I try to think why I feel so comfortable on this pier, compared with some of the new sliver piers, which make me feel exposed and anxious. Of course! The side of the terminal building acts like a streetwall, giving the open space shape, structure, limit. All this emphasis on "open space" is not good for a native New Yorker like myself, who gets vague agoraphobia with no surroundings to hem him in. A Gehrydesigned Guggenheim at Pier 40 would have set a good precedent for a highly visible public building on the waterfront. Unlike London, with its Houses of Parliament along the Thames, or Paris, where the Louvre's palaces front the Seine, New York's waterfront has a dearth of major public buildings. Its reason for being was commerce, not imperial display, so it turned the edges over strictly to port activities. "Virtually every 1 was certainly a better site than the one chosen next, near the South Street Seaport, which would Ве"И ave sunrived an environmental review process and which has since been jettisoned. foot of shoreline," wrote Kevin Bone in his superb book The l\fezu York Waterfront, "was occupied by some kind of maritime building: basins docks, piers, wharves, and seawalls, as well as the headquarters of traders, haulers, shipbuilders, blacksmiths, rope makers, riggers, oyster merchants, brewers, carpenters, and all other conceivable maritime support trades. . .. [A] gateway village between the metropolis and the sea, for many, this tidewater frontier town was the only New York they knew. It had its own hotels, bars, and brothels, as well as at least one floating church." One reason why exploring the waterfront is such a choppy, mystifying experience today is that you are walking over the bones of that commercial ghost town. There are still shards of it, in the form of the funkiest hotels and bars and (I assume) brothels you can imagine. Take the Liberty Inn Motel on Tenth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. I have always been fascinated by this modest, threestory, brickfaced, triangular structure, like a blacksheep offspring of the Flatiron Building: what is it doing out there, all by itself, near the water? It used to be known as a "hot sheet" hotel: a friend told me she would, in her youthful, promiscuous days, take her pickups from the clubs there. Today I force myself to go in and poke around, as a good reporter must. There is no lobby, just two chairs and a staircase leading up to the guest rooms; on one chair slumps an emaciated black woman, chin buried in chest, apparently nodding out; behind a Plexiglas divider an acnefaced Asian desk clerk eats a hero sandwich and chats on the phone. Misery. A set of rules posted beside the checkin desk states, "Guests must leave room together." "What do you want?" asks the desk clerk behind the partition. "I'd like to see a room. Some friends of mine are coming to town and I thought I might put them up here." The clerk looks me up and down: blue tweed jacket, white shirt, an obvious lie.