The NYPD have a Scuba Team, the FDNY a Marine Division, and plenty of boats provide tours of the harbor; likewise the Department of Sanitation is just as dutiful to the waterways of NYC. Much of the city’s garbage is still transported on barges, an iconic sight in the East River when driving over the Brooklyn Bridge, making sure to stay in the right lane for the FDR exit.

Down the block at 14 Catherine Slip, in 1891, was the East River Hotel, a notorious flophouse where Carrie Brown - known as “Shakespeare” in the dives of the Fourth Ward because of a talent for reciting the monologues of Ophelia and Lady Macbeth in exchange for free quaffs from the gin bottle - was strangled and eviscerated in the grisly style of Jack the Ripper. After an overzealous investigation and a heavily-biased trial, the wrong man went to prison for the murder, and was released in 1902 when it was determined the killer was a printing materials dealer from North Jersey.

Middle-income “machine age” housing built with New Deal funding in the 1930s, this housing complex was an early sign of superblock developments that characterized both slum clearance and modular high-rise towers. Named as if intended as a theme park of living history where actors might portray Dutch burghers with pipes and felt hats made of beaver pelts, it was reported in 1950 that convicted Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg paid $51 a month for an apartment here in the 1940s.

No longer viewable from the FDR, this building is like a nondescript brick Le Corbusier cooperative structure ribboned with unionist Art Deco touches. Such a building was the physical manifestation of the radical leftist ideologies that induced the synapses of the Lower East Side back in the day - the building was sponsored by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Today the view from the FDR is obscured by the high-rises of Cooperative Village.

These waters feature in "Knickerbocker’s History of New York," by Washington Irving, when early Dutch settlers travel from Jersey City (Communipaw back then) into Upper NY Bay in a small tub-like vessel. Irving employs the book’s signature mock-epic literary device: “... they swept up the strait, vulgarly called the East River. And here the rapid tide which courses through this strait, seizing on the gallant tub in which Commodore Van Kortlandt had embarked, hurried it forward with a velocity unparalleled in a Dutch boat, navigated by Dutchmen; insomuch that the good commodore, who had all his life long been accustomed only to the drowsy navigation of canals, was more than ever convinced that they were in the hands of some supernatural power, and that the jolly porpoises were towing them to some fair haven that was to fulfill all their wishes and expectations.”

The construction of the L train in the 1910s made it very difficult at the time to travel to Williamsburg for shows at Brooklyn Bowl and movies at Nitehawk Cinema and pizza and garlic knots with side sauce at Anna Maria on Bedford and North 7th.

A glance to Waterside Plaza from the FDR going 40 MPH on a sunny day may be one of the closest things to actual time travel back to 1980s New York City.

This Art Brut monolith designed by I.M. Pei might have been inspired by the urban architecture on planet Tatooine in the very first Star Wars movie.

This swath of riverfront is empty and barren today, but the ghostly energy at the site contrasts very interestingly with the zombified characterlessness of the black and gold egolith of Trump World Tower just a couple blocks north. The Con Ed plant further south along the FDR on 14th Street is now the gargantuan power strip to which the city is wired. These industrial scapes of architecture and vacancy have the effect of works of art by nature of their juxtapositions along this Pole Position video game of speed, traffic, sightseeing, and history.

There are not too many places in NYC where one can drive at high speed underneath a building and still remain outdoors. Under this campus is the only one I can think of.

The P. Lorillard Tobacco Factory in this photo is now the headquarters of Sotheby’s, where auctioneers light up bidding wars at prices higher than cigarette company payout settlements. Just south on York Avenue, the Weill Cornell Medical complex is today an architectural hybrid of Tudor City and the Con Ed Substation at 419 East 36th Street; it is also home to the Weill Cornell Medical Center Archives, a repository of historical and institutional medical materials that is uncommon in the field of special collections. Researchers who inquire at the Milstein Division reference desk for old medical or hospital records often find none exist. This collection is a rare alternative.

Strange that the city would name anything in Manhattan after the man who, in an 1823 letter, described New York as “a Cloacina of all the depravities of human nature” - using an outdated word for either a sewer, or part of a mammal’s digestive tract.

There is something that seems to defy the laws of physics in engineering a bridge that takes the traverser into three different places. It may be ironic that the bridge was renamed for former NY Senator Robert F. Kennedy, since westbound passengers exit onto East 125th Street, itself named for Martin Luther King, Jr., whom RFK, as Attorney General, allowed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to secretly wiretap after suspicions that Dr. King harbored Communist sympathies.

By now the FDR yields to the Harlem River Drive, which is itself a whole other tour that spans between the Triborough Bridge and the George Washington Bridge. Up here the river is almost streamlike and the short crossing at Third Avenue might hark back to those kissing bridges of colonial Manhattan where lovers canoodled over waterways banked by oyster middens.