Phillip Lopate - Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan

Part personal essay, part municipal history, part architectural guide, part criticism and part utopian musing. Waterfront makes excellent reading for all those who feel the romance of the city's past and for those with an interest in the growing healthiness of the city's waterways and in architecture and urban planning.

The New York Times Book Review

Phillip Lopate has surrounded his subject and been surrounded by it in turn. His Waterfront is an elegant, elegiac, scrapwork masterpiece.

Jonathan Lethem

Where less keen observers see only ugliness, Lopate discerns the raffish beauty that once was, the bright possibilities that might be.

Newsday

Phillip Lopate demonstrates that you don't have to go to the ends of the earth to be a great explorer. Anyone who finds Manhattan fascinat-ingthere should be several million of uswould do well to read Waterfront, his beautiful ramble into its heart and soul.

E. L. Doctorow

For strangers to New York, Waterfront will be an inviting introduction to the city's underappreciated edges. Natives will find surprising ideas and places in a metropolis they thought they knew.

The Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ)

Phillip Lopate is a walker in the city like no other since Charles Dickens: He is archaeologist, historian, explorer, poet, observer (and observer of himself observing), muser, muller, and mooner; and all the while he is leading us through streets and crannies and old politics and hidden sights and right-in-front-of-your-nose scenes and structures, compelling our poignant or astonished notice.

Cynthia Ozick

One man's saunter through a city he loves. The stories are presented with tenderness and genuine concern without the faintest whiff of sentimentality.

The Oregonian

Lopate is a fantastic writerhumane, wry, and always astonishingly willing to take on the ineffable, attuned to the complexities of symbiotic relationships we only intuited before his dazzling collage was created.

Ann Beattie

[Lopate] writes like cream pouring from a jug. Richly entertaining.

Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Waterfront is a potpourri of astute architectural critiques, fresh readings of shoreline classics (literary and cinematic), snippets of autobiography, and a string of vest pocket histories (the one on Westway is by itself worth the price of admission). By turns amusing and acerbic, gently playful and bracingly argumentative, it's a moveable feast.

Mike Wallace, coauthor of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

A native New Yorker, avid walker, and impeccable stylist Lopate seamlessly blends witty and candid accounts of his ramblings along the bedraggled edge of this great metropolis to create a fascinating narrative that encompasses historical, literary, cultural, aesthetic, and environmental perspectives.

Booklist (starred)

An intensely and delightfully personal account of the Manhattan waterfront, full of insight and information, that weaves together one man's life and New York history for a rare, readable book.

Ada Louise Huxtable

Phillip Lopate makes the waterfront that has vanished as vivid as the one that has survived. The thrill is not just in his different voicestour-guide, archaeologist, detective, social scientist, historian of yesterday and today, lyrical poet, pragmatist, utopian, man alone on the cliffs, public citizen in the streetsbut in the brilliant fluency with which he jump-cuts back and forth between them.

Marshall Berman, author of All That is Solid Melts into Air

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PART TWO: