Thursday, September 23, 2004
A book about New York - Waterfront by Phillip Lopate
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
A new and valuable book about Manhattan, Waterfront, a Journey Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate (Crown, March 2004), recently came my way, via the public library. The author is a walker and a reader, and takes us on a leisurely stroll us up the Hudson waterfront, from the Battery northward, reminding us of the military and civic battles on the West Side, interspersed with quotes from Walt Whitman. He then repeats the walk on the East Side, our home grounds.
Historically America’s most important port, by 1860 New York handled over a half of the entire country’s imports and particularly, exports, including the principal one, cotton, on which the New York bankers and merchants, financiers of the Southern plantation owners, had a lock. The Custom House, where Herman Melville toiled, was then the prime source of the federal government’s revenue. By 1950 the volume of the nation’s cargo passing through New York was down to one third, and it kept reducing, since larger ships, deeper draft and container handling facilities required more space. The traffic shifted to Elizabeth and Port Newark, on the other side of the Hudson River. Incidentally, the author, discoursing the discoverer of the river, attributes his death to Indians. My recollection is that rebelling sailors, on a doomed winter journey in what is now Hudson’s Bay, left the sick captain in a boat, to die of exposure.
Whether the corruption of longshoremen’s unions played a role in the port’s collapse is moot. Certainly On the Waterfront, featuring the inarticulate Marlon Brando ineffectively fighting corruption, sent the nation’s thinking in that direction. We learned, though, how a longshoreman’s toothpick displayed at a shapeup signaled his willingness to pay kickback.
The community and city planners’ battles are an important element of the book, starting with the West Side Highway developments. Built in the 1920s to separate the growing car traffic from the trucks feeding the very active piers, by 1956 it was crumbling. Commissioner Moses’s proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, that would have destroyed much of Greenwich Village and SoHo, brought community activism to life. Upon its defeat, in 1969 the community fought a new proposal, Westway, offering to bury the highway underground from 40th Street south and building a park above it. Eventually, 16 years later, Justice Thomas Griesa ruled it out on environmental grounds, to protect the river’s striped bass population.
These battles have haunted all subsequent attempts to bring the dilapidated riverfront areas to development, whether as real estate properties or as parks. The East Side counterpart, with which we may be more familiar, involved the battles over what is now Stuyvesant Cove Park, from 18th to 23rd Streets on the East River. Once the site of the Transit Mix Concrete Corporation’s construction dock, with silos and barges, then property of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, it had become the subject of a major development of apartment houses and some interspersed greenery, fetchingly dubbed Riverwalk, that would generate tax revenues. Community Board 6 and local activists, concerned about lack of public space in its area, fought it off in the 1990s.
Another battle on our East Side waterfront concerns the waterfront properties, behind Stuyvesant Town and beyond. Lopate calls it ConEdisonland, ranging from the power plant on two blocks at 14th to 16th Streets, Ave C to the river, and slated for expansion, to the one between 38th and 40th Streets, defunct and on its way to real estate developmentland. The expansion would have increased the air content of fine particulate matter PM2.5, with particles 2.5 microns or less, linked to asthma, lung cancer and heart disease. A community group, the East River Environmental Coalition, instituted a lawsuit, not disputing ConEd’s and the city’s need for more power and the company’s promises of new cleaner equipment that would reduce the pollutants in the air. No, the culprit was the attachment of the new system to the old, dirty and antiquated oil-burning plant, one of 18 that NY State legislature had exempted from complying with certain provisions of the Clean Air Act of 1970. The lawsuit demanded that it be upgraded, with expanded use of natural gas. Eventually a settlement was reached, but the fight continues, notes the author.
Lopate is of mixed emotions about the waterfront developments, such as Waterside, harsh of appearance and worrisome from the point of view of maintenance against underwater damages. There is a current substantial rebirth of the waterfront as evidenced by the utilization of piers, the construction of the Hudson River Park and the new buildings on the inland side of the West Side Highway. Lopate discourses how the abandoned piers became centers for preservation and tourism at South Street Seaport (he likes), and developed into sports centers at Chelsea Piers (he is less pleased).
This ambivalence regarding developers is not uncommon among people who devote time to thinking about New York’s future. Even Robert Caro, scourge of Robert Moses and his 40 autocratic years of rule over our roads and bridges, expresses certain admiration of his accomplishments and ability to cut through red tape. It should be recognized that much of it, the inevitable community protests against all new demolition and construction that we have come to consider a basic part of our democratic process, was born out of revolt against Moses’s arbitrariness..
A new and valuable book about Manhattan, Waterfront, a Journey Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate (Crown, March 2004), recently came my way, via the public library. The author is a walker and a reader, and takes us on a leisurely stroll us up the Hudson waterfront, from the Battery northward, reminding us of the military and civic battles on the West Side, interspersed with quotes from Walt Whitman. He then repeats the walk on the East Side, our home grounds.
Historically America’s most important port, by 1860 New York handled over a half of the entire country’s imports and particularly, exports, including the principal one, cotton, on which the New York bankers and merchants, financiers of the Southern plantation owners, had a lock. The Custom House, where Herman Melville toiled, was then the prime source of the federal government’s revenue. By 1950 the volume of the nation’s cargo passing through New York was down to one third, and it kept reducing, since larger ships, deeper draft and container handling facilities required more space. The traffic shifted to Elizabeth and Port Newark, on the other side of the Hudson River. Incidentally, the author, discoursing the discoverer of the river, attributes his death to Indians. My recollection is that rebelling sailors, on a doomed winter journey in what is now Hudson’s Bay, left the sick captain in a boat, to die of exposure.
Whether the corruption of longshoremen’s unions played a role in the port’s collapse is moot. Certainly On the Waterfront, featuring the inarticulate Marlon Brando ineffectively fighting corruption, sent the nation’s thinking in that direction. We learned, though, how a longshoreman’s toothpick displayed at a shapeup signaled his willingness to pay kickback.
The community and city planners’ battles are an important element of the book, starting with the West Side Highway developments. Built in the 1920s to separate the growing car traffic from the trucks feeding the very active piers, by 1956 it was crumbling. Commissioner Moses’s proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, that would have destroyed much of Greenwich Village and SoHo, brought community activism to life. Upon its defeat, in 1969 the community fought a new proposal, Westway, offering to bury the highway underground from 40th Street south and building a park above it. Eventually, 16 years later, Justice Thomas Griesa ruled it out on environmental grounds, to protect the river’s striped bass population.
These battles have haunted all subsequent attempts to bring the dilapidated riverfront areas to development, whether as real estate properties or as parks. The East Side counterpart, with which we may be more familiar, involved the battles over what is now Stuyvesant Cove Park, from 18th to 23rd Streets on the East River. Once the site of the Transit Mix Concrete Corporation’s construction dock, with silos and barges, then property of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, it had become the subject of a major development of apartment houses and some interspersed greenery, fetchingly dubbed Riverwalk, that would generate tax revenues. Community Board 6 and local activists, concerned about lack of public space in its area, fought it off in the 1990s.
Another battle on our East Side waterfront concerns the waterfront properties, behind Stuyvesant Town and beyond. Lopate calls it ConEdisonland, ranging from the power plant on two blocks at 14th to 16th Streets, Ave C to the river, and slated for expansion, to the one between 38th and 40th Streets, defunct and on its way to real estate developmentland. The expansion would have increased the air content of fine particulate matter PM2.5, with particles 2.5 microns or less, linked to asthma, lung cancer and heart disease. A community group, the East River Environmental Coalition, instituted a lawsuit, not disputing ConEd’s and the city’s need for more power and the company’s promises of new cleaner equipment that would reduce the pollutants in the air. No, the culprit was the attachment of the new system to the old, dirty and antiquated oil-burning plant, one of 18 that NY State legislature had exempted from complying with certain provisions of the Clean Air Act of 1970. The lawsuit demanded that it be upgraded, with expanded use of natural gas. Eventually a settlement was reached, but the fight continues, notes the author.
Lopate is of mixed emotions about the waterfront developments, such as Waterside, harsh of appearance and worrisome from the point of view of maintenance against underwater damages. There is a current substantial rebirth of the waterfront as evidenced by the utilization of piers, the construction of the Hudson River Park and the new buildings on the inland side of the West Side Highway. Lopate discourses how the abandoned piers became centers for preservation and tourism at South Street Seaport (he likes), and developed into sports centers at Chelsea Piers (he is less pleased).
This ambivalence regarding developers is not uncommon among people who devote time to thinking about New York’s future. Even Robert Caro, scourge of Robert Moses and his 40 autocratic years of rule over our roads and bridges, expresses certain admiration of his accomplishments and ability to cut through red tape. It should be recognized that much of it, the inevitable community protests against all new demolition and construction that we have come to consider a basic part of our democratic process, was born out of revolt against Moses’s arbitrariness..
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 4:29 AM 
