Seaport: New York's Vanished Waterfront: Photographs from the Edwin Levick Collection

by Phillip Lopate, Edwin Levick (Photographer), Thomas V. Moore (Foreword)

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Port of New York was the center of a huge maritime enterprise. Through this hub passed vessels and cargoes of every description, heading to or arriving from anywhere and everywhere around the globe. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, it was here that America's commerce with Europe and Central and South America converged. In this busiest port in the world, seasoned sailors and fishermen, international traders, muscled longshoremen, barge brats, and yachters shaped and shared New York's waterfront world. By 1960 maritime New York had greatly diminished, eclipsed by more efficient operations elsewhere. Fortunately, a small cadre of commercial photographers documented the dynamic social, economic, and political forces in the heyday of the wharves, waterways, and waterfront markets, capturing for the ages the gritty and sometimes glamorous life of the docks and their environs.

Genres: Photography, History

181 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Phillip Lopate is the author of three personal essay collections, two novels, two poetry collections, a memoir of his teaching experiences, and a collection of his movie criticism. He has edited the following anthologies, and his essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, The Paris Review, Harper's, Vogue, Esquire, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, and New York University. He currently holds the John Cranford Adams Chair at Hofstra University, and also teaches in the MFA graduate programs at Columbia, the New School and Bennington.

Reviews

[Rudy Seifert · Rating 3 out of 5]

good photos

[John Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunning photos, but not his best work. Check out his America's Cup photos.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compiled as such collections should be, with an appropriately insightful essay that sets the stage for the material, helpful captions that add depth and detail to the photographs, and high quality reproductions of the works themselves. The only ding is for the repetitiousness of the work, but considering the narrow scope of the collection (and most likely of the original source material) that is an inherent problem that no curator could be expected to overcome.