bobbing in the water.
BY ALL RIGHTS, the waterfront should be the city's carnival release, the diastole to the workaholic's systole; but we've lost the habit, and now we're creakily, arthritically trying to regain it. That it was once a habit may be inferred from the opening pages of Moby-Dick:
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward.What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.… Strange! Nothing will content them but theextremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in.
Melville's 1851 vision of a waterfront-besotted populace certainly jibes with Whitman's poems of the same decade; this must have been the very apex of the seaport's bursting youth. Yet, just a few years earlier, in 1843, the popular writer and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis—New York's first self-conscious flâneur— expressed a somewhat different view: “If quiet be the object, the nearer the water the less jostled the walk on Sunday. 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.”
So, which is correct? Melville's assertion that New Yorkers flock like lemmings to the river, or Willis's, that the crowds prefer the thick of Broadway, avoiding the waterfront like hydrophobic rats? Both, perhaps. I can only say that, walking the waterfront and finding myself often the sole human being on foot, I would not rule out the hydrophobic hypothesis as the deeper, more basic trait. In Manhattan you often forget you live on an island, much less one abutting a mighty ocean. You go about your business, deep in preoccupation. New York's granitic environment promotes living in your head, a cerebral, landlocked state just this side of paranoia, but perfect for an information capital.
It's not as though the New York waterfront ever was a place for ordinary citizens to walk much. Boys hung around it for fun and risk, jumping into the East River as their swimming hole, and those who made their living in the port felt comfortable at the river's edge. But except for the Battery, at the island's tip, there was very little opportunity along the waterfor strolling or recreation. It was not until the mid-1890s that a few downtown recreation piers and the first, rough version of Riverside Park were opened.
In the twentieth century the edges of Manhattan remained remote from the average New Yorker's everyday path, for the simple reason that the rapid transit system didn't extend that far. The main subway lines traversed the finger-shaped island in a north-south direction, rather than going east-west; also, the subways generally followed the densest residential or retail patterns, which left out the waterfront. Without a subway to take you to the far western or eastern edge, any riparian encounter would have to come after an excursion on foot, making it a more intentional, marginal experience. You might be a solitude-loving poet or an escaping thief or someone who lived nearby in one of the reconverted warehouses, but you could not be a member of a crowd, except in those rare, fiesta-like situations when the city embraced the river, usually for its unobstructed sightlines: Fourth of July fireworks, the Brooklyn Bridge or Statue of Liberty centenary. The very
BY ALL RIGHTS, the waterfront should be the city's carnival release, the diastole to the workaholic's systole; but we've lost the habit, and now we're creakily, arthritically trying to regain it. That it was once a habit may be inferred from the opening pages of Moby-Dick:
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward.What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.… Strange! Nothing will content them but theextremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in.
Melville's 1851 vision of a waterfront-besotted populace certainly jibes with Whitman's poems of the same decade; this must have been the very apex of the seaport's bursting youth. Yet, just a few years earlier, in 1843, the popular writer and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis—New York's first self-conscious flâneur— expressed a somewhat different view: “If quiet be the object, the nearer the water the less jostled the walk on Sunday. 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.”
So, which is correct? Melville's assertion that New Yorkers flock like lemmings to the river, or Willis's, that the crowds prefer the thick of Broadway, avoiding the waterfront like hydrophobic rats? Both, perhaps. I can only say that, walking the waterfront and finding myself often the sole human being on foot, I would not rule out the hydrophobic hypothesis as the deeper, more basic trait. In Manhattan you often forget you live on an island, much less one abutting a mighty ocean. You go about your business, deep in preoccupation. New York's granitic environment promotes living in your head, a cerebral, landlocked state just this side of paranoia, but perfect for an information capital.
It's not as though the New York waterfront ever was a place for ordinary citizens to walk much. Boys hung around it for fun and risk, jumping into the East River as their swimming hole, and those who made their living in the port felt comfortable at the river's edge. But except for the Battery, at the island's tip, there was very little opportunity along the waterfor strolling or recreation. It was not until the mid-1890s that a few downtown recreation piers and the first, rough version of Riverside Park were opened.
In the twentieth century the edges of Manhattan remained remote from the average New Yorker's everyday path, for the simple reason that the rapid transit system didn't extend that far. The main subway lines traversed the finger-shaped island in a north-south direction, rather than going east-west; also, the subways generally followed the densest residential or retail patterns, which left out the waterfront. Without a subway to take you to the far western or eastern edge, any riparian encounter would have to come after an excursion on foot, making it a more intentional, marginal experience. You might be a solitude-loving poet or an escaping thief or someone who lived nearby in one of the reconverted warehouses, but you could not be a member of a crowd, except in those rare, fiesta-like situations when the city embraced the river, usually for its unobstructed sightlines: Fourth of July fireworks, the Brooklyn Bridge or Statue of Liberty centenary. The very
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