A 40-year chronicle of the city's changeover from industry to recreation as seen from a kayak, exploring ships, skyscrapers, bridges, cranes, drydocks, airports, sewers, oil refineries, power plants, tide races, whirlpools and waterfront promenades in company of birds, fish, seals, eels and people inhabiting some of the most overlooked water in the world.
From glittering banks of Manhattan's newest skyscraper districts to dull distillation tubes of refineries in the Staten Island Kills, from grassy expanses of Jamaica Bay bordering miles-long runways of JFK Airport to a narrow sluiceway of the Bronx River wedged between basement walls, whether engaging homeless isolatoes who blend in plain sight between busy beltways and manic-depressive tides or debutantes jogging around the Battery in the latest neon fashions, Dolan documents the seafront city like a 16th century Dutchman mapping the islands for the first time-and with the wary eye of locals the mappers would dispossess. Leveraging the effacing impact of his feather-craft, which sneaks about the archipelago by night and day mostly unseen, he compares the latest towers poking above the skyline to the latest containerships plowing under the Verrazano Bridge, bound to vast terminals carved out of meadowlands formerly overflowing with furs and oysters, laid waste now in tribute to a sumptuous city that lies on the same latitude as the Rome to which all roads and rivers once led and that New York seems bent on besting in overreach. Sneak with him through ruins of old factories and abandoned wharves being subsumed by slick condo towers, draft along in quickwater behind jumbo oil barges, and circumnavigate the gyres that power the fabled city, mystifying poets who never bounced on a boil during peak flood.