Manhattan shores

About this book

Over a period of three years, working in all seasons and kinds of weather, Laura Rosen made her way around Manhattan Island with her camera. Manhattan Shores captures a world where landscape and architecture meet in strange and wonderful combinations, a world of decay and transformation, history and neglect, beauty and desecration. Accompanied by Rosen's wryly affectionate, deeply knowledgeable text, this is a book that reveals New York City's past, present and even its future, in a brilliant series of timeless images. Beginning just north of the George Washington Bridge, and travelling clockwise through time and space, we pass the site of the last American Revolution fort in Manhattan to fall to the British and move through the only natural forest in Manhattan. Beneath a series of glowering industrial age bridges we find the U.S. Ship Canal, the project that cut off a piece of Manhattan and attached it to the Bronx. We discover old boathouses and derelict boats moldering in the mud of the Harlem River. Sweeping down along the East River, we come to the esplanades of the East Side, and discover private gardens and hidden parks. We pass through Lower Manhattan, where gleaming Financial District skyscrapers dwarf the antique ships of the South Street Seaport Museum and, rounding the Battery, move uptown, past decaying piers, the ghosts of the island's once vibrant waterfront economy.