The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, October 18, 2024

From the sea New York Harbor was a sight to make authors strain for adjectives. Writers had described the colossal staired and serried mass of towering skyscrapers, which seemed to be rising out of the water, as a giant ship (Melville had been reminded that the very name “skyscraper” had once been used by sailors to describe a sailing ship’s topmost canvas); as a «structure of tiered decks,” pointing at the watcher and “growing taller and taller” like the prow of a furiously onrushing vessel; as a medieval fortress, whose towers, rising out of swirling tides, at night were “blocked by darkness into a sentinelled medieval keep of enormous height and unscalable defense” that might have been inhabited more fittingly by dead kings than recent bankers; as a mesa, a petrified forest, a “giant’s cromlech.” And the very number of the metaphors proved the power of the scene to excite the imagination, proved, in fact, the truth of the one image used most frequently to describe it: that the view of New York from its harbor was one of the wonders of the world. The unique importance of Battery Park to New York City was obvious not from the sea but from the air- from a plane or from the observation platform of the Empire State Building a thousand feet in the sky over Manhattan Island. To the observer looking out over what has been called “the most significant panorama that modern civilization offers,” the buildings in which 12,000,000 persons lived and worked in 1939 seemed to stretch out endlessly to the horizon. But from such vantage points it could be seen that they were not only stretching out but closing in, building up, pressing inward, crowding closer and closer together, until, as if the concentrating inward surge of humanity constituted a geologic force, in the epicenter of that surge the buildings of Manhattan were thrust upward and toward the sky. And it was near the island’s southern tip, the tip jutting into the harbor, that the colossal upthrust had been greatest. In the upper part of Manhattan the masses of concrete were mostly sixty feet high, or seventy; in the center of the island, they were a hundred and fifty or two hundred. But as the island narrowed toward its southern tip, they were four hundred feet high, five hundred, cramming closer and closer together, bulking up higher and higher as they loomed southward pressing inexorably toward the island’s tip–until at the very tip, at the very end of the most crowded island in the world, at the very spot in the entire world in which buildings should have been crowded most closely together, there were suddenly, with the exception of a tiny old fort converted into an aquarium, no buildings at all. At a point at which a single square foot of land was worth thousands of dollars, at which the value of an acre was computed not in the millions of dollars but in the tens of millions, there sat 967,032 square feet of land–22.2 acres–vacant except for grass and trees, pathways between them, benches, and a broad, breezy waterfront promenade.
And it wasn’t from either sea or air that the value of park and harbor was most apparent. It was from the ground, from the nearby streets of the city, from the bleak narrow concrete canyons of Lower Manhattan from which towering masses of concrete and steel had crushed sunlight and sky and green grass and trees and, by hemming between them the swirling concentration of humanity (half a million human beings worked in Manhattan’s single southernmost mile), peace. If there was ever a place in which a man occasionally needed to be alone for a while, to sit in the open, in the sun, among grass and trees, for a minute or two, to escape from crowds and noise, that place was Lower Manhattan. And in all the streets of Lower Manhattan, there was no place to do so. There should, moreover, have been a sense of the sea in Lower Man-hattan, which was, after all, the tip, the seamost tip, of the island that was the world’s largest seaport. But there was no sense of the sea in Lower Manhattan; skyscraper walls blocked that out, too. CnThere was no sense of history, either.

–From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (1974). .