New York 2
nated with walkingaround literature, and everything about New York City. I thought I would write down whatever I was thinking and seeing in the course of my walk, including any encounters or adventures I might have. It was a quaint, likable idea, a sort of modernday version of Robert Louis Stevenson's walks through France and England. But the first problem I encountered was that I could not pretend to be a tourist in my native city, discovering it with fresh wonder; I utterly lacked what the anthropologists call "culture shock." Moreover, I was no longer a young man, for whom any city walk could release buckets of lyrical verbiage; I had exhausted those sorts of poems and urban sketches earlier, for the
most part. If I were to write about New York City now, it would have to be with the more reserved, critical perspective of a lifetime's accumulated uncertainties.
And I could not simply "meditate" (that last refuge of lazy belletrists such as myself) on what I saw, I would actually have to know something about the waterfront: its past, its economic importance, its ecological concerns and development constraints. Which raised the second problem, my ignorance. I've always had a generalist's smattering of background information, but that's a far cry from true understanding. So I started to read as well as walk. The more I researched, the more I saw that the evolving waterfront was the key to New York's destiny, as it is to many former port cities globally.
The advent of containerized shipping, with its demands for acres and acres of backspace to load, unload, store, and truck the containers, has meant that, over the last forty years, in city after city around the world, the port functions have had to be moved, sometimes seaward, inland, or upstream, to rural or suburban areas where there was more available cheap land. This severing of the ageold connection between city and port is having profound cultural and economic effects, which we may not fully grasp for some time. At the moment, all we know is that cities all over the map are faced with empty harbors, and lots of underutilized waterfront property.
Today, in my native New York City, the waterfront has become the great contested space. Newspapers regularly carry announcements of some plan for a stadium, recycling plant, sound stage, wetland, park, marina, ferry, electrical generator, or museum, that is then fought over by the local community board, developers, and municipal and state governments. Over the last few decades, New York, like Washington Irving's Rip van Winkle, always seems to be reawakening from long slumber to discover it possesses ... a shoreline! "The new urban frontier" is what a 1980s Parks Council report called the city's waterfront, inviting, it would seem, the brash, goldrush behavior often associated with American frontiers.
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