Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
I taught this book during the summer of 2005 as the anchor text of a content-based ESL curriculum at CUNY entitled “Stories of the City, Stories of the Sea” – it was sort of an examination of how water shapes New York Cit, literally and figuratively. First off, I should say that this is not an ideal ESL text – the narrative is too digressive, the sentences are too complex, and his style could never be translated into 5-paragraph-essay format (which, truth be told, is all most of the student want to learn in order to pass the CUNY entrance exams).That said, it’s a highly entertaining, well-researched work organized around Lopate’s own walking journey around the periphery of Manhattan island. He fills tales of his own adventures with historical and literary anecdotes, giving the entire waterfront a mythic grandeur. I know much of the area he’s transversed, but many of them felt new to me from his takes. Others, like his descriptions of the Fulton Fish Market, are sadly already history as the market was moved to the Bronx at the end of 2005 to make downtown area more tourist-friendly. (One of my students that summer, an Israeli named Kobi, spent the entire summer going to the market at night once he heard it was to be closed; he said it was one of the last great things about New York)You can tell he’s the brother of an NPR commentator (Leonard Lopate), but he has enough spunk and a few breaks from standard liberal party-line analysis to make for a dynamic read. For example, he has a chapter entitled “Robert Moses: A Revisionist Take” where he reassesses New Yorkers’ and his own ingrained hostility toward the much-reviled Moses, shaped mostly by his attachment to Jane Jacobs’ pedestrian utopian ideals and his reading of The Power Broker. It didn’t change my mind about Moses, but it made for some interesting reading.
Part meditation, part history, part travelogue, Lopate's narrative is informative, witty and insightful insofar as the history of New York City IS in its waterfront, as Lopate argues. The rise and fall and rise again of its piers, wharves and boardwalks also chronicles its politics and tastes. Although much of the information can be found elsewhere and written by "experts," I appreciate its placement within the walking narrative. There is nothing revelational about the book except, for a New Yorker, a recognition of the familiar, but with added depth. As an avid walker and biker as of late along the coastal slivers of Manhattan and Brooklyn, this book is the thoughtful companion I've wanted to my explorations.
What do You think about Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (2005)?
And with this ends my random-reading study of New York. "New York's waterfront has undergone a three-stage revaluation-from the world's largest port to an abandoned, seedy no-man's land to a highly desirable zone of parks and upscale retail and residential properties-each metamorphosis only incompletely shedding earlier associations." (Book Jacket)Probably more interesting to locals because it outlines the city's more recent history and details places that I will certainly never see in the short time I will spend there. I did a lot of skimming here.
—Jenifer
I recommend this book for a select group: those who have a good bit of familiarity with New York City and are fond of the rivers and the harbor. If you live in New York City, but you generally ignore the waterfront, you won't enjoy this book. If you love the water, but you don't know a lot about Manhattan particularly, you won't enjoy this book. If you like your nonfiction books to have a dispassionate and generally even narrator, you won't like this book. I fall into that small band that 1. lives in New York, 2. loves the waterfront in New York, and 3. can stomach a writer occasionally digressing to rambling. My one nagging annoyance with Mr. Lopate is that he slams on runners (and I count myself a runner) as just skimming the surface and not truly connecting to the waterfront. I'm almost willing to overlook that slight because he admits that he's not athletically inclined, so he has no valid perspective there.
—Daniel
FIRST LINE REVIEW: "Manhattan is shaped like an ocean liner or like a lozenge or like a paramecium (what remains of its protruding piers, its cilia) or like a gourd or like some sort of fish, a striped bass, say, but most of all like a luxury liner, permanently docked, going nowhere." Although Manhattan isn't going anywhere, I feel like I've gone on a wonderful journey around this richly provocative island. I know the inland parts fairly well (not really, but I like to think so), but knew nothing about it's watery edges. Now I do! I feel like I've walked them alongside Lopate, a fascinating character with whom I've actually walked the streets of Vilnius, Lithuania. As the opening line of this "walking narrative" reveals, he can use words to open up new vistas on very old places. I learned much and wanted to see, first-hand, much that he described.
—Ivan
