Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan Read Online Free PDF

immigrant novel, The Rise of David Levinsky ): “We were ferried over to Castle Garden.… The harsh manner of the immigration officers was a grievous surprise to me. As contrasted with the officials of my despotic country, those of a republic had been portrayed in my mind as paragons of refinement and cordiality. My anticipations were rudely belied. ‘They are not a bit better than Cossacks,’ I remarked to Gitelson.… These unfriendly voices flavored all America with a spirit of icy inhospitality that sent a chill through my very soul.”
    The immigrant station at Castle Garden was closed in 1890; two years later the much more famous one at Ellis Island opened. In 1900 Castle Garden reinvented itself as the city's aquarium, around which time the journalist John C. Van Dyke compared it to “a half-sunken gas tank.” Now Ellis Island beckons as the revered national landmark of immigration, while the rotunda-less, roofless Castle Garden operates as a sort of glorified tickets booth to that attraction.
    THIS AREA NEAR THE TIP of the island was once thick with piers and docks. There used to be some seventy-five piers between the Battery and 59th Street. Now there are only thirteen left. The New York system of narrow,perpendicular “finger” piers that jutted out one after another, each holding a ship at a time, came about because the merchants could pack more vessels in that way, on an island with a fairly limited shoreline, than by having each boat tie up parallel to the land. The very advantage of New York's port, its sheltered harbors and deep waters, where any wooden pier would do to tie up at, deterred the city fathers from the large capital investments made by less geographically fortunate ports, such as Liverpool, which built majestic, palatial stone piers to hold off the fierce, crashing ocean waves. A slapdash setup (“the miserable wharves, and slipshod, shambling piers of New York,” Herman Melville wrote in his 1849 novel Redburn ) was also justified at the time by the argument that ships kept getting wider and longer; thus it made little sense to “commit” to an expensive, heavy pier that would only have to be changed again in several years.
    Besides pragmatic reasons, there almost seems something in the character of New Yorkers that prefers the rough-and-ready, provisional solution to the perfected, built-for-the-ages approach, just as there is a tolerance for dirt and clutter that far exceeds the standards of tidiness in many metropolises. The New Yorker gets a thing off and running and says, “Good enough.” Perhaps it has something to do with the city's polyglot immigrant population, which never developed a culturally homogeneous, bourgeois communal standard, as in Holland or Japan, or perhaps it stems from the fact that, unlike other colonies in the New World, New York was not founded to serve some religious or civic utopian ideal, but solely to make money. Whatever the reasons, by 1872 an editorial writer in Scribner's Monthly was already commenting: “It must be a matter of serenest satisfaction and the most complacent pride that we, who have the reputation of being a city of money-getters and worshipers of the useful and the material, can point to our docks as the dirtiest, most insufficient, and the least substantial of any possessed by any first-class city on the face of the globe. To the strangers who visit us from abroad we can proudly say: You have accused us of supreme devotion to the material grandeur of our city and our land. Look at our rotten and reeking docks, and see how little we care for even the decencies of commercial equipment.…”
    The waterfront was especially notorious for its muck. Edith Wharton, recalling that era in her memoir A Backward Glance, wrote: “I rememberonce asking an old New Yorker why he never went abroad, and his answering: ‘Because I can't bear to cross Murray Street.’ It was indeed an unsavoury experience, and the shameless squalor of the purlieus