The Water Bridge: Whitehall Terminal and the Ferry to Staten Island

At the southern edge of Manhattan, where the streets seem to end at the water, Whitehall Terminal sends the Staten Island Ferry across the harbor to St. George, a short crossing in which the narrator finds a journey between different speeds, shores and lives. The book recalls that water was among New York's oldest roads, from early steam ferries to the day the city took over the service for a fare of a few cents, and honors the person who wakes before dawn to cross the water to work, year after year. In the waiting hall a nurse ending a night shift, a worker carrying coffee and a tourist reading the signs become a temporary society of passengers, and the ferry, free to ride today, offers an architecture of everyday equity in a city where almost everything has a price. As the boat moves, Manhattan retreats from a wall of power into a line on the horizon, teaching that distance restores human scale, and the copper Statue of Liberty, turned green with time, appears as a landmark to the tourist and as an idea to the immigrant. For the immigrant, whose life is a series of crossings, another city such as Damascus, Beirut or Cairo rides along in his heart and the horizon asks him for no passport, and the narrator ends on Staten Island looking back at Manhattan, understanding that the water was crossing through him.