Shorelines of History: Preserving Greenwich Village’s Waterfront
From New Amsterdam to New York City, the shores of Manhattan and the surrounding harbor — one of the best natural harbors in the world — connected a fledgling colonial port to a global economy. As our great cosmopolitan metropolis grew through the nineteenth century, it remained a maritime city, becoming the world’s busiest port by the start of the 20th century. Today, the Port of New York remains one of the great port cities of the world, but activity is focused in New Jersey and Brooklyn. Manhattan’s waterfront has been resurrected at a place of leisure. But, as many know, the transition was a difficult one.
In the second half of the 20th century, Manhattanites seemed to forget that their city was built as a maritime city. The city’s shoreline, once the very hub of economic activity from trade to travel, had decayed and for most was a place to avoid.
In an effort to reacquaint New Yorkers with their maritime heritage and to help bring awareness to the efforts to preserve it, in September 1990 Village Preservation (then still known as the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation) opened the exhibition “Greenwich Village on the Water’s Edge: The Survival of a Neighborhood.”
Co-sponsored by the Municipal Art Society and based upon the book The Architecture of the Greenwich Village Waterfront, edited by our then-executive director Regina M. Kellerman, the exhibition was held at the Urban Center Galleries. Open from September 26th to October 25th, it included a large-scale model of the Greenwich Village Waterfront, which measured 20 by 8 feet.
The waterfront had been excluded from the Greenwich Village Historic District, designated in 1969. At a preview for the exhibition, playwright John Guare read selections by Herman Melville, who worked as a Customs inspector near the Gansevoort Markets. The important maritime historical connections alone are impressive: the launching of Robert Fulton’s Clermont, the arrival of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Eastern, and docking locations for Lusitania and, had she not sunk, the Titanic. In sum, the Village waterfront has an equally long and rich history as the rest of the Village, especially as New York’s passenger shipping hub, as a market district, a site of industrial innovation, and an enclave for artists and LGBTQ+ life.
While we can’t take you back to the 1990 exhibit, to appreciate what the waterfront looked and felt like at the time of the exhibition’s opening, you can take a look at our Historic Image Archive, specifically the John T. Krawchuk Collection: The West Village Waterfront in the Early 1990s.
These images were donated by John T. Krawchuk, who photodocumented the Meatpacking District, Far West Village, and Hudson River waterfront in the early 1990s as part of his Columbia University graduate thesis in Historic Preservation completed in 1995. The full thesis is entitled “On Edge: The West Village Waterfront.”
This project took place at a pivotal time in the neighborhood’s history. The contemporary removal of disused sections of the High Line south of Gansevoort Street and the conversion of the abandoned Hudson River piers and waterfront to parkland coincided with and helped spur dramatic gentrification and development in the area, which had been a gritty backwater for decades. That process accelerated greatly in the years that followed those captured in these pictures, which show buildings and scenes which have since disappeared or been utterly transformed.
John’s thesis, along with the earlier work of Regina Kellerman, which the 1990 exhibition was based upon, helped document and highlight the architecture and history of the waterfront blocks initially left out of the 1969 Greenwich Village Historic District. Their work contributed to renewed interest in these historic yet undervalued and undesignated blocks, resulting in the designation of the Gansevoort Market Historic District in 2003 which Village Preservation proposed and fought for. Our Historic Image Archive hosts numerous additional images and collections highlighting the waterfront through the decades, such as from the 1970s and 80s in the James Cuebas Collection.
Today the waterfront is also part of the Hudson River Park, that stretches from 59th Street to Battery Park. It has been utterly transformed and once again made accessible to New Yorkers, now as a site of leisure and enjoyment. As in 1990, Village Preservation continues to highlight the importance of the waterfront as an integral part of our neighborhoods and to celebrate its incredible history with our free resources and public programming.