Tag Archives: Angel Navedo
Protected: Reaction: The Girl in the Window
As sailing season drifts away, the Manhattan Sailing School charts a course for 25 more years
Bidding farewell to sailing season proves difficult when sailors are still enjoying 70-degree days in Battery Park City, but that’s the schedule the Manhattan Sailing School abides by for decommissioning its fleet in the middle of each October.
The approaching winter looms heavily over the school, serving as a reminder to the staff and the school’s club members that their luxurious leisure can only be a seasonal thrill in the northeast. There’s storage space in New Jersey awaiting the arrival of the school’s 24 J-24 sailing boats, and an active winter schedule in place, designed to whet appetites for the next sailing season on the rippling Hudson River.
But the decommissioning of the fleet doesn’t happen without Sailing Club members first taking a Saturday to memorialize one of their own. The Bruce Hagan Memorial Regatta celebrates the life of a former club member and award-winning “Dateline NBC” producer who passed away in 1998. The money raised for the race is donated to charity.
“Every year we do a regatta to remember him,” said Emily Whipple, the school’s Club Director. “It’s usually the Saturday before the decommissioning. Our last race is in his honor, and then we break it all down the next day.”
Sailing the Hudson: Emily Whipple and the Manhattan Sailing School’s Rite of Passage
As tides change in Dennis Conner’s North Cove marina, the enduring constant in Battery Park City’s waters is the Manhattan Sailing School that Emily Whipple helps direct.
The Mermaid, an office-classroom hybrid flanked by the school’s 24 J-24 sailboats in the marina, rests in the shadow of the World Financial Center and the ascending Freedom Tower. For the last three and a half years, Whipple has stood in the center of that bobbing vessel, helping New Yorkers discover and develop their passion for sailing.
“On the weekends, we’ll teach a basic sailing course for 50 to 80 people, for a Level 1 certification,” Whipple said. “We decided to add more weekday courses, so we teach the two-day course throughout the week, too. We can teach up to 150 students a week.”
Originally located in the South Street Seaport, the Manhattan Sailing School is celebrating its silver jubilee this year. That’s 25 years of introducing enthusiastic people to life as sailors in a city where most time exhausted on the river is on crowded ferries.
Protected: Battery Park City: Neighborhood Faces Query
Battery Park City; Neighborhood Choice
There isn’t a neighborhood that embodies the revitalized spirit of this post-9/11 New York with more exuberance than Battery Park City. It offers a mixture of elegance and extravagance, without the elitist attitude of Yorkville, the clutter of Chelsea and SoHo, or the opaque atmosphere of the Upper West Side.
Battery Park City is technically Tribeca, but not really, at all. The awkward mixture of seedy shopping areas, bundled office spaces, squalid eateries, and the supercilious air of City Hall vanish when crossing the West Side Highway toward the Hudson River. The buildings, primarily residential, update the view of the New York skyline from New Jersey, effectively disguising the cracks in Old New York’s façade with modern grandeur.
That’s an adequately appropriate description for a strip of land that was constructed with excavated terrain while building the World Trade Center and Twin Towers. Because in Old New York, the manicured lawns where we picnic and the yacht harbor where we learn to sail the Hudson and the restaurants that offer views of Lady Liberty silhouetted against the sunset couldn’t exist. In Old New York, just four decades ago, Battery Park City was dilapidated piers and murky waters.
There was a vision for New York when Battery Park City was built with land where the Twin Towers once stood, and it’s that vision that drives this entire city forward as One World Trade Center ascends into the skyline.