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Once More Over the Bridge: May 24, 2008
by Victoria Olsen 07/01/2008Neighborhood: Multiple, On the Waterfront
I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge on my last day of classes. It was a beautiful day in May. I had walked over the bridge many mornings this year, dropping my daughter at her school in Brooklyn Heights and continuing to work. I teach the essay to first-year college students and it is a good [...]
When Motorcyclists Can’t Feel Solitary Anymore
by Melissa Holbrook Pierson 03/02/2008Neighborhood: On the Waterfront
One of the children’s favorite holidays is now past, the heart-warming annual Recycling of the Desk Calendars. This followed hard upon the Transfiguration of the Christmas Décor, when inexplicable magic occurs: wreaths and lights, trees and cheery blow-ups quivering on lawns in vast profusion are overnight divested of hope and suddenly take on a forlorn, [...]
Spinning Tables at the Frying Pan
by Ellen Moynihan 08/10/2006Neighborhood: Chelsea
I had never gone to the Frying Pan—the restored boat/event space docked beside the Chelsea Piers—before last week. It was one of those places that I’d almost been to a bunch of times, but never actually made it. I nearly didn’t go that night, either, but I’m glad I did, because I think I ended [...]
Manhattan, Floating World
by Philip Lopate 05/31/2006Neighborhood: Midtown
Manhattan is shaped like an ocean liner or like a lozenge or like a paramecium (the protruding piers its cilia) or like a gourd or like some kind of fish, a striped bass, say, but most of all like a luxury liner, permanently docked, going nowhere. The Japanese of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries [...]
On the Train Tracks in Marble Hill AKA Manonx, New York City- the circumsized north end of Manhhhhhaaaaattaaaaan
by Suhay Rosario 02/14/2006Neighborhood: Bronx, On the Waterfront
That morning I got up in the afternoon. My friend Micki came from 204th/Post Avenue, from her man’s crib complaining about his small penis saying, "My baby brother’s got a bigger dick than his!" And I had to get up and shower, leaving her in my room and I took the loofa with me because I [...]
Funky Piers of Tribeca
by Kate Walter 12/01/2005Neighborhood: Tribeca
I’m savoring the last days of Pier 25, which closes next month for a three year renovation. I loved this funky wharf in Tribeca– a rest stop on my daily bike rides through Hudson River Park. I would visit the Sweet Love Snack Shack for a lemonade or veggie burger grilled on an old fashioned [...]
Love and Bridges
by Jasmine Dreame Wagner 02/01/2005Neighborhood: Across the River, Brooklyn
Allie once told me that if two people meet on a bridge, they will almost always fall in love. “I read it in my psychology textbook,” she said. “They have to meet on a bridge.” I glanced across the river at the orange lights of the Williamsburg Bridge and imagined myself flagging down the next available bike [...]
On The Aesthetics of Urban Walking and Writing
by Phillip Lopate 03/24/2004Neighborhood: All Over, Multiple
A tugboat, wheezing wreaths of steam, Lunged past, with one galvanic blare stove up the River I counted the echoes assembling, one after another Searching, thumbing the midnight on the piers. Lights, coasting, left the oily tympanum of waters The blackness somewhere gouged glass on a sky And this thy harbor, O my City, I have driven under, Tossed from the coil [...]
Knickerbocker Village
by Phillip Lopate 03/01/2004Neighborhood: Manhattan
A block or so north of the Brooklyn Bridge, just behind the old New York Post Building, between Catherine and Market Streets, squats Knickerbocker Village. This unassuming enclave of bare brick apartment towers, privately managed, which might easily be mistaken for one of the nearby government projects, made history as the first major housing development [...]
Death Visits the Waterfront
by Phillip Lopate 02/23/2004Neighborhood: All Over, Manhattan
Distinct from other great cities of the world, Manhattan is almost pathologically averse to letting you wander to the river’s edge and get close enough to touch the water. It has erected a prophylactic wall of fences and other physical barriers, which over-protectively stave off potential accidents, intentional harm and, most of all, liability suits. [...]
Crossing the Pulaski Bridge
by Fritz Buehner 02/07/2004Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Greenpoint
The Greenpoint where I live is separated from Long Island City by a slough named the Newtown Creek. Its western boundary is the East River. East is Ridgewood and South is Williamsburg. Manhattan Avenue, Ash, and Commercial streets intersect a block away from the Brooklyn shore of the creek. In the space between the creek [...]
Crossing The Brooklyn Ferry
by Walt Whitman 01/25/2003Neighborhood: Brooklyn
1. Flood-Tide below me! I see you face to face! Clouds of the west-sun there half an hour high–I see you also face to face. Crowds of men and women attired in the unusual cos- tumes, how curious you are to me! On the ferry boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you [...]
