Culture June 9, 2010

From the boozy, crusading priest in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, to Malcolm “Mike” Johnson, the New York Sun’s journalist-hero, to death by Murder Inc.’s ice pick, the New York City waterfront’s native criminality has been both root and branch of many enduring urban tropes. These ideas have by now been civilized, obscuring the fact that not long ago a reporter could write that the waterfront “produces more murders per square foot than does any other section of the country.”