Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan - Softcover

Lopate, Phillip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385497148 ISBN 13: 9780385497145

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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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 the laborious mechanic, relieved from his dirt and drudgery of the week, poured his weekly tale of love into the half averted ear of the sentimental chambermaid." During the day the park seems always popular, partly because the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island ferries leave from it, partly because it has such juicy vistas. A well-worn recreation space, not even aspiring to the bucolic, the Battery works as a city park should, circulating people from the nearby skyscraper-thick streets to the water's edge.

Performers work the tourist crowds who are waiting for the next ferry. A West Indian with dreadlocks is playing "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" on steel drums to one bunch, while an African contortionist in black shirt and red pants entertains another by twisting his legs around his neck and walking on his rump. Not an entirely appetizing sight, to my mind, though he releases his body-knot and comes up cheerfully for air, declaring, "Okay, folks, one dollar. Japanese-two dollars." A paterfamilias tells his children looking through coin-operated binoculars: "That's where Vito Corleone came over on a boat."

I wander over to the circular Castle Garden, historically the site of a fort, summer tea garden, concert hall, immigrant processing center, and aquarium, and now the place to buy tickets to the Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island ferry. This moldy cinnamon doughnut, a spiffed-up ruin, has been rebuilt and remodeled so many times you would be hard pressed to feel any aura of the authentic emanating from its stones. But the gesture of retaining it is appreciated.

Originally built between 1808 and 1811, it was constructed about two hundred feet offshore in thirty feet of water, like a stable boat. This engineering feat was largely the achievement of Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Williams, who covered the fort in stone thick enough to withstand hostile naval bombardment, and added iron filings to the mortar that held the façade together, which made the walls more durable and adaptable to a watery environment. Williams, one of the first professional military engineers in America, also designed Castle Williams on nearby Governors Island. In all, four batteries were installed to defend the harbor, and may have in fact helped dissuade the British from attacking the city during the War of 1812. A wooden bridge connected Castle Clinton to the Battery in Manhattan; ultimately it was made redundant by landfill.

In 1824 the federal government gave the fort to the city, which turned it into Castle Garden, a celebrated entertainment hall, where "the Swedish Nightingale," Jenny Lind, first sang on her American tour. In 1850, after the premiere of La Sonnambula, New York's indefatigable diarist, George Templeton Strong, wrote: "Everybody goes, and nob and snob, Fifth Avenue and Chatham Street, sit side by side fraternally on the hard benches. Perhaps there is hardly so attractive a summer theatre in the world as Castle Garden when so good a company is performing as we have here now. Ample room; cool sea breeze on the balcony, where one can sit and smoke and listen and look out at the bay studded with the lights of anchored vessels, and white sails gleaming. . . ."

In 1855, during a peak immigration period (more than 319,000 immigrants reached the New York port in 1854 alone), Castle Garden was converted into a reception hall for the entering masses. Before this innovation, those who came over in steerage had been routinely fleeced by runners at the docks, who stole their luggage or steered the newcomers to outrageously overpriced boardinghouses. These runners and touts often spoke the same language as their confused countrymen, the better to exploit their trust. Entering at Castle Garden, however, the immigrant could take stock, receive honest advice, and make further transportation arrangements at normal rates. In William Dean Howells's fine novel A Hazard of New Fortunes, the Marches approve of "the excellent management of Castle Garden, which they penetrated for a moment's glimpse of the huge rotunda, where the emigrants first set foot on our continent. . . . No one appeared troubled or anxious; the officials had a conscientious civility; the government seemed to manage their welcome as well as a private company or corporation could have done."

It is interesting to contrast this rosy picture with the testimony of one who actually went through the processing line, Abraham Cahan (in his classic immigrant novel, The Rise of David Levinsky): "We were ferried over to Castle Garden. . . . The harsh manner of the immigration officers was a grievous surprise to me. As contrasted with the officials of my despotic country, those of a republic had been portrayed in my mind as paragons of refinement and cordiality. My anticipations were rudely belied. 'They are not a bit better than Cossacks,' I remarked to Gitelson. . . . These unfriendly voices flavored all America with a spirit of icy inhospitality that sent a chill through my very soul."

The immigrant station at Castle Garden was closed in 1890; two years later the much more famous one at Ellis Island opened. In 1900 Castle Garden reinvented itself as the city's aquarium, around which time the journalist John C. Van Dyke compared it to "a half-sunken gas tank." Now Ellis Island beckons as the revered national...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0385497148
• ISBN 13: 9780385497145
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 450
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland