Illustration by James Dawe, photographs by The New York Times and Getty Images
ONE of the great things about New York used to be how easy it was to ignore the natural world. With a public transportation system that never closes, moving from climate-controlled apartment to office to entertainment, and living high above the earth itself, New Yorkers never had to worry much about anything as mundane as the weather.
Keith Meyers/The New York Times
Teenagers in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, in 1991, diving into water filled with debris.
No more. A year ago this month, Hurricane Sandy swept down on the city, killing 43 people and causing $19 billion worth of damage. A beachfront neighborhood, Breezy Point, Queens, was leveled when flooding set off an electrical fire; on Staten Island, houses were torn from their foundations. A 14-foot surge knocked out almost all power south of 34th Street and created the unnerving spectacle of a Manhattan split between light and darkness.
New Yorkers had to confront the reality of the natural world around them. They had to ask themselves if Sandy was the harbinger of a new era of climate change that would force them to dramatically alter how and where they live.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg says no. On a gorgeous, late-summer day last month, I traveled with the outgoing mayor and two of his top aides, Amanda M. Burden, the director of the Department of City Planning, and Caswell F. Holloway, the deputy mayor for operations, as they toured the East River to make the case for a waterfront New York that will not only endure, but triumph.
"This is just the beginning," the mayor said. "We're leaving in place the bones, the approvals, the transactions that will now let the marketplace go and build a lot of stuff," a process he sees lasting for decades.
"Back in the days of La Guardia, what's-his-name tried to separate us from the water," Mr. Bloomberg said, forgetting (or pretending to forget) the name of the master builder Robert Moses. "He built roads all along the water. ... Today, we're trying to reconnect everybody to the water."
BEFORE there even was a city, there was the harbor. New York was made by water. It possesses one of the great natural harbors in the world, along with San Francisco and Hong Kong, and more shoreline than the waterfronts of Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles combined.
As we set out, Pier 11 at the foot of Wall Street was a scene of happy urban tumult. Sightseeing helicopters buzzed industriously up and down nearby like giant locusts. Traffic twanged overhead on the drive. Dozens of New Yorkers ran or biked along well-marked exercise trails. Just upriver, the sailing bark Peking sat at anchor, its rigging creating a gorgeous matrix with the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge just beyond it.
Everything seemed stunningly new and bright, and if there was a sense of something artificial about it all, it was probably because New Yorkers are unused to seeing what is new and bright in such settings. In living memory, there was a mountainous open garbage dump along the Lower East Side waterfront, where, during the Great Depression, desperate men and women fought the sea gulls for scraps.
For centuries, New Yorkers pumped and tossed and slipped pretty much everything into the water that surrounded them: raw sewage, tons of used film, all the PCBs that made a Superfund site out of the Gowanus Canal. During the American Revolution, more than 11,000 prisoners died of disease and starvation on rotting British prison ships in Wallabout Bay. Their corpses were tossed into the river, and for years their skeletons would wash up on the shore.
Wallabout Bay glimmers prettily today between the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, the harbor cleaner than it has been at least since anyone started testing it, back in 1909. Fish and other marine life abound, and there are even reports of beavers — beavers! — being spotted along the banks of the Bronx River, the first time in centuries they've been seen anywhere outside the city seal.
Cas Holloway boasted that "95 percent of the harbor is open to boats." Amanda Burden enthused in turn about the swimming races, and the more than 40 kayak launches along city waterways and the "visceral desire" people have to "touch the water and put their feet in the water." She called the harbor "our largest park."
That was the original idea. The early-19th-century planners of Manhattan's grid system acknowledged they had left little room for parks but noted that "those large arms of the sea which embrace Manhattan Island render its situation, in regard to health and pleasure ... peculiarly felicitous."
The large arms of the sea around Manhattan would become increasingly peculiar but hardly felicitous. New Yorkers regarded the harbor unsentimentally as a place of business. By 1807, New Yorkers had developed the first commercially viable steamboat. Ten years later, the Black Ball Line advertised that one of its ships would sail on a fixed schedule, a change that transformed the shipping industry. By 1825, the Erie Canal — the greatest public works project since the pyramids — had pushed through to the American heartland, setting New York in the cockpit of the Atlantic world at the height of the Industrial Revolution.
Kevin Baker is an essayist and the author, most recently, of the historical novel "The Big Crowd."
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