New York 12
Twenty years later, Mannahatta's port, the one Walt Whitman had witnessed and sung ("hemm'd thick all around with sailships and steamships"), was dead. Supertankers and containerization required considerably more backspace (fifty acres per berth), such as could no longer be found in a dense metropolis. New York's maritime trade got shifted to New Jersey. With the concomitant loss of manufacturing, sweatlabor, for the most part, disappeared from the island.
Manhattan remained the world's financial capital, the nexus of global headquarters, a skyscraper magnet, and an endlessly selfcelebrating concentration of media, culture, tourism, retail shopping, and restaurants. Still desirable, Manhattan retooled itself; its specialty became selfcannibalism, real estate. It now sold the image of itself. But Manhattan as solitary symbol has been overstressed, masking its interdependence on the larger region to which it belongs. The island is part of a 780mile New York waterfront. To the north, Westchester, the suburbs, Albany; to the west, Newark, Arizona, and so on, as Saul Steinberg would have said (or drawn).
M
Y CLOSEST ESTIMATION OF THE BULBOUS VPOINT, THE MAGNETIC SOUTHERN TIP OF MANHATTAN
ISLAND, IS THE STATEN ISLAND FERRY TERMINAL. It's a sunny winter day and, fortified by two cups of coffee and a poppy seed bagel, I head to the terminal where one catches the boat to Staten Island.
For as long as I can remember, the scuzzylooking terminal that was here until recently, abounding in pizza outlets, couldn't have been less "npressive if it tried. It was to have been replaced long ago, first by a sober office tower designed by Kohn Pederson Fox, then by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates' playful terminal with a giant, iconic clock. But Staten Island politician Guy Molinari objected to having to stare at this whimsical timepiece, which he found insufficiently respectful of his oft e towork commuters, and it was scrapped. Then architect Frederick
Schwartz got the assignment, and has remade the terminal into an attractive, if very modest, corrugated steel box with waterfront views from an elevated public deck wrapped in blue and aquamarine glass.
I enter Battery Park, or, as it is historically known, the Battery (so named because of its cannons, which originally protected the harbor). It remains one of the most congenial parts of New York, its treefilled grounds decompressing you from the financial district. Along the promenade, with its new, ergonomically correct walnut benches and pink marble backrests, you have the luxury to gaze out at the bay, then back to the parade of foreign tourists, locals, teenage girls arminarm. "My imagination is incapable of conceiving any thing of the kind more beautiful than the harbour of New York," the visiting Frances Trollope wrote in 1832; "I doubt if ever the pencil of Turner could do it justice, bright and glorious as it rose before us . . . upon waves of liquid gold.
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