cover image Seaport: New York's Vanished Waterfront

Seaport: New York's Vanished Waterfront

. Smithsonian Books, $34.95 (181pp) ISBN 978-1-58834-163-1

Here's the perfect companion volume to Phillip Lopate's Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (Forecasts, Feb. 9). A pictorial celebration of New York's maritime heritage, the book reproduces more than 100 black-and-white photographs from the vast collection of vintage photos and negatives that the Frederick Lewis News Agency bequeathed to the Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Va., starting in 1955. Chief among the photographers represented in the collection was British emigre Edwin Levick, who with his assistants took pictures of many New York scenes in the early 1900s but seemed to have a special fondness for the waterfront. As Thomas Moore, the senior curator of photography at the Mariners' Museum, observes in his preface,""Levick's images capture the energy of a confident nation unflinchingly marching into a new and promising century."" Not simply a distillation of Waterfront, Lopate's introductory essay,""The Port of New York in Its Heyday,"" pays ample tribute to Levick and the other photographers who recorded a now-vanished world a century ago.