Wandering watery New York

Phillip Lopate, the essayist, leads the way into the New York Psychiatric Hospital in search of the Hudson River.

He’s having trouble finding a path that descends to the river from streets perched above Manhattan’s northwestern shore. Once, he says, he figured out a route through this hospital lobby, by elevator and some stairs, to a street near the river. But he can’t find it now. He waves a companion back to the sidewalk. A worn map appears from his coat pocket. The river shimmers in the distance, at the bottom of the path he feels sure is here somewhere.

He’s been taking walks like this to follow the waters surrounding Manhattan for more than four years, the time it’s taken him to write “Waterfront,” his new 414-page book about nearly every natural and human feature of the places where land meets water at the city’s edges. He’s wandered along old train tracks, traversed empty industrial spaces, thrashed his way through wild overgrowth most people would never imagine the metropolis included, cut between and through buildings, circumnavigating all but one of the 32 miles around the island’s rim.

His city is one whose center remains more elusive than its edges, and he writes about them, in his words, with “a mixture of history, guidebook, architectural critique, reportage, personal memoir, literary criticism, nature writing, reverie, and who knows what else.”

What holds it together is a personal voice that embodies a basic connection between walking and writing. Lopate even includes a chapter on writing about walking, calling the combination “a leash on the infinite.” The walker’s freedom, in this case, is defined by the infinite chutzpah to comment on everything, untying boundaries of place, time and psyche.

The book’s self-revealing narrator remembers how he “fell under the tutelage of a Jungian shrink who encouraged me to attend to the present moment -- a hopeless proposition, in the long run.... “

Born in Brooklyn, a lifelong New Yorker, Lopate had edited a major anthology of writing about the city, knew how often it had been rediscovered by others and how hard it would be to do it again. At first, he says, he felt lost. An editor had wanted him to write a nonfiction epic, a “maximalist” approach that he concluded his particular talents as an urban watcher didn’t quite match.

He has long had a reputation as a prolific writer of personal essays, film criticism, novels and poetry. He’s taken readers on highly subjective tours of his body, his former Greenwich Village neighborhood, his life as a bachelor until he remarried 13 years ago. He often writes with transparent candor, achieving an inward grasp of outwardly ordinary life by balancing humanity and irony.

The big book required a visionary idea about the city that, sitting in his study in Brooklyn, Lopate just couldn’t muster. Then, the editor proposed something more modest, a New York walking guide. Lopate liked what he calls “walking-around literature.” This idea ignited a possibility. Yet his generative insight, while strolling along the harbor one day, had an epic, if existential, dimension. In the age of the plane and the automobile, Manhattan’s harbor, like that of so many cities on water, had died as a vital commercial center. From this view of loss and possibility, Lopate found an indirect path to his kind of big book, one attainable by making the city’s edges central and pushing detailed insights together until they coalesced.

“I think the big awareness of where I was going came from the realization that the harbor was empty and it used to be the largest port in the world,” he says. “There was a strange relationship between presence and absence.”

The gap between activity and emptiness followed him. For hours, there was nothing much to write about. The discovery might have panicked other writers. But when Lopate says “nothing was happening to me,” it is with remembered excitement at how the lack of outward drama set his essayist’s mind wandering to everything from personal memories to ideas for the waterfront’s future. “Any redesign on the waterfront must start from the premise of public access,” he writes at one point.

Sometimes, he took friends, fellow writers, experts on urban lore, a photographer who led him through a series of rooms inside the Brooklyn Bridge. One of his quirky but inspired writing choices was to jam the whole history of building the bridge into a single sentence that becomes a parody of a long sentence.

He’s organized the book into walks, first up the West Side, then the East. On the West Side, he takes us from the Battery to Battery Park City (“It seems to have everything you would need for a good Manhattan neighborhood, except a pulse”), the World Trade Center site (“I despair of any memorial doing justice to the victims and their families”), past Midtown, on to the Upper West Side and beyond.

On the East Side, he traverses the South Street Seaport and makes a nocturnal visit to the Fulton Street Fish Market, the book’s most vivid reminder of how the New York waterfront once was. He passes the United Nations, revealing that “because of its security fears, the United Nations has never permitted any pedestrian access to its water frontage in the rear.” Along the way, he drops in for ropa vieja at a riverside salsa party, delves into social programs for lonely seamen, researches the mighty shipworm, devourer of whole fleets.

He ambles through the oldest streets of New York searching for the house of the pirate Captain Kidd and gets to know the secret beauties of power plants and the politics of sewage treatment plants. He pursues the ghosts of other writers who walked, from poet Hart Crane to New Yorker stylist Joseph Mitchell.

“I walked every bit of it except where the land literally gave out,” he says as we walk. “There were moments where the highway came so close to the edge that there was nothing to hold on to.”

Hidden possibilities

Lopate’s walk is more like a float or a glide, punctuated by sudden stops, then a soft-smiling semi-lostness. Looking around, he seems to court possibilities hidden in the breeze or the special signals roving essayists pick up. At 60, with a genteel face that sometimes shows the vulnerability of a baby’s, he looks like a taller version of Carl Reiner -- another variation on the manic, domestic, funny, thoughtful, inventive Jewish creator.

He becomes a writer-actor of his own story, giving what seem like dramatic monologues about the collapse of his first marriage as he crosses the neighborhood where it happened, recalling his father’s work in a factory when describing one he sees by the water. He is “working with myself as a character,” he says, and often refers to his narrator as if he both were and were not him. “I share his views,” he allows.

One hopes so, because it’s a good guess that “Waterfront” will be most talked about for its critique of New York’s “fractious municipal culture,” which Lopate says has thwarted the kind of civic ambition that characterized the city in other times and is in contrast to the “new maturity” of Los Angeles.

We walk past railroad tracks spanned by an elegantly solid art deco bridge that Lopate speculates was built by Robert Moses, the autocratic planner who imposed his controversial emphasis on the automobile and a regional perspective on modern New York.

Moses was the subject of “The Powerbroker,” an epic biography by Robert Caro. Lopate takes Caro to task in one of his chapters -- it’s a theme that threads throughout the book -- for sticking to a monolithically damning view. “Caro is a moralist,” Lopate says in our talk. “He sees Moses too much one way or the other. I don’t think that way.” He clearly wishes for stronger, Moses-like figures these days.

We finally reach the river, but not before running across one stretch of highway and making our way between scatterings of garbage until we find a paved walkway. Directly overhead, on this increasingly bright day, the George Washington Bridge soars toward New Jersey. Beneath the bridge, as he’d promised, stands a red lighthouse. It is one of those things Lopate knows about that even some longtime New Yorkers do not.

Built in 1880, the lighthouse was the subject of a children’s classic called “The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge” by Hildegarde H. Swift and Lynd Ward: “Once upon a time a little lighthouse was built on a sharp point of the shore by the Hudson River. It was round and fat and red. It was red and fat and jolly.”

Lopate pulls off his gloves, crouches down and dips a hand into the brown water. It is quiet and the views of the river are broad and beautiful. Lopate notes that environmental measures have made the Hudson cleaner than it has been in decades. He glances up at the giant supports of the bridge, where workmen scramble on scaffolds, and speculates that they might be working to protect the bridge from terrorists. He peers out at a Coast Guard boat making its way down the river. Soon, warm weather will bring families and lovers.

The park-like area, Lopate says, is what experts on waterfront issues refer to as one of the “touch-down places” where ordinary New Yorkers can actually touch the water. “There aren’t enough of them,” he observes.

He stands up, puts on his gloves, and keeps walking.