Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (63 page)

Parenthetically, an increase in the river craft using the New York Harbor would also make the waterfront more stimulating for passive contemplation, since any gazing at the water is immeasurably improved by the sight of a vessel moving steadily through it.

I AM TEMPTED TO END with a few more concrete suggestions about what I think should be done. Perhaps I am too much under the influence of those critics who say: “Mr. So-and-So has failed to recommend solutions for the problems he calls to our attention, and therefore risks leaving the reader in a state of despair.” I would not for anything want to leave you in despair. On the other hand, I am not a professional architect or planner, and would hate to have to bluff the part.

As it happens, recently I came across a report titled “A Better Edge” that the architect James Sanders had prepared for the Parks Council in
1990. Reading through it, I was heartened to see many of the viewpoints I have stumbled on, through my own halting reasoning processes, corroborated by the report's author, even as I was edified to see how much further Sanders's thinking went, with fresh proposals and imaginative refinements I could not have figured out by myself. The summary I now offer is a blend of my ideas and those (the majority) that I have purloined from him.

Now that everyone recognizes that “waterfront access” is good, this concept needs to be made workable. Especially in a city such as New York, where there exist major physical impediments to reaching the rivers, such as highways, power plants, superblocks, railyards, housing projects, brown-fields, factories, sanitation department parking lots, private development enclaves, and other barriers, as well as psychological ones, such as the tradition of non–public access, it becomes necessary to reach farther inland and develop a clear and inviting procession, from several blocks away, that will lead would-be waterfront enjoyers toward their goal. Thought will have to be given to drawing pedestrians from streets and avenues near inland subway and bus stations, with a wide choice of routes down to the water. Strategies may involve extending the street grid farther to the river's edge, redesigning the main approach street to the water as a tree-lined, handsome thoroughfare, displaying signage or pennants to alert pedestrians to follow the water-bound route, improving sightlines to the water, and erecting some culmination—a gateway, column, flagpole, or mast—that can be seen from a distance, lit with strings of lights at night, to welcome people to the waterfront.

To help the public across the physical barriers encountered at the edge, it will be necessary to “breach the wall” wherever possible with creative solutions. For instance, an elevated highway structure can have its underside and column supports reconfigured as arches or vaults, using inviting materials at key entrance points. A farmers' market can nest under the elevated structure, receiving protection from rain and snow year-round. Where the highway is not elevated but at grade, pedestrian bridges and overpasses should be erected, designed much more appealingly and imaginatively than they have been in the past, so as to overcome the New York public's fear of using them.

Once the public reaches the water, there should be wide paths to
accommodate pedestrian circulation. A promenade as continuous as possible is desirable, with shade trees, benches, well-designed lampposts, and high-quality paving materials; but it must have the variety, incident, and urbanity of a popular boulevard for it to be truly pleasurable. There can be cantilevered lookouts, pushing out over the bulkheads, to relieve the circulation of walkers, joggers, and bicyclists at densest points. There should certainly be some central civic public feature—a square with a fountain, artwork, café, or bookstall—built into the promenade every so often. Where it is impossible for the city to acquire land from private owners to make a continuous promenade, these public plazas can still occur, where the street ends at the waterfront.

There is no end to pleasurable activities that can draw people to the waterfront. Fishing piers, with basins and tables for cleaning fish, a bait shop, and handrails notched with rests for fishing poles, represents one possibility. You can reintroduce pleasure piers, those semi-enclosed, public recreation structures popular in days gone by, and offer court games such as handball and racquetball, shuffleboard, miniature golf, concerts, dances, public lectures, classes, carousels, carnival rides. Offshore, you can have floating swimming pools, with clean, chlorinated water and changing rooms—and even a floating beach, using a barge vessel filled with sand. Water theaters with live performances or floating movie screens can bring a dramatic flair to the riverfront; view towers can offer panoramic vistas; water clubs and restaurants can come equipped with retractable glazed doors, open in the summer months, shut in the winter.

Ultimately, however, the edge must become something more vital and necessary than a place just for pleasure strolling, looking out, and imbibing: it must draw people as a site of routine, day-to-day activity.

For this to happen, the water itself must be restored as a circulation system, and the waterfront as a place of transfer. That means a combined, integrated system of ferries that cross the rivers and bays, connecting opposite shores; water jitneys that travel along a shoreline and connect with the ferries; and water taxis that take individual customers or small groups to destinations on demand. Such a network will bring people to the waterfront, and counteract the isolationist tendencies of waterfront redevelopers.

In addition to this boat transportation system, there can be excursion
boats and pleasure craft, including motorboats, kayaks, canoes, and sailboats. All these boats will need new docks. While ferries require substantial docking facilities, those for water jitneys and water taxis can be slighter. As for pleasure craft, what are needed are not necessarily more full-sized marinas for stationary yachts, but many small-boat launches up and down the waterfront. There can also be seasonal mooring docks, floating and movable, designed for small boats to tie up, and canoe and kayak launches. Boathouses, lighthouses, windmills, and water shops, selling oysters from barges, could add color to the waterfront edge.

In general, to achieve a better balance in waterfront planning, the emphasis should shift from very large projects, which have garnered most of the attention up to now, to small-scale and moderate-scale projects. The city should help small entrepreneurs to operate on the waterfront, realizing that often it is the smaller businesses or nonprofits (such as the River Café, BargeMusic, and the River Project) that have ignited a vital spark at the river's edge. In line with that thinking, structures built on the waterfront should, whenever possible, employ a light, transparent architecture so that they do not themselves turn into new visual barriers.

Where the public enters at a higher elevation than sea level, such as the bluff at Highbridge Park, a cascading edge can be effected, through flights of stairs or ramps that curve intriguingly, and are frequently interrupted by landings equipped with seats for overlooks. At the seawall, there can be steps leading down to the water, with rising tides covering the bottom steps and retreating tides uncovering them. There can also be “stepdowns,” or platforms reached by ramps or steps, that are carved into the bulkhead or project out from it. The bulkhead itself may be decorated, so that different sections acquire a neighborhood identity.

Not everything needs to be bustling and crowd-attracting. Sites of intimacy or discovery, little gardens and coves almost hidden away, make for a restorative change of tone, and a waterfront that will reward recurrent exploration.

A softer edge can be achieved, in places, by nurturing wetlands and grassy lawns sloping down to the water. Wetlands environments can be protected from the public by wooden boardwalks. Lagoons could be introduced, with artificial lakes and paddle boats rented by the hour, and smaller basins notched out of the shore, designed for model boats. One
could take a playful attitude toward the shoreline. Much as Olmsted and Vaux artificially composed wild, Edenic landscapes in Central Park and Prospect Park, so the island's edge might be sculpted to give it a more varied, dramatic, and “naturalistic” coast.

Lest all this sound an impossible fantasy, please consider that many of these strategies existed as part of the everyday reality of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cities. They are drawn from New York's own traditions and practices—largely forgotten, I realize, but by no means impossible to put into practice once again. The quickening of the urban pulse at the waterfront will go a long way toward improving the city's morale.

IN PROMOTIONAL MATERIALS and slide-show lectures for waterfront projects, there is always a sentence thrown in about “the magic of water,” accompanied by assertions that “people have a remarkable tendency to be drawn to the water.” No real estate or recreational development can go forth without appeal to the spiritual properties of H
₂
O. That water is life-giving and life-sustaining, no one would dispute. I merely wonder why, if this substance is so universally mesmerizing, its magnetic qualities need to be reiterated. We do not, for instance, feel obligated to make claims in a stock prospectus that money has great attractions, or, in a handbill for phone sex, that erotic pleasure has a strong, undeniable appeal. Could it be that the case is not so clear-cut?

The mystical longing to get to the edge; the impossibility of doing so. Prevented by highways, railroad yards, fences, gradient problems, environmental laws against reaching the water, there is yet another issue that is never discussed, namely, you get there finally and there is—nothing, an emptiness, the river flowing interminably by, now nearly devoid of ships or other human presence. Granted, there is something soothing in itself about watching moving water, for thirty minutes at the maximum, and there is something beautiful about the sunlight or clouds rippling on water, about the natural landscape intruding on the cityscape, good for shall we say another fifteen minutes, but this play of water and light that is supposed to be unquenchably rewarding soon becomes a sterile delight for the urbanite raised on spectacle and shopping. The empty harbor becomes, paradoxically, the zone revealing to us our own shallow impatience, alienation
from nature, unattainable sexual desires, professional pettiness, the substance of our nattering inner monologue. We
say
all we want is access to the water; we
mean
access to inner peace, to meaning, to purity, to a mature acceptance of our place on earth, and other such improbables. The water's edge is the infinitely beckoning, infinitely receding mirage of our consumerist society: the place that will finally tell us we have arrived.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IN RESEARCHING THIS BOOK, I was aided by many specialists who took pity on me. Sometimes I tried my hunches out on them, to see if I was not completely off-base; more often, I simply “appropriated” their knowledge. While there must be
some
original ideas in this book, I would be hard-pressed to point to them, so indebted am I to the warp and woof of other people's thinking.

I would especially like to thank three professionals who so generously offered their insights and expertise: Carter Craft of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance and Kent Barwick of the Municipal Art Society made themselves unfailingly available, as did Wilbur Woods, of the New York City Department of Planning. I also learned much from conversations with the architects David Burney, Richard Dattner, Stanton Eckstut, Laurie Kerr, and Craig Whitaker; with the city planners Paul Levy, Laurie Beckelman, Peter Marcuse, Deren Rieff, and Harry Schwartz; with architectural writers Dolores Hayden and Ada Louise Huxtable; with marine biologists Mike Ludwig (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration), John Waldman and Dennis Suszkowski (Hudson River Foundation); with nonprofit administrators Cathy Drew (The River Project), Joseph Pupello (New York Restoration Project), Cy Adler (Shorewalkers), Raymond Gastil (Van Alen Institute), Mary Brosnahan Sullivan (Coalition for the Homeless), and Andrew Darrell (Environmental Defense); with activists Marci Benstock and Albert Butzel; with photographers Barbara Mensch, Stephen Scheer, Margaret Morton, and Stanley Greenberg; with officials Robert Gill (Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) and Heather Sporn (New York State Department of Transportation); with landscape architects Maggie Ruddick and Len Hopper; with journalists David White and Thomas R. Flagg; with Professors William Kornblum (CUNY Graduate Center) and Elaine Savory (New School); with Eric Washington of the Manhattanville Historical Society; with Judy Berdy (Roosevelt Island Historical Society), and John Pettit West III (Community Board 6).

I want to thank the friends who accompanied me on waterfront jaunts: Tom Beller, Leon Falk, Vivian Gornick, Larry Joseph, Elizabeth Mitchell, Ann Patty, James Sanders, David Shapiro, Jack Stevens, and Lee Zimmerman. I would also like to thank those friends of mine, such as Lynn Freed, Ann Snitow, Ben Taylor, and Sharon Thompson, whose enthusiastic good wishes and advice helped me more than I can say. I received tremendous support from the faculty and administration of Hofstra University, my employer. I also got much valuable input from the other research fellows at the Center for Scholars and Writers (especially Ileen DeVaux, Ann Mendelsohn, Francisco Goldman, Claudia Roth Pierrepont, Joseph Cady, Steve Fraser, Rachel Hadas, Eiko Ikegami, and Jonathan Bush), and the staff and incomparable librarians of the New York Public Library. Barbara Hirschmann was a sage support throughout. I am very indebted to Vijay Seshadri and Kent Jones for reading the first draft and offering suggestions. I thank my editor at Crown, Doug Pepper, both for his enthusiasm and for trying to save me from my worst self, not always successfully.