Read Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan Online
Authors: Phillip Lopate
Tags: #Literary Collections, #Essays, #Biography & Autobiography, #General
Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan
Acclaim for Phillip Lopate's
WATERFRONT
“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 Lethem
“Where 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 fascinat-ing—there should be several million of us—would do well to read
Waterfront
, his beautiful ramble into its heart and soul.”
—E. L. Doctorow
“For 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.”
—
The Star-Ledger
(Newark, NJ)
“Phillip Lopate is a walker in the city like no other since Charles Dickens: He is archaeologist, historian, explorer, poet, observer (and 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 Ozick
“One 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 writer—humane, 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, coauthor 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 book.”
—Ada Louise Huxtable
“Phillip Lopate makes the waterfront that has vanished as vivid as the one that has survived.… The thrill is not just in his different voices—tour-guide, archaeologist, detective, social scientist, historian of yesterday and today, lyrical poet, pragmatist, utopian, man alone on the cliffs, public citizen in the streets—but in the brilliant fluency with which he jump-cuts back and forth between them.”
—Marshall Berman, author of
All That is Solid Melts into Air
PHILLIP LOPATE
WATERFRONT
Phillip Lopate is the author of numerous books, including
Getting Personal: Selected Writings
, the essay collections
Bachelorhood
,
Against Joie de Vivre
, and
Portrait of My Body
, and the novels
The Rug Merchant
and
Confessions of Summer.
Lopate also authored
Seaport: New York's Vanished Waterfront
, a book of photographs of maritime Manhattan. He is the editor of
The Art of the Personal Essay
and
Writing New York
, 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.]
ALSO BY PHILLIP LOPATE
ESSAYS AND NONFICTION
Getting Personal: Selected Writings
Totally, Tenderly, Tragically
Portrait of My Body
Writing New York
(editor)
The Art of the Personal Essay
(editor)
Against Joie de Vivre
Bachelorhood: Tales of the Metropolis
Being with Children
NOVELS
The Rug Merchant
Confessions of Summer
POETRY
The Eyes Don't Want to Stay Open
The Daily Round
CONTENTS
A QUICK START-UP OF MANNAHATTA 10
PART ONE:
THE WEST SIDE
4
EXCURSUS: THE HARBOR AND THE OLD PORT
6
THE SOHO/GREENWICH VILLAGE CORRIDOR
7
EXCURSUS: OUTBOARD, OR THE BATTLE OF WESTWAY AND ITS AFTERMATH
8
CHELSEA PIERS, CHELSEA, AND TROCCHI-LAND
10
FROM 42ND STREET TO RIVERSIDE SOUTH
11
RIVERSIDE PARK AND MANHATTANVILLE
12
SEWAGE TREATMENT PLANT AND SALSA PARTY
13
WASHINGTON HEIGHTS AND INWOOD
PART TWO:
THE EAST SIDE
14
INTRODUCTION: ON THE AESTHETICS OF URBAN WALKING AND WRITING
15
CAPTAIN KIDD AND PEARL STREET
16
EXCURSUS: SAILORS AND MERCHANT SEAMEN IN NEW YORK
17
THE SOUTH STREET SEAPORT AND THE FULTON FISH MARKET
18
EXCURSUS: THE ELUSIVE JOSEPH MITCHELL
19
THE SOUTH STREET SEAPORT (CONTINUED)
22
CON EDISONLAND: FROM ONE POWER PLANT TO ANOTHER
23
EXCURSUS: ROBERT MOSES, A REVISIONIST TAKE
24
TUDOR CITY, THE UNITED NATIONS, AND THE UPPER EAST SIDE
25
EAST HARLEM AND POINTS NORTH
26
EXCURSUS: ODE TO THE PROJECTS
29
THE DILEMMA OF WATERFRONT DEVELOPMENT
“If there is magic on the planet, it is contained in water.”
—LOREN EISELEY
“Islands—I don't get them. Surrounded by water, poor things.”
—PATRIZIA, in Antonioni's
L'Avventura
INTRODUCTION
