Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pierheads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen of week days pent up in lath and plaster-tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. . . . Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. Melville's 1851 vision of a waterfrontbesotted populace certainly jibes with Whitman's poems of the same decade; this must have been the ver) apex of the seaport's bursting youth. Yet, just a few years earlier, in 1843 the popular writer and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis-New York's firsi selfconscious flaneur-expressed a somewhat different view: "If quiet be the object, the nearer the water the less jostled the walk on Sunday. Y01 would think, to cross the city anywhere from river to river, that there was a general hydrophobia-the entire population crowding to the high ridge of Broadway, and hardly a soul to be seen on either the East River or the Hudson." So, which is correct? Melville's assertion that New Yorkers flock like lemmings to the river, or Willis's, that the crowds prefer the thick o: Broadway, avoiding the waterfront like hydrophobic rats? Both, perhaps I can only say that, walking the waterfront and finding myself often the sole human being on foot, I would not rule out the hydrophobic hypothesis as the deeper, more basic trait. In Manhattan you often forget you live on an island, much less one abutting a mighty ocean. You go about youi business, deep in preoccupation. New York's granitic environment promotes living in your head, a cerebral, landlocked state just this side of paranoia, but perfect for an information capital. It s not as though the New York waterfront ever was a place for ordinary citizens to walk much. Boys hung around it for fun and risk, jumping into the East River as their swimming hole, and those who made theii living in the port felt comfortable at the river's edge. But except for the Battery, at the island's tip, there was very little opportunity along the watei for strolling or recreation. It was not until the midi890S that a few downtown recreation piers and the first, rough version of Riverside Park were opened. In the twentieth century the edges of Manhattan remained remote from the average New Yorker's everyday path, for the simple reason that the rapid transit system didn't extend that far. The main subway lines traversed the fingershaped island in a northsouth direction, rather than going eastwest; also, the subways generally followed the densest residential or retail patterns, which left out the waterfront. Without a subway to take you to the far western or eastern edge, any riparian encounter would have to come after an excursion on foot, making it a more intentional, marginal experience.