THIS AREA NEAR THE TIP of the island was once thick with piers and docks. There used to be some seventyfive piers between the Battery and 59th Street. Now there are only thirteen left. The New York system of nar emendicular "finger" piers that jutted out one after another, each cow, perr lding a ship at a time, came about because the merchants could pack vessels in that way, on an island with a fairly limited shoreline, than more vc by having each boat tie up parallel to the land. The very advantage of New York's port, its sheltered harbors and deep waters, where any wooden pier would do to tie up at, deterred the city fathers from the large capital investments made by less geographically fortunate ports, such as Liverpool, which built majestic, palatial stone piers to hold off the fierce, crashing ocean waves. A slapdash setup ("the miserable wharves, and slipshod, shambling piers of New York," Herman Melville wrote in his 1849 novel Redburn) was also justified at the time by the argument that ships kept getting wider and longer; thus it made little sense to "commit" to an expensive, heavy pier that would only have to be changed again in several years. Besides pragmatic reasons, there almost seems something in the character of New Yorkers that prefers the roughandready, provisional solution to the perfected, builtfortheages approach, just as there is a tolerance for dirt and clutter that far exceeds the standards of tidiness in many metropolises. The New Yorker gets a thing off and running and says, "Good enough." Perhaps it has something to do with the city's polyglot immigrant population, which never developed a culturally homogeneous, bourgeois communal standard, as in Holland or Japan, or perhaps it stems from the fact that, unlike other colonies in the New World, New York was not founded to serve some religious or civic Utopian ideal, but solely to make money. Whatever the reasons, by 1872 an editorial writer in Scribner's Monthly was already commenting: "It must be a matter of serenest satisfaction and the most complacent pride that we, who have the reputation °f being a city of moneygetters and worshipers of the useful and the material, can point to our docks as the dirtiest, most insufficient, and the least substantial of any possessed by any firstclass city on the face of the globe. To the strangers who visit us from abroad we can proudly say: You have accused us of supreme devotion to the material grandeur of our Clty and our land. Look at our rotten and reeking docks, and see how lit We care for even the decencies of commercial equipment. . . ." The waterfront was especially notorious for its muck. Edith Wharton, Iecauing that era in her memoir A Backward Glance, wrote: "I remember once asking an old New Yorker why he never went abroad, and his answering: 'Because I can't bear to cross Murray Street.' It was indeed an unsavoury experience, and the shameless squalor of the purlieus of the New York docks in the 'seventies dismayed my childish eyes.