And their costumes-shorts, T shirts, sweatpants, sneakers-have no local or regional characteristics, they are the global uniforms of the bodysnatched, those who have allowed their limbs to be turned over to machines for happiness. In contrast, compare the fashionsawy suit or dress choices of office workers striding past ryant Park at 9:00 a.m. on any given weekday: here you see something quintessentially New York. While everyone was worrying about the entry the chain stores into Manhattan, fearing that the city would lose its retail flavor to suburban shopping malls, the conformist forces of globalization sneaked in the back way through leisure. It is not consumerism per se that disturbs me-New York was always a mecca of shopping and fashion-but seeing the local populace come to rest and pirouette on skates in anonymous skivvies. At play, or at least this contemporary, puritanical cardiovascular exercise we call play, people look their most blandly bourgeois. Maybe it's just that I'm watching, for the most part, middleclass white people, the dominant demographic in Hudson River Park. Uptown, Hispanics and AfricanAmericans capering on roller skates to a loud ghetto blaster in Central Park are much more entertaining. They know how to party in any public space, the point being to show off one's moves, not burn off one's calories. Maybe Hudson River Park will be wonderful when it's finished. You can't tell yet. Still, it seems to me, as I'm walking along, that what should be on the waterfront is something fun, like-movie theaters. How great to be able to reach the river and see a large marquee featuring one, but at most three (okay, four) titles a day-anything more multiplex feels fragmented. I can imagine coming out of an Eric Rohmer film and wandering over by the water's edge, along the promenade, and smoking a cigarette (if only I smoked cigarettes), while I watch a lumbering tug, redhulled with a striped stack. Or maybe all those cheap Times Square moviehouses that once showed kung fu, horror, or porn could be resurrected along the waterfront. What I miss is something outrageous that would honor the waterfront's raffish history: like a big Jones Beachtype amphitheater for Song of Norway revivals; or a pagodashaped gambling house festooned with neon, near Chinatown and Canal Street (first floor, mahjongg, second floor, cockfighting), or a floating casino supper club, run by Brooklyn gangsters, with reflections of little carmine lanterns bobbing in the water. BY ALL RIGHTS, the waterfront should be the city's carnival release, the diastole to the workaholic's systole; but we've lost the habit, and now we re creakily, arthritically trying to regain it. That it was once a habit may be inferred from the opening pages of MobyDick: Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, north SOHO village corridor 7 1 T H E ard What do you see?-Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, tand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.