Full name: Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan

Author: Phillip Lopate Year: 2004 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Award winners, Non Fiction, Travel Purchase/reserch links: Goodreads Amazon LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780385497145 0385497148

East Side, West Side, from the Little Red Lighthouse to Battery Park City, the wonders of Manhattan's waterfront are both celebrated and secret -- hidden in plain sight. In his brilliant exploration of this defining yet neglected shoreline, personal essayist Philip Lopate also recovers a part of the city's soul. A native New Yorker, Lopate has embraced Manhattan by walking every inch of its perimeter, telling stories on the way of pirates (Captain Kidd) and power brokers (Robert Moses), the lowly shipworm and Typhoid Mary, public housing in Harlem and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. He evokes the magic of the once bustling old port from Melville's and Whitman's day to the era of the longshoremen in On the Waterfront, while appraising today's developers and environmental activists, and probing new plans for parks and pleasure domes with river views. Whether escorting us into unfamiliar, hazardous crannies or along a Beaux Arts esplanade, Waterfront is a grand literary ramble and defense of urban life by one of our most perceptive observers. Similar books: The New York Nobody Knows by William B. Helmreich Forgotten New York by Kevin Walsh Here is New York by E. B. White Manhattan '45 by Jan Morris Clear Waters Rising by Nicholas Crane The Spirit-Wrestlers by Philip Marsden Black Earth City by Charlotte Hobson Downtown by Pete Hamill The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead Subwayland by Randy Kennedy Apple of My Eye by Helene Hanff Motions and Moments by Michael Pronko The Emerald Mile by Kevin Fedarko Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie The Discovery of France by Graham Robb Empires of the Indus by Alice Albinia Day of Honey by Annia Ciezadlo Following Fish by Samanth Subramanian Italian Neighbours by Tim Parks