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in thirty days or so I received my pay- ment." The only uncollectible was a friend, who is still a friend anyway -- "a paradox that speaks to the relative expec- tations of ordinary friendship compared to those of honor in New York Harbor."

Picture Perfect?

All the book's photos are in black-and- white, or more precisely, grayscale, rich in tone like the film originals of the 1930s and ' 40s when most were taken. Few spreads of text are without at least one comely illustration, and many are full- page. Although the text covers the harbor from eleven hundred million years ago on up to 2005, when the book was published, the majority of photos come from a small- er slice of time. A few go back to the stere- oscope era, with Anthony photos of the 1850s or ' 60s, but most hover around the

WPA (Works Progress Administration) era. Gordon Parks is among the talents that recurs through the book, having been funded in the late 1940s for photos of life aboard. Mr. Parks would be the featured name in the photo credits, though plenty of work by other photographers of the era is present, all up to high standards.

Perhaps because of the photographers themselves, or the type of equipment they were using, there's a formality and dis- tance between the viewer and subject, at least with some of the human ones pic- tured aboard, that would look stilted in photography today. Cameras since then have gotten quicker, closer, maybe even more expected, so the result in this book is a certain stylized nostalgia of those years. "Adele, the author's wife, did much of the image researching," said Steve

Maikowski, Director of New York Uni- versity Press, when we called to inquire how a work of so many honorable quali- ties saw light of day, in a world where so much gets shrugged-off. "The researches revealed that at the University of

Louisville were over 300,000 prints donated by EXXON, some taken under the WPA. That really deepened the illus- trations. We said they are so sensual — let's think of a 9x12-in. format, do it oblong, and let's put in more of these beautiful photographs. The project grew based on the illustrations."

What it had grown from was a proposal by the author, not yet a finished manu- script, but "I had wanted to grow our list of regional history," said Mr. Maikowski. "This one came across my desk and it struck a chord. I'd met a former New York harbor tug captain, and over a beer asked him about the proposal. He took it away to look at, and said this is really good work.

That was the first litmus test — this guy knows his stuff."

With the discovery of the collection of photos came the decision that "we wanted to make a more beatiful book and I told designer Charles Hamed to lay out each page individually, as if every page is part of a coffee table art book. I decided to go out and raise some money to pay for the more significant fixed costs, like the very high-quality scans of the photos," which with a reasonably small endowment could keep the initial press run of 4,000 at a rea- sonable retail price -- the publisher's web- site quotes $39.95, although Amazon offers it at $26.37. It probably compli-

March, 2006 • MarineNews 25

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