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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 [...]
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 [...]
Fire on the Water
by Phillip Lopate 10/13/2002Neighborhood: Chelsea
We were on our way to a downtown loft party in Emily’s Volkswagen, Emily, Kay and I, when we stopped off to see the ruins of a fire in the waterfront district, on Thirtieth Street and Twelfth Avenue. This whole neighborhood, along the western spine of Manhatan, has always been mysterious to me, with its [...]
Turn of the Century on Bridge
by Thomas Conner 01/01/2002Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Brooklyn Heights
We had such great plans. We wanted to kiss off the second millennium, and this goal directed our New Year’s Eve itinerary: a matinée of the “Rocky Horror” stage show (the icon for which, of course, is the juicy pair of lipsticked lips), dinner at Lips (a West Village drag-queen restaurant) and drag-queen extraordinaire Lypsinka’s [...]
The Navy Yard and the Constellation
by Lee R. Unterborn 01/01/2002Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Williamsburg
New York City and the US Navy have a relationship that goes right back to the very beginning of the Navy. This is to be expected for a city that is this country’s major Atlantic port. From 1801-1966, the principle site for the Navy-New York relationship was in Brooklyn, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Its [...]
