On Tuesday, we took a boating tour all the way around the island of Manhattan.

(That’s not the boat we did it in. It’s only a cool-looking boat that got in the snapshot I was taking of the Brooklyn Bridge. I took photos of the boat we went in, but they were really boring, so I used this one instead. Artistic license. Deal with it.)

About a month before we left for New York City, I was paging through The New York Times when I read about a guided tour of New York that focused on the architecture of the buildings making up the skyline. The advantage to doing it in a boat that sailed up the East River and down the Hudson was that you could see the skyline at a distance and gain an appreciation of how architecture tried, or sometimes failed, to design buildings that compliment their surroundings.

The boat we rode in was a replica of the kind of passenger boats that used to ferry people back and forth across the rivers around New York a hundred years ago. To catch it, we had to walk from our hotel in the heart of Chelsea to the piers along the shore of the Hudson. Most of the piers along this stretch of the river were demolished years ago, and the few that were still standing appeared to be derelict, except for Chelsea Piers. The piers used to be where the luxury liners of the White Star Line and Cunard Line docked in the 20s and 30s. Four of the piers have been rebuilt into a sort of community center where you can play golf, drop off your kids for gym class, stop by for a beer at the Chelsea Brewing Company, or catch a boat to sail around the island.

Our guide, an architect named John from the American Institute of Architects, sort of rocked my world when he referred to New York City as an archipelago city. I’ve known for years that Manhattan’s an island, but somehow it escaped me that, of the other four boroughs that make up the city of New York, only the Bronx is on the mainland. Brooklyn and Queens are on Long Island, and Staten Island is, duh, an island.

We sailed south from Chelsea Piers on the Hudson River into New York Harbor, far enough to take us past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. I hate to have to say something as cliched as this, but the statue looks so small! I’m surprised more than ten people can get into it at a time. And John pointed out an interesting fact about the pedestal the statue’s mounted on: it’s modeled after a fortress. America’s shining beacon of freedom is penned up within the stone walls of a reinforced battlement. The ironies of our country’s metaphors never cease to amaze.

The tour continued up the East River from the harbor. It was just about this time that it started to rain, but luckily the boat we were on was boxed in on all sides by plexiglass. We spent about three hours sailing all the way up the East River past Harlem and back down the Hudson, following the sites as we went. An interesting part of the tour (interesting to a nerd like me) was looking at all the different kinds of bridges we sailed under as we went. And the Palisades along the New Jersey shore looked strangely primeval after being surrounded by skyscrapers for the better part of two hours.