New York’s perimeter, where the land meets the rivers and the harbor, has always been the city’s beating heart.

The waterfront has morphed over the centuries, from booming port to waste ground to what it is today, a shifting, contested zone of new parks, ferry piers, aging public housing, infrastructure and upscale development. Its history is the history of New York — just as the water is the city’s sixth borough, toward which, as Phillip Lopate once wrote in “Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan,” New Yorkers often look for “inner peace.”

Twenty-five years ago, the architect Deborah Berke settled with her family at Gracie Square on the Upper East Side. Ms. Berke founded Deborah Berke Partners, and now divides her time between the Manhattan-based firm and Yale University, where she is dean of the School of Architecture.

With her husband, Peter McCann, an orthopedic surgeon in the city, she has long made it a habit to stroll the East River promenade, starting around leafy Carl Schurz Park, where the better part of a century ago Robert Moses, the city’s omnipotent planning czar, ordered up a deck to be built atop the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive.