On the Waterfront

With the end of World War II began a long slow decay of the waterfronts, which once teemed with commercial and manufacturing activity and served as the engine of the city’s ascendance. The last few years have seen tentative steps towards the creation of the postindustrial waterfront, especially on the West Side, but these have yet to inspire other such projects.

The shoreland of Manhattan, east of the FDR Drive and west of the West Side Highway, is nevertheless the site of some fine works of civil engineering. New developments on the West Side have quietly reinvented miles of that dreary stretch, attracting bicyclists, tennis players, idle walkers, and rentiers to newly greened spaces. The potential of the East Side, and some of that of the West, meanwhile remains hidden among a catastrophe of misuse–rotted piers and anonymous residential towers, decommissioned factories and impound lots, most of it ringed off from the people by wide impassable highways.

Now, this may not be an entirely bad thing. As Phillip Lopate puts it in his wonderful new book:

When Lopate adopts the viewpoint of the flaneur, as he does here, it is difficult not to admire the sheer chaos of the urban waterfront–the provisional nature of it all, the way it functions, as do the older and better of city streets, as a “palimpsest of multiple erasures.”

Here is an abandoned power plant, vines trailing from its broken windows; there is a waterlogged pier, a remnant of the old port; between them, sagging and seamed, is an office building from which Melville might have peered one bright day while examining shipping manifests. What monster would seek to impose order on it all?

The flaneur, of course, is not the only one who will find himself walking along the water. The historian will ask himself how the waterfront, so recently the engine of the civic economy, came to resemble a mouthful of broken teeth. The politician and the activist will ask themselves how this broken land might help them secure advantages. The developer will ask himself where profit lies. The mother who raises her child in a dark high-rise will wonder why she is expected to push her stroller across six lanes of traffic to get him near the water.

ALL OF THEM will find food for thought in Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan. Organized as a walking tour along the edge of the city, it is somewhere between a belle lettrist’s meditation on the waterfront and a miscellaneous history. Along with many a personal digression, the book contains odds and ends like an account of the pirate William Kidd, a historical aside on the warlordism of the old longshoreman’s unions, notes on Joseph Mitchell (“It was as though Mitchell were trying to see how far you could go as a writer in sustaining interest without resorting to conflict”), and a consideration of the long death of Westway, an initiative to submerge the West Side Highway and open the resulting space as a series of public greens and commercial developments.

If the improvised nature of the waterfront is the city in microcosm, Westway is the waterfront in microcosm. The project, conceived in the late 1960s by planners in New York’s Housing and Development Administration, would have placed six lanes of highway underwater from the Battery Tunnel to 42nd Street at federal expense and opened 234 acres of land for public use, of which, according to Lopate, 93 acres would have been reserved for parks. It was defeated in 1984 on environmental concerns that were clearly just a pretext for its opponents, many of them the sort of 1960s holdouts for whom community activism is its own end. The real objection of these activists to Westway was that it opened waterfront real estate to the market. The question of how large, vibrant mixed-use development can take place without the involvement of commercial interests was never answered, but the nature of New York politics did not, and does not, require much past raising such objections and claiming a position of ideological purity.

The veto power held by neighborhood activists is symptomatic of larger, structural problems that prevent the coherent development of many of the city’s resources. On the one hand, a committed fringe can bog down a project of immeasurable potential benefit for the city as a whole through the courts, community boards, and the City Council; on the other, unelected and unaccountable individuals, most famously Robert Moses and most recently Bloomberg deputy mayor Daniel Doctoroff, are sometimes in a position to ram projects through by sheer force of will.

WITNESS NEW YORK’S BID for the 2012 Olympics, the most important waterfront development project since Westway, and one that has so sapped the Bloomberg administration’s intellectual and political capital that it has left downtown without a champion just two years after 9/11. The grand plan for the 2012 Games, the brainchild of Doctoroff, implies a shift of the city’s economic center from downtown to midtown. For billions of dollars, Manhattan will receive a football stadium it doesn’t need, a grave security threat, and the probable destruction of the resurgent Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. It is exactly the sort of utopian development scheme that periodically erupts in Manhattan and blights the city for generations.

There is hopefully a balance to be found between disused rail yards and vast, unnecessary sports complexes on the West Side. When discussing the future of the waterfront, Lopate is, I think, right to oppose the idea that “the entire waterfront needs to be protected by a prophylactic greenbelt.” He continues: “That would be a very monotonous and antiurban strategy. We ought to remember that people do not relocate to New York only to commune with nature: the pleasures of living in a big city derive partly from surrounding oneself with the street’s retail enticements. The horror against allowing commerce to invade the new waterfront derives from a fundamental misconception that confuses public access with open public space, untouched by the private sector.”

It is easy to imagine a partnership between commercial and public interests resulting in something better than a sterile “greenbelt” or a monolithic football stadium cutting the transportation infrastructure of the city in half. In Chicago, the shores of Lake Michigan are fronted by bicycle and walking paths that link beaches, parks, museums, and commercial and residential developments together, creating a spectacular lakefront used by the entire city. There are no reasons, save Nimbyism (Not in My Back Yard) and Bananaism (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) that the recent improvements on Manhattan’s west waterfront cannot serve as the seedbed for a diverse series of cultural institutions, parks, cinemas, shops, and residences. On this front, Lopate’s book, if it is read by the right people in the proper spirit, might be very helpful.

Tim Marchman writes regularly for the New York Sun and is an editor at NewPartisan.com.