The Circle Line

While I was on the prelinger archive site retrieving the third avenue el movie, I found a few other 1950 gems that touched upon life in KV. In this film there's just a very short glimpse of Knickerbocker Village (at 5:10). Here's a summary of the film:

This promotional film for New York's Circle Line cruise service was produced in 1955 [note the marquee for Anne Baxter's movie "Bedevilled" at :49 and the billboard for "Long John Silver" being erected on the movie theater at :55]. The production company behind this, "Paul Alley Productions", was headed by a former pioneer announcer for NBC-TV a decade before! "Douglas" Downs, the cameraman, also photographed Jackie Gleason's filmed "HONEYMOONERS" series in late '55.

The Waterfront of New York is highlighted in Philip Lopate's excellent book, "Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan" which has a chapter on Knickerbocker Village
Here's a summary of that book:
Unlike other great cities, as eminent essayist and New York devotee Lopate observes, "Manhattan is almost pathologically averse to letting you wander to the river's edge and get close enough to touch the water." In this loose circumnavigation, first up the West Side from the Battery to Washington Heights and then up the East Side from South Street Seaport to Highbridge Park, he takes the reader up close on an information-packed journey—dipping, as the particular location suggests, into memoir, history, current events, marine biology, city planning, literature, architecture, interviews, biography, films, ecology and more. Anyone who relishes the company of Whitman, Melville, both Cranes, even Sara Teasdale, among many other celebrants of the New York waterfront, will particularly enjoy the vicarious sojourn. The trek includes Chelsea Piers and the U.N., Gracie Mansion and the Brooklyn Bridge, Captain Kidd and the Gulf filling station on East 23rd Street. "Sewage and salsa," Lopate invokes in describing Riverbank State Park, and that mix of the problematic and the delightful pervades his account, "saturated with history," of the waterfront's metamorphosis from "a working port, to an abandoned, seedy no-man's-land, to a highly desirable zone of parks plus upscale retail/residential." This is a demanding book—formidable in some of its detail, complex in its broad approach. Tourists will find it enriching but only borderline useful. Its ideal reader, a New Yorker who cares as deeply as Lopate does about the waterfront as "the key to New York's destiny," will find it compelling as well as entertaining.

The Lopate piece on Knickerbocker can be found on Mr. Beller's Neighborhood (no relation)