Wheeling.(The Talk of the Town)

It's possible for a New Yorker to go weeks without glimpsing a river or a harbor, and to lose track of the fact that Manhattan is both an island and a seaport. This misapprehension is inconceivable, however, for a user of the Waterfront Greenway, a well-marked thirty-two-mile route for walkers, runners, skaters, cyclists, and other non-motorized travellers. It follows the Hudson, Harlem, and East Rivers around Manhattan's perimeter, with occasional inland detours (across Dyckman Street, way up beyond the Cloisters; along the spine of central Harlem; around a couple of dozen blocks near the United Nations). The Greenway is especially well suited to bicyclists, who, if they are moderately fit and don't blow a tire on a broken apricot-brandy bottle, can cover the entire distance in a single leisurely morning or afternoon. Biking the Manhattan shoreline turns the city inside out, and gives the cyclist firsthand answers to questions that often stump even lifelong residents, such as: are there any decent places in Manhattan to go rock climbing, and what the heck do they keep under the Henry Hudson Parkway? Perhaps you yourself rode the Greenway on a recent, spectacular Friday afternoon, beginning and ending at the Battery, where, when you started, a man wearing a broad-brimmed hat was baiting a fishhook with a half-dollar-size crab, which he had selected from a joint-compound bucket at his feet. If so, here are a few of the other things you may have noticed along the way:

Helicopters and small airplanes flying above the Upper Bay like dragonflies above a swimming pool.

A man wearing a black wetsuit and an orange life jacket, bobbing in the Hudson about fifty feet from shore, using various hand tools to affix four large pink plastic petals to a rotting wooden piling. According to another man, who was standing onshore and holding a walkie-talkie, the man in the water was "installing prototypes for an art project, to see how they make it through the winter."

The Parthenon-like and perhaps spectacularly luxurious colonnaded rooftop outdoor lounging facility of Larry Flynt's Hustler Club, at Fifty-first and Twelfth.

A guy who had been shooting hoops alone on a court underneath the West Side Highway asking another guy, who had been shooting hoops alone on a different court, two courts away, for a little help in retrieving his ball, which had become stuck between the rim and the backboard, and then also asking, "Wanna play?," and then the two of them ...