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

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.

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 for heavy work along the coasts. But as the fishermen discovered motors that could carry them out of calms or squalls, the slower-sailing cats held less appeal for men whose livelihoods depended on getting the catch to market as fast as possible, and who would also prefer to get to the dinner table sooner and with more certainty. Many old fishing catboats lost their masts and sails and puttered along for years as motorized fishing boats.

But catboats are well evolved for sailing over our particular shoals, and they turn out to be extraordinarily adaptable to contemporary life on the waters of the East Coast cities. Like a whale's body, the shape of a boat's hull and the arrangement of its rigging are evolutionary solutions to complex problems of life in particular marine surroundings. "The one essential factor in the design of boats proven by history," wrote maritime historian Howard Chappel, "is that they must fit the conditions where they are used and for what they are used. . . . No one sits down and tries to figure out how to build a boat that is all round 'better.' He tries to figure out, instead, how to fit an existing boat so that she will do better the work for which she is required. This was certainly the case with the commercial catboat."

It may no longer be well adapted for sport or commercial fishing, but the catboat was still ideal for family voyages. Tradition was small enough for one sailor to handle and relatively easy on a strained household budget. Her four-cylinder gas engine burned about fifty dollars worth of gasoline a season, from April to late October or November. Her eleven-foot width sat flat on the water; her great beam made her extremely accommodating. You couldn't stand in the cabin below, and every boating season began with at least one sharp knock on the head, but there was plenty of room below for a huge double berth, a small galley, a portable marine head, a long bookshelf, and assorted storage nooks. On deck there was room for ten people to go on a day's outing without feeling crowded. When they were young, our children slept under the stars on Tradition's broad deckhouse.

Susan and I began sailing small boats together in 1963 when we were Peace Corps volunteers on the west coast of Africa, on the Ivory Coast. I lived in a tribal fishing village on the outskirts of the capital, Abidjan, where I taught physics and chemistry at the LycTe Classique d'Abidjan. Susan lived an hour outside the city in a small college town, where she taught math.

Wandering along the beach outside the city one day, I spotted the rotting hulk of an open-decked sloop, draped it over the back of a rented truck, and hauled it back to a local lagoon. A village carpenter made the major repairs. I finished the boat and rigged it for sailing. On its maiden voyage, two African friends from my village took the chance of being the first to go out with me. A crowd of curious villagers lined the beach. (Their preferred watercraft was a sleek dugout canoe with a good fifteen-horse Johnson outboard.) We sailed off smartly, and I took a few tacks through the wind. Heading back to shore to pick up Susan for her turn, I forgot to raise the dagger board. The boat hit the bottom and rolled all three of us into about three feet of lagoon water. The entire village erupted in howls. Susan was in stitches. She hardly understood how little about sailing I actually knew. But always game, she came out with me and we sailed through some splendid tidal estuaries in the Ebrie Lagoon, behind the great ocean beaches. Seventeen years later, when we were settled in Long Beach on another estuary, I managed to get us out on the water again.

Before I bought Tradition, Susan teased me by saying, "If you've got to buy another boat, just make sure it doesn't end up in the backyard like the last one." The last one, a battered rowing skiff, had rotted in our yard, proof I was probably not suited to taking proper care of a boat. Still I pored over boat ads in the penny-savers. I had sailed a strong open-decked catboat as a boy on family vacations in Maine with two old salts who gave me lessons. Now and then one of the modern fiberglass catboats would appear in the used boat ads, but they were always far too expensive for us.

Tradition was lying in pieces in the back of her seller's cottage when we first set eyes on her. My son, Noah, and I had driven at the crack of dawn to Southold, on the north fork of Long Island, the day after we spotted the ad for her: "1910 Crosby Catboat, hull fiberglassed, engine, $2,500." The owner had assured me over the phone that the boat had been restored and that she was well worth taking a look at. It was 1979, and my father lay dying in Mt. Sinai hospital in Manhattan. I needed a lift. But as Noah and I surveyed Tradition's forlorn condition, settled into the lawn of a Southold backyard, under a ragged canvas cover, it was hard to know what to think. Her lines, her sturdiness, her ample deck and cockpit space, her wooden spars, and all the rest were evident. She was traditional, all right, but modified over the years and now facing an uncertain future, perhaps only as another backyard compost pile.

My heart was beating wildly with the sudden panic of a man about to act like a boy by making an impulse purchase. I could hear all the voices of experience and reason telling me to get another opinion, shop around, try for a better price. Noah and I took a walk down Southold's Main Street and thought it over. Tradition's owner guaranteed that the engine had worked the last time the boat was in the water but did not say when that actually was. The prop turned easily, suggesting that the engine was not...