One promising new technology is to make new piers out of recycled plastics or composites (a composite is a plastic or other polymer combined with glass, carbon, or aramid fibers), which ought to be a much cheaper material than concrete and steel, as well as being more environmentally friendly. Most important, shipworms won't munch on plastic. Granted, plastics have a weaker loadbearing capacity than concrete or steel, necessitating closertogether pilings, and no one really knows how long they last underwater. But the time had come to test this intriguing solution. One such test occurred on the south side of Hunts Point, the Bronx: in the mid :99os, the Tiffany Street Pier was constructed almost entirely of "plastic lumber, which came from millions of twoliter soda bottles. Less than a year after the recreational pier opened, to great fanfare, it was struck in a freak lightning storm and its deck incinerated. One might almost think the Almighty had intervened with lightning bolts to protect His lo\v]jest creature, the shipworm, from extinction. So shipworms and New Yorkers continue to coexist, uneasily. They have much in common: "Each lives alone in a crowd," Jeffreys says of the teredo, though he might be speaking equally of the Manhattanite; each is obsessed with finding a suitable pad or consoling cocoon; each adjusts readily to obstacles looming in its path, while remaining solitudinously, morosely driven; each has workaholic, if not bisexual, tendencies. FROM 42N D STREET TO RIVERSIDE SOUTH B EYOND THE CONVENTION CENTER, ABOVE 42ND STREET WALKING NORTH, IS THAT WHOLE BOLLIXEDUP TRAFFIC JAM OF AN AREA, THE ALRCRAFT CARRIER INTREPID museum and the Passenger Terminal for ocean liners. The heyday of this area was when all the Queens docked side by side-the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth, the Normandie, the He de France-and when Cole Porter wrote, in "I Happen to Like New York," that he liked to "watch those liners booming in"; they came all that distance because they, too, "happen to like New York." In those days, even Upper East Side snobs who said they never went over to the West Side amended that with "except to go to the French Line." к Now these piers seem drab and inhospitable. If there is any glamour S attached to ocean liners, you would not be able to sense it from the fortresslike vanilla concrete ramps designed for cars, not pedestrians There are no sidewalks, period. I contemplate buying a ticket to the gun metal gray Intrepid, but I've been on it, twice, and each time felt that the thrill of martial experience and historical sacrifice was eluding me. Instead, it seemed an illsorted collection of maritime junk. The glass box they've built in front to house a McDonald's doesn't help inspire feelings of nationalistic reverence. I may as well keep walking. It's supposed to be great walking along the waterfront, but around here I'm starting to feel lonely. Cut off.