At least, that's what it says on the Town's web site.
From 1899 until 2012, I would have agreed. But in 2012, the Town government held a hearing for the purpose of closing Avenue A and South Avenue, the latter the principal public access to the water of the Town's harbor. So maybe it isn't about the water any more. At least, for ordinary citizens.
What does it matter for ordinary people to stand at water's edge and look out at the water? After all, rich folk already own the waterfront.
CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never
mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and
nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about
a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of
driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find
myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly
November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before
coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet;
and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it
requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately
stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats
off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is
my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato
throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is
nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their
degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings
towards the ocean with me.
There now is your insular city of the
Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral
reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets
take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that
noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours
previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers
there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go
from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall,
northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the
town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean
reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the
pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some
high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward
peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and
plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then
is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?
The
transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a
sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to
enable you to grin and bear it.
But look! here come
more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a
dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the
land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not
suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can
without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues.
Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and
avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me,
does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those
ships attract them thither?
Once more. Say you are in the country;
in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to
one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in
the stream. There is magic in it.
Let the most absent-minded of men be
plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet
a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in
all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American
desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a
metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water
are wedded for ever.
But here is an artist. He desires to paint
you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic
landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he
employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit
and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep
his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into
distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of
mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies
thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like
leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the
shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the
Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep
among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?—Water—there is not a
drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you
travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of
Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate
whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in
a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy
boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to
go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself
feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship
were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea
holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of
Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the
meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the
tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was
drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans.
It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key
to it all.
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea
whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over
conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go
to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a
purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it.
Besides, passengers get sea-sick—grow quarrelsome—don’t sleep of
nights—do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;—no, I never go
as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to
sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and
distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I
abominate all honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of
every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of
myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and
what not. And as for going as cook,—though I confess there is
considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on
ship-board—yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;—though once
broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered,
there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say
reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the
idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted
river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge
bake-houses the pyramids.
No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple
sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft
there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and
make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And
at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s
sense of honour, particularly if you come of an old established family
in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And
more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot,
you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest
boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you,
from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of
Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this
wears off in time.
What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain
orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that
indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New
Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less
of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that
particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then,
however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump
and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all
right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same
way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so
the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each
other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.
Again, I always go to sea
as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble,
whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of.
On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the
difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying
is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard
thieves entailed upon us. But BEING PAID,—what will compare with it? The
urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous,
considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all
earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah!
how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
Finally, I
always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure
air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far
more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the
Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the
quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the
forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same
way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the
same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that
after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now
take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible
police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me,
and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way—he can
better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this
whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that
was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude
and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part
of the bill must have run something like this:
“GRAND CONTESTED
ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES. “WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE
ISHMAEL. “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”
Though I cannot tell
why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for
this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for
magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel
comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I cannot tell why this was
exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see
a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented
to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the
part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice
resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.
Chief
among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale
himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my
curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island
bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all
the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped
to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not
have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting
itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on
barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a
horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is
but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one
lodges in.
By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was
welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in
the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there
floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid
most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
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