Yes, each of those interest groups may be passionately committed to their agendas; but there is not the same imperative to act promptly as in the past. Some of the resistance is historical: Broadway and Central Park together had helped establish Midtown as the city's fashionable center, while its waterfront districts were associated with bad smells and low rents. All recent efforts to draw maximally upscale residential development to the water's edge have had to overcome that history, and the hierarchical superiority of the center to the periphery. In other words, however desirable a river view may be, for the wealthiest clientele it can never replace proximity to Central Park or Bergdorf's. The sense of urgency is further vitiated by the incredibly long time that waterfront development projects seem to require, from inception to completion. Manhattan is now entering its fifth decade of waterfront "rebirth" (the original plans for Battery Park City were drawn up in 1961). While New Yorkers might selfpityingly blame local corruption, the truth is it is a slow process everywhere. Waterfront projects are typically delayed five to ten years just by the complexities of achieving political consensus and government approvals; then there are the problems of site assembly, site clearance, environmental remediation, new infrastructure, and often millions in cost overruns. Hence, we who are living through the great leap forward of waterfront revitalization should cultivate patience, perspective, and reincarnation skills, because we may not see the changes in our lifetime. There is also a clash between the waterfront zone-a separate corridor with redevelopment issues unto itself-and the neighborhoods it traverses. Traditionally the working waterfront has had a separate visual character, a more roughhewn quality than the inland areas. The riverside highways that have come to rim the island compound the problem of getting to the Manhattan waterfront. These perimeter highways ignore the grid, or, rather, intentionally oppose a powerful counter to them, a moat between the everyday city and the water. They have also introduced disjunctions in scale, which can never be more than awkwardly reconciled, between highways meant for thousands of speeding cars and the buildings abutting them. In theological terms, the West Side Highway and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive constitute the Original Sin of Manhattan planning. We may repent, we may patch, but-short of burying or lidding these highways, which would be very, very costly-we can never regain our wholeness. NEW YORK'S WATERFRONT has undergone a threestage revaluation, from a working port, to an abandoned, seedy noman'sland, to a highly desirable zone of parks plus upscale retail, each new metamorphosis only incompletely shedding the earlier associations. We may think of Manhattan's shoreline as a golden opportunity, a tabula rasa for leisure and luxury development, but the ghosts of stevedores, street urchins, and shanghaied sailors still haunt the milieu.