Many, Many Changes

From the Architectural League in 1905, via the New York Public Library scrapbooks, a proposal for an elevated highway and new “dignified” piers in the Hudson River, off Greenwich Village. This is one of those cases where the history is reasonably straightforward and easy to trace, it just sounds made-up.

As I’ve discussed before, New York has a four-hundred-year history of filling in at the river edges to create more land. That couldn’t continue forever, and in the late nineteenth century that stoppable force ran into an immoveable object: the Army Corps of Engineers. They set the pierhead lines (which define the permissible outboard edges of piers) in navigable waterways, and the city had gone as far as it could go. The original Commissioners’ Plan for the street grid had twelve avenues running north south; there had been so much landfill that Thirteenth Avenue had been laid out. By the time this map was made in 1895, the piers at the north end of Greenwich Village, just south of where the west shore of Manhattan takes a bend, had been reduced to stubs, crushed between the immoveable pierhead line and the landfill pushing west:

This might have been tolerated except for an unrelated change: steamships were getting bigger. And they were getting bigger rapidly, as the technology of steel hulls and marine turbine engines matured. But none of the old piers (such as piers 39 to 45) could be extended further into the river. The obvious, and I’m sure painful, answer was to remove landfill and re-shrink the land. Here’s a 1904 map of the same area:

You can ignore the “Marginal Way” right next to the piers. That was an apron for loading and unloading, not a through street. But note how the line of West Street, which was on the river south of West 11th Street but a block inland north of there, is now on the river all the way to 22nd Street. The northern portion of that line has been named Eleventh Avenue, and the old grid-aligned Eleventh is gone, along with everything west of the West Street line. The only exception is the tight grid of the West Washington Market, turned into a small peninsula. That peninsula survives today, with a tiny piece of Thirteenth Avenue at its western edge.

So the pier proposal became a reality, allowing New York to continue serving the bigger passenger liners. Pier 54 was used by the Cunard line, including RMS Mauritania and RMS Lusitania; Pier 59 was used by the White Star line, including RMS Olympic, and, if things had gone differently, RMS Titanic. The elevated highway proposal waited a few decades before re-emerging as the West Side Highway.

As ships continued to get bigger, the same cycle repeated uptown, leading to the construction of the bigger Passenger Ship Terminal at piers 84 to 94 by excavating into the west side and giving Twelfth Avenue an inward curve. The downtown piers were eventually abandoned for maritime use; some were demolished and turned into a piece of the new Hudson River Park; some were turned into the Chelsea Piers recreation complex.