You might be a solitudeloving poet or an escaping thief or someone who lived nearby in one of the reconverted warehouses, but you could not be a member of a crowd, except in those rare, fiestalike situations when the city embraced the river, usually for its unobstructed sightlines: Fourth of July fireworks, the Brooklyn Bridge or Statue of Liberty centenary. The very avidity with which millions of New Yorkers poured into the waterfront on those occasions suggested what an anomaly it was for them to be there, and only accentuated their usual indifference to the river's edge. Now I PASS BY PIER 40, at West Houston Street. This enormous, fifteenacre concrete bunker traversing three city blocks, probably the last substantial investment the Port Authority made on the island before it became crystalclear that Manhattan's port was doomed, was built to handle cargo freight, and when it opened, in 1950, it was the largest precast structure in the world. A victim of bad timing, it sat redundant on the waterfront twenty years later. Thereafter it became a gargantuan parking lot-muchneeded, by the way, in Lower Manhattan, especially for long term commuters-that holds more than 2,000 cars and dozens of buses and trucks. It remains an immensely tantalizing site to planners, community activists, and Utopian urban dreamers. The Van Alen Institute sponsored an architectural competition, which attracted 141 entries; the winning designs used all or parts of the existing structure, in some cases as a kind of picturesque scrim, leaving only the frame and opening the fa?ade ОНО village corridor 73 т H E s ° • »r breezes For a while it was set to house a Home Depot super to the river . now all the alternatives have been put on hold, store, i' I brood about what might have been here, the proposal to build a new tellite Guggenheim art museum on Pier 40, designed by Frank Gehry. Д tourdeforce, billowy wave of a building by the maestro of Bilbao at water's edge would have been magnificently dramatic, and where more suitably than at the cusp of two artconscious neighborhoods, Greenwich Village and S0H0? But it was shot down by the local community planning board, which had long had its eye on the Pier 40 site for recreational uses (never mind that Hudson River Park and all of Battery Park City's recreation spaces were in the vicinity), and which did not appreciate the highhanded, empireexpansionist style of the Guggenheim's director, Thomas Krens, who had failed to consult the community before announcing the plan to the press. To me, the Gehry Museum proposal for Pier 40 was a casualty of a decentralized local planning process, by which what serves the city as a whole often takes a backseat to a community's parochial agenda. I walk along the edge of Pier 40 next to the terminal building, where benches are set up and an old man is fishing. The sun flashing on the water, the sound of the slapping waves, idyllic: It does make a difference, getting a hundred feet out, away from the noise of the city.