Looking Back at the West Village Waterfront
The photographs of the West Village waterfront in our Historic Image Archive remind us just how dramatic a transformation that area has undergone over the past several decades. Photographer James Cuebas, a Lower East Side native, captured on film the Hudson River piers in Greenwich Village in the late 1970s and 1980s. His photographs in our Historic Image Archive take an incisive look at these sites, which were in a state of decay at the time and sometimes even dangerous. At the same time, their emptiness and isolation provided a means of escape for many city residents.
Cuebas captured these two people shown above relaxing on the pier in 1986. He didn’t indicate which pier, but this appears to be approximately Bethune Street based upon the buildings visible in the image. John T. Krawchuk took similar pictures of the area approximately ten years later, which can also be found in our Historic Image Archive. Krawchuk’s photographs are marked with specific descriptions of each location, as he was studying the waterfront for his graduate thesis on the preservation of the West Village waterfront. Cueba’s photographs provide a different type of context; several of his photos contain people or show the interiors of some abandoned buildings that once stood on the piers.
From the beginning of the twentieth century through the 1950s, the West Village piers were a hub for maritime shipping. As new transportation technologies emerged and local industries slowed down, the piers became obsolete and the area fell into a decades-long period of blight.
During the 1970s and 1980s, walking onto the piers on the West Village waterfront was a great risk, often illegal due to the condemned buildings, and yet for many, done in pursuit of freedom. While the lack of development and safe infrastructure led crime to thrive in the area, it inadvertently provided a haven for LGBTQ+ people to commune with less fear of being ‘caught’ by police or homophobic members of the public. Members of the community gathered on the pier to socialize, have sex, and create art. Residents of the neighborhood from all walks of life would brave the crumbling piers just to find a place of refuge, to be surrounded by the water instead of the city.
While Krawchuk was researching his thesis in the early 1990s, the city was taking a more serious look at a path to effective urban renewal for the West Side piers. On September 8, 1998, the Hudson River Park Act was passed, and construction for the new park began the following year. As of 2024, the area is nearly unrecognizable, with broad, open spaces, public sculptures, plenty of seating, and solid pier designs with materials that can withstand the water. It is a case of preservation in which the structures were not the most important element, but rather the potential of the space that community members had found, long before a new park made it official.