Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the New York docks in the 'seventies dismayed my childish eyes.…”
    ON THE NORTHERN END of the Battery sits Pier A, another eternally promised restoration job. No one can pass by that elegant, dilapidated Victorian structure (formerly the Fireboat House) without admiring its Beaux Arts shell, and fantasizing some amazing use for it. A visitors' center with retail or restaurant is proposed, you learn with a thud. The developer who was most recently brought in to revive it, a loyal Republican appointed by Governor George Pataki, claims to have gone bankrupt, and now there is much finger-pointing all around.
    Pier A was originally one of two piers (the other, Pier 1, is now buried under landfill) to be constructed out of granite and ornamented with tinplate. In 1870, Peter Cooper, the millionaire manufacturer, urged the city to build all-stone piers, but his advice was not taken, except for these two, whose construction proved so costly that the rest were made of timber, and are now, appropriately, in various stages of rotting. Pier A is one of the only tangible signs left of that heroic and ingenious, if now mostly forgotten, effort—the greatest public-works project of its period—to improve the New York waterfront, which dragged on for six decades, from 1870 to 1930. (So important was it that George McClellan, the former Civil War general and 1864 presidential candidate, was appointed as its first engineer-in-chief, to lead New York City's Department of Docks and oversee its challenges.) As ambitious, in its way, as the Brooklyn Bridge, employing more than a thousand workers, the Department of Docks' project erected a continuous concrete bulkhead or riverwall below sea level to “hold in” Manhattan Island and protect it from ramming boat hulls; transformed the island's geography by landfill; removed underwater reefs and shoals; constructed dozens of piers; dredged where necessary; and in every other way helped promote the Port of New York as a thriving commercial enterprise.
    “The netting of the whale—in this case, the enclosing of its outline by the construction of bulkheads following the shape of the island—was amilitary action against a natural landscape, initially led by a Civil War general who was determined to triumph. The whale was to be molded or cast into a tight corset,” wrote architect John Hejduk. It seems a paradox that, on the one hand, so much engineering effort was expended on recasting the waterfront's infrastructure, and, on the other, so little of the civic and cultural pride that had been lavished on other municipal projects percolated through sufficiently to elevate it above the makeshift. Le Corbusier, visiting New York in the early 1940s, wrote: “Along the avenue which skirts the river, the docks and ships form the teeth of a comb as far as you can see. The arrangement is clear, logical, perfect: nevertheless, it is hideous, badly done, and incongruous; the eye and the spirit are saddened. Ah! If the docks could be done over again!”
    The docks will never be done over again, for shipping, but Le Corbusier may get his wish in the form of new recreational piers proposed for Hudson River Park. When the day arrives and they are all in place, surfboards and skates agleam, a part of us may long for the old, slipshod comb. Speaking of which, after September 11, with the sudden need for increased ferry service, a temporary, tentlike ferry dock has been constructed of vinyl and steel rods, and run perpendicular to the midsection of Pier A, into the Hudson River. A vendor has installed a wagon inside the tent to sell hot dogs and pretzels to the waiting travelers. It is pleasing to see the ad-hoc, provisional genius of the New York docks surfacing again.
    Before leaving the Battery, I note the rather morbid monument to the Merchant Marines, an academic-realist statue by ex–Pop artist Marisol, which depicts a seemingly fruitless attempt to rescue drowning seamen, who disappear between the