The Complexities Of Multiple Buildings

A Wurts Brothers photo that was, for me, covered in déjà vu:

It’s titled “Tenth Avenue – West 15th Street (Looking North)” so there was no question that those bridges over the street were part of the old New York Central freight line – now the High Line park – but I was having a hard time placing the multiple bridges present. The stated location made it obvious, per this snippet from the Open Street map:

The slightly-bent diagonal line running across Tenth Avenue from Hearth on the High Line is the two-level bridge in the center of the photo, the wide bridge of the High Line crossing 15th Street just east of Tenth is out of frame off to the right, and the bridge across Tenth just north of 16th Street is in the background of the photo. Here’s a 1940 view of the building on the right from diagonally across the intersection of Tenth and 15th, with the double bridge on the left and the 15th Street bridge on the right:

The why of this complex is also easily explained with a map, but not a current one. The Chelsea Market is a lot of fun – both a tourist attraction and a place for NYers – but that’s not what that huge building was constructed as. The 1940 photo had a hint. Here’s a 1923 map:

The National Biscuit Company – AKA Nabisco – had the full-block Chelsea Market building, which appears to be eight separate buildings cobbled together, as well as a full-block building on the short block to the west (facing the Hudson River) and three joined buildings on the block to the south. I’ve worked on similar ad hoc industrial complexes, in NYC and elsewhere, and typically the buildings are assigned numbers other than their addresses to make it easier to talk about the flow of materials through the site. The two-level bridge’s lower level was a branch of the freight railroad, for deliveries or pick-ups at the west building on block 687; the main freight line served the two National Biscuit complexes east of Tenth Avenue, and the two-level bridge’s upper bridge was for easy internal passage between the main complex and the west building.

In my opinion, the survival of all this infrastructure long after its original use is gone is a great thing for the city.