That’s another great color photograph from the Detroit Publishing collection, taken in 1901 and showing the intersection of Liberty and West Streets, looking north. West Street faces the Hudson River, so all the buildings on the left are piers or the headhouses for piers.
There’s a lot going on here, and not just the insane traffic jam in the street, although that’s a good place to start. Before the invention of shipping containers, which basically turned freight into very-large-scale parcel post, freight was moved as what is today called “break-bulk” cargo, i.e., individual containers based on the content. Nails, for example, were shipped in barrels. So all of those heavily-laden horse carts aren’t people moving house, they’re picking up or delivering freight to the piers. We’ve got barrels, bales, wood crates, and in the far lower left, a horse cart loaded with steel beams, reddish-brown from their layer of red-lead paint.
The two buildings on the immediate left – the one with multiple gables and a tall flagpole, and the one with multiple pinnacle roofs, are the head houses to four piers, belonging to the Central Railroad of New Jersey and the Pennsylvania Railroad, respectively. Neither railroad had any trackage in Manhattan, although the CRNNJ has a helpful sign calling the piers a “passenger station.” This all comes down to the city’s geography. The Hudson is more than a mile wide at lower Manhattan, just before it merges into the harbor, so even though most of the railroad traffic in the country was to the west, there was no easy way to go there. The New York Central entered Manhattan from the north, across the much narrower Harlem River, and took a slightly circuitous (but almost flat, and so fast) route north and then west; the Long Island Railroad served the commuter and farm traffic to the east, on Long Island’s huge cul de sac; and the New Haven served areas to the north and east, i.e. New England. All the other railroads converging on New York, including the CRNNJ, the Pennsylvania, the Erie, the Lackawanna, the Lehigh, and the Susquehanna, ended in New Jersey and operated ferries, for both people and freight, to Manhattan. Right around the time this photo was taken, the managers of the Pennsylvania made the decision to build a tunnel system and a station in Manhattan, but it was a huge effort even for the richest railroad in the country. None of the others tried.
The tall building on the right, red brick over a rough stone base, was the Central Building, constructed by the CRRNJ and containing their New York offices. That strange thing that looks like scaffold up around the eighth floor was part of the building, as some kind of odd cornice, but there also appears to be a hanging scaffold below. The building was 12 years old in 1901, so facade repairs? A window cleaner?
The bridge over the street ran from the Pennsylvania pier headhouse (which is flying the railroad’s flag, with a keystone symbol) to a small building on the east side of West Street used by the railroad. As this picture suggests, crossing West Street was likely to be dangerous, slow, and manure-filled, so the railroad was providing ease for its passengers. However, there’s a group of people crossing just below the bridge, and the brightly-colored clothing suggests it’s mostly women. Maybe they preferred dealing with traffic to the bridge.
Finally, note the many-armed poles further up the street, past the bridge. The combination of multiple competing telegraph systems, multiple competing telephone systems, and Edison’s new power lines, led to the installation of poles like this all over lower Manhattan in the 1880s. It was a mess that the city government was grappling with regulating when the Blizzard of 1888 changed the issue by downing a lot of the wires. By 1901, most of the wires were underground, and the way that the line of poles simply stops suggests they were abandoned and waiting to be removed.
So the combination of a difficult-to-cross river and a bad snowstorm helped create the view in this photo.
