“The way it was: Tom Fox’s photos recall pre-Hudson River Park waterfront” by Lincoln Anderson is a great photo essay about the west shore of Manhattan before the current park was built. The park was built in stages in the 80s, 90s, and 00s, after the Westway plan died in 1985.
The original docks in Manhattan were on the East River, which is slightly more sheltered than the Hudson and slightly less likely to freeze. As ships got bigger and and the amount of traffic grew, most of the piers were moved to the Hudson shore, which by the mid-1800s contained miles of piers, and warehouses of various types just inland. After World War II, as passengers switched to air travel and freight switched to trucks and container ships, the Hudson piers were gradually abandoned. West Street and Twelfth Avenue formed a continuous and very wide street along the piers, with a relatively small part of the street devoted to north-south traffic and the rest used for parking to service the piers.
This tangle was made worse by the construction, starting in 1929, of the elevated West Side Highway. The elevated structure was never properly maintained and was closed in pieces starting in 1973 after a section of roadbed collapsed. The Westway project was supposed to replace the elevated highway, the abandoned piers, and the now too-wide street with a boulevard and strip park at grade above a highway tunnel. The boulevard and park portions were eventually built after the grand plan failed.
Now that the background is done: the photo essay shows the abandoned piers and old wide street after the elevated highway removal, the abandoned highway, various abandoned buildings along the route, and the beginning of the new park. It’s a form of ruin porn, I guess, showing one of the last large-scale unoccupied pieces of land in Manhattan.
