The recently opened Greenwich Village stretch of Hudson River Park, together with the modest but beguiling beginnings of Brooklyn Bridge Park, in DUMBO, offers a tantalizing glimpse of the possible future of the city’s waterfronts as places for people, recreation, and contemplation.

In addition to these are several other waterfront parks and esplanades that beckon the summer visitor. New York once made heavy commercial use of its waterfronts. Indeed, the waterfronts were the economic lifeblood of the port city. Shipyards and docks, warehouses, railroad tracks and car float operations, and all manner of noisome industry once defined the city’s riverfronts. For a variety of reasons, that phase of the city’s economy has passed. Major freight shipping has left Manhattan and Brooklyn for New Jersey and elsewhere. Waterfront railroads are a dim memory. Only weed-covered rails embedded in Brooklyn pavements and Manhattan’s ghostly “High Line” remind us of the engines’ roar as freight cars rolled along the riverbanks.

The decline of waterfront commerce opened up new possibilities, from residential development to parks – or some combination thereof.

Not all of our waterfront access is of recent vintage, however. Robert Moses, from the 1930s through the 1950s, brought New Yorkers closer to the rivers. One of his masterstrokes was his 1930s expansion of Riverside Park. As originally built in the 19th century, the park drew up far short of the riverbank, separated from it by the New York Central Railroad’s tracks. When Moses built the Henry Hudson Parkway, he at one stroke created a new roadway and drew people nearer the water.

He encased the railroad tracks in a great concrete box, the top of which became a long pedestrian promenade with plantings and benches – indeed, the very thing that occurs to most people when they think of Riverside Park. To its west, he built the new parkway, but he did so in such a way as to allow people to pass beneath it to new riverfront esplanades. At 79th Street he built for the parkway a massive traffic rotary that also serves as a pedestrian rotary, if you will, enabling access to a marina, where a cafe, bobbing houseboats, and river breezes form a setting where several generations of New Yorkers have found romance.

A few years later, on the East Side, Moses built the FDR Drive. It included the brilliant redesign of Carl Schurz Park, which Moses magnificently cantilevered over the drive. That park is one of New York’s underrated gems. The best way to get to its waterfront esplanade is via 86th Street. One enters from East End Avenue onto an allee of trees toward a great stone wall that blocks one’s passage and view. On either side of the wall rise curving stairs. Symmetrical curving stairs are one of architecture’s immemorially pleasing forms, and these beckon upward in breathless anticipation. The anticipation pays off as one nears the top, and the river and Hell Gate loom thrillingly into view as one alights upon the promenade.

In the early 1950s, Moses built the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. In its Brooklyn Heights stretch, Moses created a promenade cantilevered over the expressway and the waterfront docks, which at that time still bustled with freighters. As at Carl Schurz Park, the Brooklyn Heights Promenade does not so much bring us into contact with the water as allow us the sense of floating above the water.

Next time you’re there, look not out but down from the railing. Those old piers no longer serve ships. Rather, they contain warehouses – which could be anywhere. Such thoughts gave rise some years ago to the idea that Brooklyn might build a magnificent waterfront park. In its approved design, by the landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh & Associates, Brooklyn Bridge Park will extend from the Manhattan Bridge on the north to Atlantic Avenue on the south. Progress has not been as rapid as originally hoped, but it does appear all systems are go.

What’s more, a tantalizing bit of the park has recently been built, and it already ranks as one of the waterfront wonders of New York. This teaser is at the foot of DUMBO’s Main Street, between the Manhattan Bridge to the north and the pre-existing Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park to the south. When we hear “state park,” we may think of thousands of acres of virgin Adirondack wilderness. Brooklyn’s waterfront state park is rather different. Its name comes from the Empire Stores, the austerely characterful 19th-century brick warehouses that form the park’s backdrop.

The park is but a small lawn, which resulted in the 1970s not from any positive desire to reclaim a bit of vacant industrial waterfront (once traversed by the Jay Street Connecting Railroad) but rather from some influential Brooklyn Heights residents calling in favors to forestall the city’s planned relocation to this site of the Fort Greene Meat Market, which then stood on the site of the Atlantic Center Mall. (The meat market ended up instead in Sunset Park.) For years, the state park wasn’t the most kempt greenery in the city, yet it never lacked for majesty – for how could it? The views are better than those from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, because the state park comes right to the water. And with the Brooklyn Bridge looming overhead on one side, and the Manhattan Bridge on the other, it would be hard for a park to fail. Yet for years the isolation of DUMBO meant that few people visited the park.

This has changed gradually. Today the state park is more crowded with people than ever, and looks better than ever. It shall be incorporated – for all intents and purposes already is incorporated – into Brooklyn Bridge Park. The Brooklyn Bridge Park teaser to the state park’s south, though, is another deal altogether. Here, on the site of a parking lot, has arisen – with shockingly little publicity – a tiny yet beguiling park like no other in the city. Paths with benches overlook formations of boulders tumbling to the water. Here, as in few other spots in the city save for its beaches, one may dangle one’s naked foot in the water. Adjacent to this little park is one of the winsomest children’s playgrounds in the city, with equipment charmingly designed in nautical motifs. This playground, too, is formally part of Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Manhattan’s answer to Brooklyn Bridge Park is Hudson River Park, on the West Side. The West Side had two great esplanades – that built by Moses in Riverside Park, and Battery Park City’s, begun in the 1980s. I know that Battery Park City has its detractors (I’m not one of them), yet do I remember how everyone was thrilled by that first stretch of its esplanade, south from the World Financial Center Plaza to South Cove Park, when it opened in the 1980s. Soon thereafter, the waterfront parks of Battery Park City were extended to the south, as Wagner Park, and to the north, as Rockefeller Park. Rockefeller Park shall continue northward into Hudson River Park. The idea is that, eventually, Hudson River Park will extend all the way to Riverside Park.

The recently completed Greenwich Village part of Hudson River Park is proving a smashing success as the first part of Hudson River Park to emerge from a provisional to a final form. Three newly built piers jut impressively outward at Christopher Street, Perry Street, and Horatio Street, perpendicular to a continuous landscaped esplanade fronting a lawn that rolls back from the riverfront.

In the 1970s, the urbanist William H. Whyte made influential studies of what attracts people to – and repels them from – public spaces. We see his recommendations embodied in the redesigned Bryant Park, in such features as handsome landscaping that clearly demarcates the space yet doesn’t divorce it from its surrounding streets; provision of kempt restrooms and places to get something to eat or drink; movable, as opposed to fixed, seating; and lawn. Such places succeed, Whyte said, because in cities, people are attracted to other people.

The Village piers embody many of the Whyte precepts. I would list the features of a successful waterfront space as involving not merely an outlook upon the water but as intimate a relation to the water as possible; provision of shade; lawns suited to sunbathing; gustatory and rest-room amenities; interesting or beautiful design elements; views out across the water and even inland; and proximity to interesting or beautiful neighborhoods. All such features may help to draw people: people who may wish solitary watery contemplation; people who may wish to watch other people; groups enjoying a picnic; trysting couples; families with frolicking toddlers – all in equal measure, accommodated in equal comfort.

And long piers are always nice. Christopher Street’s juts 800 feet (longer than the Woolworth Building is tall), and from its end it’s hard to imagine more magnificent Hudson vistas from Manhattan. The pier also has a central strip of lawn, sun tents, and movable chairs.

In the summertime, cities may come alive when such spaces beckon. And at long last, such spaces have become, as they shall increasingly become, a civilizing feature of the New York scene.