At Sea in the City: New York from the Water's Edge
(eBook)

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Book Cover Information

Hoopla Extract Information

stdClass Object
(
    [year] => 2013
    [artist] => William Kornblum
    [fiction] => 
    [coverImageUrl] => https://cover.hoopladigital.com/hbg_9781565127050_270.jpeg
    [titleId] => 15240887
    [isbn] => 9781565127050
    [abridged] => 
    [language] => ENGLISH
    [profanity] => 
    [title] => At Sea in the City
    [demo] => 
    [segments] => Array
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        )

    [pages] => 288
    [children] => 
    [artists] => Array
        (
            [0] => stdClass Object
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                    [name] => William Kornblum
                    [artistFormal] => Kornblum, William
                    [relationship] => AUTHOR
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    [genres] => Array
        (
            [0] => Essays & Travelogues
            [1] => History
            [2] => State & Local
            [3] => Travel
            [4] => United States
        )

    [price] => 2.99
    [id] => 15240887
    [edited] => 
    [kind] => EBOOK
    [active] => 1
    [upc] => 
    [synopsis] => New York is a city of few boundaries, a city of well-known streets and blocks that ramble on and on, into our literature, dreams, and nightmares. We know the city by the byways that split it, streets like Broadway and Madison and Flatbush and Delancey. From those streets, peering down the blocks and up at the top floors, the city seems immense and endless.

    And though the land itself may end at the water, the city does not. Long before Broadway was a muddy cart track, the water was the city's most distinguishing feature, the rivers the only byways of importance. Some people, like William Kornblum, still see the city as an urban archipelago, shaped by the water and the people who have sailed it for goods, money, pirate's loot, and freedom. For them, the City will always be an island.

    William Kornblum--New York City native, longtime sailor, urban sociologist, and first-time author--has spent decades plying the waterways of the city in his ancient catboat, Tradition. In At Sea in the City, he takes the reader along as he sails through his hometown, lovingly retelling the history of the city's waterfront and maritime culture and the stories of the men and women who made the water their own. In At Sea in the City and in Kornblum's own humility, humor, and sense of wonder, one detects echoes of E. B. White, John McPhee, and Joseph Mitchell. William Kornblum is a professor of sociology at the City University of New York. He is a graduate of Cornell University and the University of Chicago and was among the nation's first Peace Corps volunteers. He is the author of numerous scholarly books and articles on the people of New York. A native New Yorker, he's been sailing around the city his whole life.  The vessel we sailed on our New York voyages was named Tradition. This was the name she was given in 1910, when she was launched at the Crosby boatyards in Osterville on Cape Cod. She was a worn-out twenty-four-foot New England catboat, built by the most famous maker of these boats at a time when they were the most common all-purpose work and pleasure craft along the shallow barrier island bays and inlets of our northern coasts and estuaries.
	  Tradition carried a single huge mainsail on her wooden spars. The sail was rigged with wooden hoops to her stout, ancient mast, dark with the stains of time and the sea, and laced to a boom that extended aft some twenty-five feet from the mast near the bow, beyond the sturdy wheel and beyond the boat's transom. The sail was hauled aloft by a wooden gaff to which was connected an efficient system of halyards and blocks. A throat halyard pulled up the gaff by its throat, while the two jaws moved up along the mast, and there was a peak halyard that lifted the aft portions of the sail. A third halyard, the topping lift, raised the boom, in part so this formidable club could swing safely over the heads of crew and passengers when the boat was tacking through the wind. All the halyards ran from the mast to the boat's ample cockpit, and the sail could be raised or lowered by a single sailor without having to run forward to manage the sails, as is the case with most modern sailing rigs.
	  Catboats passed out of favor among yachting people in the early decades of the twentieth century. They were replaced by the graceful sloops whose shortened mainsails and higher-reaching Marconi (triangular peaked) sails and forward jibs could add speed in lighter breezes, and whose heeling in the wind gives a greater impression of speed than the more upright and beamy cat.
	 The working catboats of Cape Cod, Great South Bay and Barnegat Bay were good all-purpose boats for tending fishing nets and for use as charter fishing boats on the weekends. A classic Currier and Ives print from the turn of the nineteenth century shows a catboat and its captain carrying intent young men and laughing women trolling for bluefish in a choppy ocean inlet. Generations of fishermen and local boatbuilders refined the catboat
    [url] => https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/15240887
    [pa] => 
    [subtitle] => New York from the Water's Edge
    [publisher] => Algonquin Books
    [purchaseModel] => INSTANT
)