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There are certain things a savvy New Yorker tends to avoid: Statue of Liberty paperweights, chain restaurant pizza, "The Addams Family."
Another is the Circle Line: the original three-hour tour, ferrying excursion-boat passengers down the Hudson, past the Statue of Liberty, up the East River and back, taking in the entire island of Manhattan at a camera-friendly distance.
A pity - because Circle Line has something to offer locals, too.
Sure, it's custom-made for tourists, for the sensible reason that it's one of the few ways a visitor can get his bearings on an island of 23 square miles and 1.5 million people.
But Circle Line also provides a thing, commonplace to our grandparents, that is now nearly extinct: a boat's-eye view of New York.
"It's a great perspective," says Kenneth Corcoran of Closter, who has been with the company since 1983. He'll be piloting the Brooklyn, one of six Circle Line sightseeing boats (the others are the Manhattan, the Queens and the Circle Line XII, XVI and XVII), on this particular July Friday.
"This is Manhattan from a different angle," he says. "I always tell people to see it this way."
It's easy for today's bridge-and-tunnelers to forget that New York is an island. But as late as 1931, when the Fort Lee ferry was replaced by the George Washington Bridge,...