"When I was a young man, living in London, I saw Woody Allen's 'Manhattan' and I knew I had to live there."
- Patrick Downes, publisher of Audubon.


About a year and a half ago, the big casino at Foxwoods in Connecticut, run by the Mashantucket Pequot tribal nation, began a ferry service to and from my town of Glen Cove, which is directly across Long Island Sound from the resort and casino. As part of the arrangement permitting the gambler trips, our city council demanded the people at Foxwoods provide ferry service between Glen Cove and Wall Street. Despite having to arise at 5 a.m. to make the ferry's 6:30 departure, I decided to try the service, and treat myself to the first class Admiral's Deck, up top . . . $40 roundtrip. I've been hooked ever since. I relax to coffee and bagels, served at my own booth, read the copy of The New York Times I bring with me, and the Wall Street Journal provided by the crew. We skirt the north shore of Long Island to our left, then the New York borough of Queens and finally part of Brooklyn, while Manhattan makes its dramatic appearance to our right. We cruise - under bridges, past LaGuardia Airport, by tugs hauling tankers, sport fishermen heading out to the sound - into the maw of that man-made colossus of gigantic buildings, as the early morning sky turns from deep red to blue. Then we disembark at Pier 11 on the East River, just below South Street Seaport, into the midst of New York's financial district as it awakes to that smell of morning coffee somehow so much more aromatic in the heart of the city.

The first time I took the ferry was two weeks after the devastating attacks of September 11, just a few blocks from the dock, over on the other side of Manhattan Island. There was a heavy military presence on the pier that morning, men in fatigues with automatic rifles and side arms, unusual in this realm of chalk-striped-suited bankers and brash, barking brokers. But the army guys provided a sense of security and I almost saluted. At the same time, I was overwhelmed with a sense that to those of us born and raised in New York City, this was our town, damn it, and someone had tried to bring it to its knees. Well, that didn't happen. Battered, yes; down and out; not on your life. The outpouring of heartfelt support from people across the U.S. and around the world has been heartening, from the period directly after the attack right up to the present. It was heartening, as well, to know how many Americans, from far and wide, consider New York their city. That it was O.K. for them to love to hate the Big Apple, even verbally trash us, but not for anyone else to screw with it. In fact, that feeling seemed to be one shared by people around the world as well. It's truly amazing how many people really do love New York.

Encouraged by the ferry, which has made the journey a joy in and of itself, I have been revisiting Lower Manhattan, often, since that first trip, reminding myself why, years ago, it had been such a magnet for me. I had gone to school at New York University in Greenwich Village in the 1960s - a period when progressive jazz was coming into its own, Bob Dylan was playing the coffee houses, Woody Allen was doing stand-up in the clubs. After my four-year stint as an officer in the Air Force, I had worked at the Chase Manhattan Bank headquarters in the heart of Wall Street, in the late 60s. I hadn't been down to that part of town all that many times since leaving Chase in 1968. Now, I was rediscovering how much I had loved the southern reaches of the city.

While the landscape has been altered often by the latest accession to chic, much of that is even driven by innovators in this very part of the world. As the site of one of the oldest areas of the original English colonies, and the birthplace of New York, these few blocks would seem to do well just to hang with that tradition, but quite the opposite is the case. If there is a tradition here, it is the institutionalization of change. An attitude of leading the experimentation, of riding the front edge of the carpet, is what has always made Lower Manhattan attractive, whether it be a matter of those funky types defining literature, music, painting or those Armani-clad financiers creating the financial instruments that rock the world. No question, this area of a few square miles is one of the earth's energy centers. You feel it, all about you. Got writer's block? Sit in a café here and watch the world swirl. Unblock. New Yorkers from the outer boroughs have always joked: if you don't get into "the city" for a couple of months, you won't recognize the skyline. Will they rebuild something dramatic, derivative, defining where those ramrod straight towers once stood? No red-blooded New Yorker doubts it for a minute.

When you get into Manhattan at 7:30 in the morning, you rediscover that it is a place for breakfast, as well as lunch and dinner. I shared that experience one morning with Patrick Downes, the publisher of Audubon, and the driver behind the special travel sections I have written for that magazine for more than a decade. We met at Balthazar, in SoHo, which in Manhattan stands for South of Houston (Street), which in Manhattan is pronounced "how-ston."

Balthazar is a gathering place clearly targeted at the evening crowd, its dining area a cavernous room where the bar stands before antique mirrors - their reflective backing peeling in crescents and triangles - reaching to a 20-foot ceiling of 19th century stamped metal, covered in dozens of coats of paint. Stretching in front of the mirrors are six long, long shelves with about a thousand bottles of various spirits. The place succeeds in creating a kind of French bistro feel, but in that way New York has of co-opting an atmosphere born somewhere else and making it its own. About us was a mix of business and artsy types, crackling open the pages of broadsheets, while awaiting companions, or simply grabbing some private space in a great place to do just that. They sipped café Americain, chocolat chaud or steep teas; spooned at foamy bowls of café au lait; nibbled brioche, apple galette or sticky buns.

Patrick and I sat at a booth of dark wood and red leather seats. We both chose the organic, soft-boiled egg and he razzed me for not knowing that "soldiers" were slivers of toast you dipped into the egg. Then again, he was born in England; they know things like that.

"When I was a young man, living in London," Patrick said, "I saw Woody Allen's 'Manhattan' and I knew I had to live there."

It seemed odd to leave this quintessentially urban tête-a-tête with an assignment to write about bird-watching in wilds of south Texas. But, hey, that's the kind of thing that evolves from the quintessential New York meeting of the minds.

A walk west along Bleecker Street, in Greenwich Village, provides a microcosm of what I find so intriguing about this part of the world; in a sentence: it is the antidote to the strip-malling of America. For example, on Bleecker just west of LaGuardia Place is the Bitter End, a musical venue with a legendary history. The place calls itself "New York's Oldest Rock Club," having showcased acts continuously since 1961, when rock was becoming the dominant force in pop music. The acts that played here early in their careers include a range from the soft rock of Carly Simon and James Taylor to the hard-driving of Bo Didley and George Thorogood. The best of American troubadours played here, as well: Bob Dylan; Arlo Guthrie; Judy Collins; Shawn Colvin; Peter, Paul and Mary. Comedy acts included stand-ups like Woody Allen and Bill Cosby or groups like the Ace Trucking Company. I checked out the handbills on a bulletin board out front, didn't recognize any of the new performers. Surprisingly that made me feel warm and fuzzy. I remember when Dylan played there and only those who knew this guy really, really had something to say felt that flat, nasal twang was headed anywhere.

Nascent actors have been drawn to the Actors Studio, between Sullivan and Thompson for decades. Now affiliated with the New School University and awarding degrees, the Actor's Studio offers repertory theatre employing the talents of its class of more than 50 actors, directors and playwrights. You can sample their work, for free.

I strolled down Bleecker, past small delis, cafés with benches out front where you can sit and sip something. Just short of the intersection with Avenue of the Americas is Native Leather, one of the many one-of-a-kind places in The Village, many of them dealing with radical fashion accessories. In this particular shop, you can purchase leather goods that range from a wide array of belts to vests, jackets, bracelets, you name it - all there to help accessorize your transformation to punk rocker, S&M festisher, frontier scout or Indian guide. There is something don't-give-a-damn appealing in the fact that the place doesn't even open until noon.

Where Morton Street Ts into Bleecker - tucked in among boutiques and bakeries, fruit stands and shops selling old and/or hard-to-find CDs and vinyl albums - is Matt Umanov, one of the best places anywhere to buy some of the best guitars anywhere. Here the service is personal and knowledgeable, in opposition to the department store atmosphere at the chain musical instrument vendors. You can choose a new Fender Telecaster for $849 or a 1928 Martin OO-44 for $100,000. Photos of an array of major players thanking Matt for his attention is both reassuring and intimidating to an amateur picker like me.

When SoHo blossomed a quarter century ago with innovative artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and the tragic Jean-Michel Basquiat, the unique boutiques followed behind, places where you could buy one-of-a-kind things from hand-blown glass to buttery leather chaps for horsing about New York's funkier neighborhoods, provided you had the credit line to finance these purchases. You could read up on just about anything, while you sat at a table in the Universal News Café, sipping a fruit drink and/or munching on some veggie-oriented meal in a huge, horseshoe-shaped room lined, floor-to-ceiling, with racks and racks displaying "over 7,000 magazine titles."

Yep, this is an area where a fella could sit in a café with a café latte and watch the languid strides of cam-shaft legs, jean- or leather-britchéd, knifing across acres of sidewalk to music piped directly into their carefully coifed heads. A place where every young woman looked like an incipient runway adornment for Calvin or Ralphie Boy, every young man like the second guitar in the rebirth of the Sex Pistols. But the chain retailers, with their bottomless bankrolls, started to compete for prime locale: upscalers at first - Emporio Armani, Chanel, Anne Klein, Burbury - followed by the Club Monacos, Banana Republics, Beau Brummels; and finally, inevitably, The Gaps and Old Navys. For now, there seems a quiet period, that détente in some sort of "forward" movement, in some probably predictable direction toward dumbed-down unilateralism . . . or perhaps not here.

But even as this transformation continues inexorably, as it has on a smaller scale in so many other renascent city cores, New York has a way of preserving some measure of its insistent uniqueness, no matter what the demographic or economic pressures, particularly in this area of this city. It is affected by the city's intense sense of individuality, that karmic draw that has pulled at so many creative misfits from near and far, for so many years. It is this sense of personal space that will always cause you to wonder would the lissome brunette in the seat next to you at the counter in New World Coffee be open to a conversation, opening comment: "Does that soup taste as good as it smells?" Or, is she protective of her space in a city that honors it to such an extent out-of-towners sometimes think us cold. Strange, this emphasis on privacy in the midst of a city that only venerates people willing to expose themselves before its heartless judges.

I didn't ask . . . about the soup. But some guy stuck his head in and inquired about the parking space right in front and we were off into a conversation - Nicole and I - secure in the wavelets of people darting in and out. She was from Denver, born in the military, lived all over, Hawaii, her particular favorite. Said she'd almost been mugged the day before. Perhaps the pleasantries during these few moments, in each other's space, would neutralize that experience.

"What are you writing?" she finally asked.

"Actually," I answered, "I'm writing about you."

"Really?" Her tone took no offense.

"It's a piece I'm doing on Lower Manhattan, for the website I edit. I was wondering about . . . your soup."

She smiled.

I gave her a card with the web address. We parted friends. Perhaps she is reading this . . . now.

Lunch at the Manhattan Bistro, at 129 Spring Street, just east of Greene Street, a delicious grilled chicken salad with slices of Portobello mushrooms and roasted potatoes. Reluctantly, I have chosen the smoking section because it is upfront where accordion doors open onto a bright, sun-washed street. Sinatra is playing background. The bartender and a patron are talking about an unruly patron who had to be taken out by police the night before.

"She kept insisting she had a gun in her purse," the bartender says, "but she never pulled it out."

Despite its intrinsic drama, the conversation is only marginally interesting. I prefer watching the world amble by.

People-watching is great sport. On the basis of an encounter - actually a non-encounter - that lasts only a few seconds, you get to redefine a person's résumé, create for him or her a fictional existence, this more a reflection of your life experiences, your particular biases . . . then get to do it again seconds later. It beats most spectator sports of which, over the course of decades, I've seen every possible outcome. I mean really . . . with Bernie, Jeter, The Rocket and Giambino, are the Yankees anything but predictable? I resume my roll as scripter of fabricated lives.

I read in The Times about the revitalization of Clinton Street, in one of the seediest areas of the Lower East Side. I decide to check it out. The walk over there, east along Houston, is another of my re-acquaintances with things past, first the Angelika Film Center at Mercer, a great place for serious, even artsy films, many of which don't make it to the neighborhood circuit. Today, it's "Amelie," "Italian for Beginners," "American Chai." Then Katz's Delicatessen at Ludlow. I'm relieved I'd eaten already, otherwise, Katz's, a Lower East Side institution, would have drawn me in for a thick pastrami on rye with cold slaw. Once at the core of a neighborhood of predominantly Jewish families, Katz's now sits in the midst of a mixed community. Nonetheless, it remains a great draw for Jews and Gentiles, commoners and celebs, including even former Presidents and/or members of their staffs, determined to leave their cholesterol counts at the door.

My impression of the Clinton Street revival is less positive than that of the Times's reporter. Perhaps the writer was influenced, oddly, by a scoop mentality. Discovering the next neighborhood du jour is the New York rendition of jet-set island-hopping, but there is this whole cusp element to the game: you must find the place right after tacky recedes and just before tidal surge. For me, Clinton was still dealing with the detritus of its recent past, when drug dealers and prostitutes held sway. There were the trendy restaurants tucked into slots; there were the blossoming Bradford pear trees; and no doubt that the milieu was all part of an east side revitalization in Lower Manhattan, but the west side remains decades ahead.

5 p.m. Thursday, March 28, 2002. Passover. Back at Balthazar. The place is packed, a mix of tourists, many, I'm sure, drawn to New York by the spring break period; locals ducked out of work early for Easter Weekend, beginning, for most, the next day. I am sipping a Bushmill's neat, soda back, slice of lime brought on a separate saucer; the ensemble a residue from last year's trip to Ireland. The waiter approved of my choice. He of a brogue, not Dublin, somewhere west, striking good looks, a theatric in training. Cheers. I am watching the bartenders, wondering, as I had done at breakfast, how the hell they reach the bottles on the top shelf, maybe 20 feet above the bar. I decide the bottles are decorative, there to raise questions. Most are wine. Who would store wine bottles standing up in a room this warm?

The hostess leans over the tables in front of me to drop the Venetian blinds. She is maybe late 20s, tops. She has a terrific body, bare midsection, no tattoo on her rhombus, thankfully. The look still doesn't work, that bare middle thing. Inexplicably, it divides her body at a point where it should not be halved. It's as if that lovely spot needs a fashion statement that places it either north or south, not split by an equator. And if it doesn't work for her? It's only a recollection of a style that was born and died in the 60s, when free love was the mantra. It didn't really work then either.

Somehow these inane analyses of mine seem fused with meaning, perhaps driven by the fact that I am in the corner of the bar at Balthazar at a tiny table for two, doing the Alan-Ginsbergian, Jack-Kerouacian thing that didn't work for me in the 60s either.

Despite the indisputable hipness of this place, it's amazing how predictable the crowd mix is, the snippets of conversations, echoes of conversations from other bars, in other cities, at other times. For now, I take comfort in the familiarity of the scene, watch the dynamic, the shifting sands of people, exiting, entering. Two women at the table directly opposite me are served their drinks: pinky, orangey, party things. They try to clink glasses but the fruit slices draped over the sides are in the way. They smile, lift their glasses, take that ceremonial first sip. Damn, I love this town.

I am at the Aqua Grill waiting for Phil Schaeffer who, along with his wife, Margaret, runs Caligo Tours, one of the best tour operations anywhere. Phil and I have been friends since he hosted me on a trip to Trinidad and Tobago a couple of years ago (http://naturaltraveler.com/articles/2000/july00). We get together and do the New York thing a couple of times a year. If you like oysters, this is your place. Arrays of them, resting on beds of ice, are lined up at the back edge of the bar: nootka, wellfleet, Cortez Island, Duxbury, more than a dozen varieties. A guy asks the shucker how he can tell if one is bad. "The smell, sir," the shucker responds incredulously. "You know right away." Duh.

When Phil arrives we order a dozen and a half, six @ hama hama, kumomoto, fanny bay; an array of sizes. I have an Italian beer, Pironi; he has a glass of Muscadet. We have cocktail sauce, plus bread and olive oil. Heaven.

Phil has been traveling a lot, becoming more discouraged with his fellow man, the defoliation of the planet, the destruction of wildlife, the murderous attacks on each other. We decide not to go there; there is enough of it each day in the print and broadcast media.

I ask him why he always suggests Lower Manhattan as a place to meet.

"It is the energy here," he answers. "I used to work up town. It had its plusses, but it didn't have . . ."

As the sentence trails off, I realize you have to be here.

We head up to the old Gansvoort Market area, along far West 14th Street for dinner and some serious crowd-watching. It takes 45 minutes to get a table at Pastis, but our wait is mollified by glasses of Sancerre at the bar. He does a steak; me penne with broccoli rabe and sausage.

Since Wall Street is the acknowledged financial capital of the world, I thought I would finally pay a visit to a place I'd read about called the Museum of American Financial History, near the foot of Broadway at number 26. One of the things I like to do, when traveling to just about anywhere, is to check out those vest-pocket museums tucked into parks, sitting on former estates or along some tree-lined street in the old section of a city, usually down by the waterfront. They are often a building with some historic significance that the local historical society fought to keep away from the developers' 'dozers. In the case of this particular Wall Street number, it was John D. Rockefeller's former Standard Oil HQ. Now affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution, this little gem showcases "the history of Wall Street, the economic miracle of capital markets, and the achievements of American businessmen and women," going back to the hay-days of Alexander Hamilton, whose statue looks like it wants to shake hands with you and cut some kind of deal, the minute you walk in the door. Recently ex-Mayor Rudy Giuliani said of the museum, it "has effectively worked to research, document, and exhibit the history and growth of our nation's economy." That seems a bit much, given its small quarters.

However, true to its vest-pocket nature, the museum did fulfill my sense that there is always a tidbit or two you can take away from a place like this. For example, the exhibit when I visited showcased the 150th anniversary of the Wells Fargo company, including maps of the company's transcon routes, original stock certificates, molds for casting gold coins and a scale for weighing the precious metal. Despite its association with the far west, Wells Fargo was founded in New York City in 1852. Interestingly, two years earlier, Mr. Henry Wells and Mr. William Fargo were two of the founders - along with a Mr. John Butterfield - of a little company called American Express. (There's got to be a "Jeopardy" segment or a Trivial Pursuit match, some day, some where, when I pull that one out of the air.) Displayed was the original Amex stock certificate with all three signatures.

On the wall adjacent to an old ticker and a teletype machine is the framed page of the New York Daily News for Oct. 25, 1929 with the headline: "BILLIONS LOST IN WALL ST. DEBACLE." On the same page, is an ad for a free book on how to invest. Wall Street, it seems, always finds a way to move on - ever upward. One notice pointed out that a seat on the New York Stock Exchange cost about $50,000 right after World War II; $2 million today.

Surprisingly, there is a lot about the Wall Street area that is amazingly tacky: the delis that look as if they couldn't possibly have passed the last Board of Health inspection; the rutted, bumped and broken street surfaces; the retailers selling cheap watches and watchbands, four belts for $10, incredibly bulbously gauche boom boxes, faux hats and T-shirts with "NYPD" or "FDNY" emblazoned on them. It does, after all, take an incredible amount of manpower to power the electronics that keep all that money moving around, and that, in turn, requires the infrastructure to cater to lower echelon employees. The top guys dine in killer-view dining rooms, atop the towers they've built, or at $100-a-person lunch spots, where the maitre d' is black-tied and knows your last name, if he wants to keep his job. I haven't been to one of those places since I had an expense account to entertain, on infrequent occasions, when I worked at Chase in the late '60s.

South Street Seaport is an almost Disneyesque tourist attraction of square-riggers at anchor at a pier before an esplanade of chain retailers slotted into ersatz nautical architecture. But the ships here, the Peking, the Wavertree and the Ambrose, once did ply ancient waters and if you do stand out on Pier 17 and look back at these masted beauties, with the skyscrapers in the background, free your mind up just a bit, Walt Whitmanesque images of a New York past replace Disneyland and get their hooks into you, with a clear indication that time may be in suspense down here.

"I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence," Whitman wrote in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." "Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,/ . . . Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and thick-stemm'd pipes of steamboats, I look'd./ . . . These and all else were to me the same as they are to you,/ I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river,/ . . . What is the count of scores or hundreds of years between us?/ Whatever it is, it avails not - distance avails not, and place avails not,/ . . . What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you -/ . . . I consider'd long and seriously of you before you were born./ . . . Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me? . . ."

It gives me a chill.

The magnificent lacework of the Brooklyn Bridge spans the misnamed East River (it's really a strait), just north of the seaport, another connection to a bygone era, the gossamer cabling clearly an engineering necessity, but an unmistakable artistic statement as well. Whitman made the river crossing frequently, finally likening it to an avenue along the continuum, whence he speaks to you from the other side of death through the eerie lines of his poem.

On my return ferry ride, in the languid, liquid light of late afternoon, we run abeam of Astoria on the Queens side of the river. I can actually sight down Hoyt Avenue, where I spent the first 23 years of my life. We motor the full length of Astoria Park. During the year I was 14, I played first base on the 114th Precinct all star team in the Police Athletic League. We won the New York City PAL Junior League Championship that year and I got the key hit in a pivotal elimination game - a triple with two men on in the 14th inning - on the ball field just over the rise sloping down to the river. And Whitman's illusionary connections to a once-lived life become my connection . . . with my own.