dunkirk: trying to flee a battle while the enemy artillery keeps rolling in.
    Hudson River Park, that outdoor temple of physical culture, has been designed as essentially a transit corridor; perhaps because the land available for a park is so thin, there was no other choice than a transit corridor. Watching the weekend joggers, Rollerbladers, and bicyclists exercising in the waterfront park around SoHo and Greenwich Village, however, I am increasingly bored and uneasy, until I realize why I am more drawn to the center of the island. It's that in the streets you see New Yorkers in their most purposeful, urgent aspect, their presentation of self is dramatic or at least emphatic, they are navigating from one compelling situation to another—between work, say, and going to the doctor or picking up the kids—and if their faces hold the burden of being overwhelmed with all they have to do in the next twenty-four hours, you also sense their pride, or at least workaday stoicism, which is the genus loci of this particular city. Whereas at leisure they could be anywhere—Spokane, North Carolina, Sydney. On a Sunday in the park, their placid, self-contented faces are emptied of content, save perhaps the strain of jogging one more half-mile, to burn off another centimeter of fat. And their costumes—shorts, T-shirts, sweatpants, sneakers—have no local or regional characteristics, they are the global uniforms of the body-snatched, those who have allowed their limbs to be turned over to machines for happiness. In contrast, compare the fashion-savvy suit or dress choices of office workers striding past Bryant Park at 9:00 A . M. on any given weekday: here you see something quintessentially New York. While everyone was worrying about the entry of the chain stores into Manhattan, fearing that the city would lose its local retail flavor to suburban shopping malls, the conformist forces ofglobalization sneaked in the back way through leisure. It is not consumerism per se that disturbs me—New York was always a mecca of shopping and fashion—but seeing the local populace come to rest and pirouette on skates in anonymous skivvies. At play, or at least this contemporary, puritanical cardiovascular exercise we call play, people look their most blandly bourgeois. Maybe it's just that I'm watching, for the most part, middle-class white people, the dominant demographic in Hudson River Park. Uptown, Hispanics and African-Americans capering on roller skates to a loud ghetto blaster in Central Park are much more entertaining. They know how to party in any public space, the point being to show off one's moves, not burn off one's calories.
    Maybe Hudson River Park will be wonderful when it's finished. You can't tell yet. Still, it seems to me, as I'm walking along, that what should be on the waterfront is something fun, like—movie theaters. How great to be able to reach the river and see a large marquee featuring one, but at most three (okay, four) titles a day—anything more multiplex feels fragmented. I can imagine coming out of an Eric Rohmer film and wandering over by the water's edge, along the promenade, and smoking a cigarette (if only I smoked cigarettes), while I watch a lumbering tug, red-hulled with a striped stack. Or maybe all those cheap Times Square moviehouses that once showed kung fu, horror, or porn could be resurrected along the waterfront. What I miss is something outrageous that would honor the waterfront's raffish history: like a big Jones Beach–type amphitheater for Song of Norway revivals; or a pagoda-shaped gambling house festooned with neon, near Chinatown and Canal Street (first floor, mah-jongg, second floor, cockfighting), or a floating casino supper club, run by Brooklyn gangsters, with reflections of little carmine lanterns