Through the 20th Century, New Yorkers popped the buttons off their vests boasting with civic pride about such iconic treasures as Central Park, Wall Street, Fifth Avenue and the Theater District, among many others.
Ask about the waterfront, though, and you might have found them quickly changing the subject. As chronicled in film and books — from Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront to the Nathan Ward crime classic Dark Harbor — a lot of river’s-edge real estate served as a brutish backdrop for vice, criminality and depravity.
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