Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan

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Philip Lopate

Anchor Books/Doubleday, New York, 2005, English

Nonfiction, Urban Design

8 x 5.2 inches, paperback, 448 pages

ISBN: 9780385497145

Suggested Retail Price: $15.95

From the Publisher. In this exploration of Manhattan’s defining shoreline, personal essayist Philip Lopate, a native New Yorker, 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 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.

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Phil Patton

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—January 2012.

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