Read Online Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Phillip Lopate
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residential, cultural (opera house or museum), retail, and transportation uses. Whatever gets built, there are better ways of doing it than towers set off in plazas.
Thousands of commuters will again pour into the area daily, as they have in the past. Some sort of terminal or overt transportation structure seems in order, to express with aplomb their entry to the city's downtown area. Ideally, you could extend commuter rail from the Midtown terminals to the Lower Manhattan area, which would greatly enhance the attractiveness of the Financial District as a working environment.
A memorial must and will go up; the area is, after all, a massive gravesite. But I confess I am leery of the aesthetic range of contemporary monuments, pulled as they are between realist kitsch and tepidly tastefulabstraction, and I despair of any memorial doing justice to the victims and their families. As for the idea that a really spectacular memorial to September 11 would rejuvenate Lower Manhattan's tourist business by itself, that seems to me craven if not delusional.
The greatest tribute we could pay those who gave their lives on this site would be to make it into a convivial, life-affirming, urbane place, which would most aptly express New York's street-smart character. (But all such rhetoric on the subject, however well intended, finally makes one gag.)
4 EXCURSUS THE HARBOR AND THE OLD PORT
And has it really faded from the port, the painful glamour? Has it really gone from them, the fiction that was always on the movements of the liners in and out the upper bay? Or has it merely retreated for a while behind the bluffs of the New Jersey shore, to return to us again to-morrow and draw the breast away once more into the distance beneath Staten Island hill?
—PAUL ROSENFELD, Port of New York
F OR THE MAJORITY OF NEW YORKERS, EVEN NATIVEBORN, THE HARBOR IS AN ABSTRACTION : ONE WOULD BE HARD PRESSED TO SAY WHAT EXACT TERRITORY OF LAND and water it encompassed. When the state agencies promoting tourism speak of a “Harbor Park” connecting the Battery, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Snug Harbor in Staten Island, and Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park in Brooklyn into one ferry-bound entity, they are essentially imposing a hopeful verbal scrim over what is to most people an empty stage. We know the harbor used to dominate the city's consciousness, but we don't feel it anymore. I am skeptical that tourists with limited time in New York—say, a week—would give a whole day to exploring this harbor concept, by taking ferries hither and yon to island monuments far removed from Broadway. But since there are many repeat tourists to New York, perhaps they might try it on a later visit; and happily so, less because of what they might find at the various stops than because there are few ways to experience New York as pleasurably as by looking at it from the water.
The recent proposal by the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance for a harbor loop ferry system that would make up to fifteen stops in the Upper Bay, as an extension of the mass transit system, is exciting as well as sensible. Like a set of extra highways already in place, the waterways could cut down on travel time, expense, and pollution. But beyond whatever logistical, financial, and political problems may arise in instituting such a desirable plan, the harbor would have to be understood again by the public as more than an archaic abstraction—as something functionally real. *
I wonder what Ernest Poole would have made of such a turnabout. Poole, a journalist of the progressive camp, who wrote crusading pieces about the East Side slums, chose in his first novel, The Harbor, to portray the port of New York as the very symbol of reality. Poole used the terms harbor and port interchangeably, and when he wrote the novel, the port ofNew York was the largest in the world, not only in the amount of commerce it handled, but also in the length of its available waterfront. *
* The last writer to
Thousands of commuters will again pour into the area daily, as they have in the past. Some sort of terminal or overt transportation structure seems in order, to express with aplomb their entry to the city's downtown area. Ideally, you could extend commuter rail from the Midtown terminals to the Lower Manhattan area, which would greatly enhance the attractiveness of the Financial District as a working environment.
A memorial must and will go up; the area is, after all, a massive gravesite. But I confess I am leery of the aesthetic range of contemporary monuments, pulled as they are between realist kitsch and tepidly tastefulabstraction, and I despair of any memorial doing justice to the victims and their families. As for the idea that a really spectacular memorial to September 11 would rejuvenate Lower Manhattan's tourist business by itself, that seems to me craven if not delusional.
The greatest tribute we could pay those who gave their lives on this site would be to make it into a convivial, life-affirming, urbane place, which would most aptly express New York's street-smart character. (But all such rhetoric on the subject, however well intended, finally makes one gag.)
4 EXCURSUS THE HARBOR AND THE OLD PORT
And has it really faded from the port, the painful glamour? Has it really gone from them, the fiction that was always on the movements of the liners in and out the upper bay? Or has it merely retreated for a while behind the bluffs of the New Jersey shore, to return to us again to-morrow and draw the breast away once more into the distance beneath Staten Island hill?
—PAUL ROSENFELD, Port of New York
F OR THE MAJORITY OF NEW YORKERS, EVEN NATIVEBORN, THE HARBOR IS AN ABSTRACTION : ONE WOULD BE HARD PRESSED TO SAY WHAT EXACT TERRITORY OF LAND and water it encompassed. When the state agencies promoting tourism speak of a “Harbor Park” connecting the Battery, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Snug Harbor in Staten Island, and Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park in Brooklyn into one ferry-bound entity, they are essentially imposing a hopeful verbal scrim over what is to most people an empty stage. We know the harbor used to dominate the city's consciousness, but we don't feel it anymore. I am skeptical that tourists with limited time in New York—say, a week—would give a whole day to exploring this harbor concept, by taking ferries hither and yon to island monuments far removed from Broadway. But since there are many repeat tourists to New York, perhaps they might try it on a later visit; and happily so, less because of what they might find at the various stops than because there are few ways to experience New York as pleasurably as by looking at it from the water.
The recent proposal by the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance for a harbor loop ferry system that would make up to fifteen stops in the Upper Bay, as an extension of the mass transit system, is exciting as well as sensible. Like a set of extra highways already in place, the waterways could cut down on travel time, expense, and pollution. But beyond whatever logistical, financial, and political problems may arise in instituting such a desirable plan, the harbor would have to be understood again by the public as more than an archaic abstraction—as something functionally real. *
I wonder what Ernest Poole would have made of such a turnabout. Poole, a journalist of the progressive camp, who wrote crusading pieces about the East Side slums, chose in his first novel, The Harbor, to portray the port of New York as the very symbol of reality. Poole used the terms harbor and port interchangeably, and when he wrote the novel, the port ofNew York was the largest in the world, not only in the amount of commerce it handled, but also in the length of its available waterfront. *
* The last writer to
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