For those who live in New York City, one of great feats — not because it was so hard but because it was such a good idea and so well executed — of urban planning in recent years is the construction of various ‘river parks’ around the city. Basically, as New York went out of the business of being an industrial entrepot and shipping was replaced by trucking, a lot of the city’s waterline was left to largely derelict docks and piers. But in recent years, the City has rebuilt many of these as public spaces, with a mix of parks and recreation areas.
There are few more unalloyed civic goods than public areas that are genuinely available to the public at large and are sufficiently maintained and respected that they can be used.
The part that I know best are the river parks along the lower west side of Manhattan. And this is often referred to as the City reclaiming its waterline. But in a oped column in the Times on Friday Nathan Ward explains that this is really a matter of the city claiming rather than reclaiming the waterline since historically the waterlines were never places where ‘respectable’ people really wanted to be or the City itself had much control over.
Some of this was a class issue. Work on the docks was hard work, often rooted in immigrant subcultures and just as often rooted in the world of the sea, which was always a world apart from the City proper — just as it is in almost every metropolis through history. But the docks were also crime-ridden and thus dangerous or controlled by the major organized crime families.
It’s fascinating look at the City’s past that most probably aren’t familiar with unless they having living memory back more than forty years.
Late Update: Here’s the first page (you may be able to see more if you’re at a subscribing university) of one of the classic articles on merchant seamen in 18th century America: “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the politics of Revolutionary America” by Jesse Lemisch. If anyone knows where there’s a full version available I can point people to let me know.
