Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate Read Free Book Online

according to the same orthogonal street grid that prevails above 14th Street.
    A second irony is that the façades of these luxury apartment houses in Battery Park City deceptively suggest, by their historical references, the same roomy, high-ceilinged interiors one finds in pre–World War II apartment buildings. In actuality, most of the apartments' rooms are smaller, their halls narrower, their ceilings lower and walls thinner. “By putting more money into the skins of buildings,” one architect complained in the magazine Progressive Architecture, “the developers cut corners on the interiors.”
    The final, most telling irony is that Rector Place still feels like a stage set. It incorporates all the most up-to-date urbanistic wisdom, but it's not fully alive. Like so much of Battery Park City, there's no street life, no random pedestrian flow. Rector Park, with its herringbone paving bricks and ornamental fence, may not be padlocked the way Gramercy Park, its obvious model, is, but it gives off the same signals. As the AIA Guide to New York City maliciously puts it: “Rector Park is veddy, veddy propuh, using the finest materials very carefully detailed. Meant to be looked at, not played in.”
    Battery Park City's residents have often had to trek many blocks for basic necessities; yet the shops along the South End Avenue arcade haven'tdone especially well, languishing from paucity of foot traffic. Some blame the design of the arcade, a concrete “colonnade,” dark and uninviting to walk under; but the real problem is the incomplete grafting of a city spirit onto this sedate landfill community. Shopping is an appetite stimulated by complex environmental cues; you can lay down a street and designate it “retail” and it still won't necessarily hop to that beat.
    Battery Park City—like Roosevelt Island, if to a lesser degree—feels cut off from the rhythms of New York. Its very aloofness could be an asset: there aren't many places so detached from the hurly-burly. When I walk about it at night, especially by the water, I sense the wonderful, moody self-containment of the place, its dignified composure, its idealistic optimism, and I am tempted to live there. But then I remember: I would miss the city too much.
    The greatest obstacle standing between Battery Park City and the rest of Manhattan is West Street. Hardly just a street, this eight- to ten-lane roadway used to be the tailbone of the West Side Highway. At the moment, West Street is a car-choked, pothole-happy immensity, risky to cross on foot. As I waited for a clearing in traffic, a doorman warned me, “You gotta be careful, you get run over. You better run like hell!”
    You can cross West Street by taking overhead pedestrian bridges, but this is an inconvenient hassle: raised walkways between buildings are unnatural for New Yorkers and break the pattern of pedestrian wandering. Getting across West Street might be worth the nuisance if you had an extensive neighborhood to explore; but Battery Park City is a thin finger of land, two or three blocks deep at most.
    The strongest incentive for making that effort is to enjoy Battery Park City's extraordinary suite of waterfront parks and promenades, from the Beaux Arts order of the Esplanade, to the grand plaza of the World Financial Center, to the family-friendly Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Park, with its children's playground and volleyball court, which curves behind Stuyvesant High School. * Starting at the southernmost end, next to the Battery, is the Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, with its broad lawns. Arather stiff, monumental brick arch holds a café, restrooms, and a staircase that leads to a viewing platform that faces dramatically, across the bay, the Statue of Liberty. These Battery Park City parks frame, in as many different ways as possible, the Lady of the Harbor. The Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park also holds the Museum of Jewish Heritage and Living Memorial to the Holocaust, with its