Circling La Guardia airport, I took a break from reading At Sea in the City and tried to imagine William Kornblum’s journey in and around the waters of New York City. I saw a few beaches, abandoned docks, ferries, tugs, fishing boats, and a handful of sailboats. I hadn’t thought much about sailing when I visited Manhattan, but for sailors and nonsailors who, like me, are drawn to a sense of place, this is a book filled with details of ports, neighborhoods, bars, history, and a hope for the future.
AT SEA IN THE CITY:
New York From The Water’s Edge
By William Kornblum
Published: September, 2002
Circling La Guardia airport, I took a break from reading At Sea in the City and tried to imagine William Kornblum’s journey in and around the waters of New York City. I saw a few beaches, abandoned docks, ferries, tugs, fishing boats, and a handful of sailboats. I hadn’t thought much about sailing when I visited Manhattan, but for sailors and nonsailors who, like me, are drawn to a sense of place, this is a book filled with details of ports, neighborhoods, bars, history, and a hope for the future.
Kornblum, a native New Yorker, is a professor of sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He started sailing with his wife Susan while serving along the Ivory Coast as a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1960s. In 1979, Susan and Bill purchased Tradition, a Catboat built in the Crosby workshop in Osterville on Cape Cod.
Kornblum sails Tradition past the World Trade Center, through Hell’s Gate, and out into the Atlantic. Along the way, he tells us about shipwrecks, politics, neighborhoods, bars, and treacherous waters. In addition, he tells a story or two about his family, who worked the waterfront during the last century. His guiding vision for this book comes from a quote from Thoreau: “To know the way from the front door to the path...”
We get an inside look at the normal problems associated with sailing: engine breakdown, oppositional tidal currents, being becalmed near bridges, tugs and dredges, storms, and conflicts with Susan and friends as he navigates up dead-end tidal creeks.
Tradition is neither a fast nor sleek racing boat. She has a wide beam, has a fixed keel, is a bit on the heavy side, carries a singular large sail, and needs more than average wind to make headway. Kornblum loves her. He is my kind of sailor.
In 1976, I bought a wooden Flying Dutchman, Sugar, whose bottom was made of fiberglass. I sanded and varnished, dreamed and consulted charts. Sugar and I went everywhere together, and along the way experienced a capsizing in the Inlet of Wrightsville Beach on an outgoing tide. We survived.
Kornblum’s circumnavigation concludes when he sails into his homeport, Long Beach; yet we know he is not finished with us nor with sailing.
The major weakness of this book lies in Bill’s strength. He knows the water and land so well that we are offered sketchy, black inked maps. I kept asking myself, “What’s land and what’s water?” I’d like to see a regional map on the inside cover of the book and then a detailed map with a sailing destination at the beginning of each chapter.
As a returned Peace Corps volunteer and a sailor with a demanding career, I would have liked Kornblum to offer some reflections on the interaction of sailing and work. For me, sailing has often been the vessel for career transitions as well as the seed of new visions.
What this book does exceedingly well, however, is give us a perspective and love of place. Not from a car or an airplane or by foot or bike, but from the cockpit of a well-built wooden sailboat. At the end of the journey, Kornblum offers us a hint of what might be next for him and for us. He shares a secret. He has discovered another Crosby Catboat which had been lying in wait under canvas in a neighborhood marina. He purchased it and hired woodwrights to bring her back to life. And he found a buyer for Tradition. A resident of Maine with a gleam in his eye and a dream on his mind.
In his epilogue, written September 19, 2001, Kornblum offers us a word of encouragement: “I hope more people will take to the waters of my city to explore the creeks and coves, to ride on the powerful river tides, and to see the city from sea level, where it appears as a place within, and not outside, nature’s domain.” I recently purchased a 24’ Sharpie, fiberglass and wood, trailerable. I’ve already consulted the charts of the Chesapeake Bay and northward, believing the waters Kornblum lives on will offer me a renewed vision of what is wild and optimistic at sea in the city.
