The view from the Promenade near my longtime home in Brooklyn Heights may be New York’s finest. The city and its waterfront snap into perspective from across the river. Manhattan’s proud towers cluster, then crash toward the water’s edge, their juncture fragmented into a splayed collar of docks and piers, cafés, and bubble-topped tennis courts. From this distance, the city looms whole and iconic, the culmination of heroic materialism. The architecture takes your breath away.

Just at my feet, the riverfront is changing, morphing before our eyes from a gritty, on-the-waterfront industrial zone into Brooklyn Bridge Park. Exit, Brando; hello, Mommy. Day after day, I follow the changes at the former docklands: Pier One, from a flat cipher into a rolling meadow and hillside; down the East River, from cargo containers to howling kids hanging from the swings and climbing gyms of Pier Six. On balmy evenings this past summer at the newly opened Pier One, a soprano from the Metropolitan Opera, Susanna Phillips, held an audience of thousands silently enthralled as her arias carried a hundred feet up the bluff to my home, where her lilting voice reached an editor and his wife perched above, conveyed to another plane. I was there.