Artist David Wojnarowicz regularly visited the piers beginning in the late 1970s, creating artworks and taking photographs there over the next few years. From 1975 to 1986, Black photographer Alvin Baltrop took photos of gay men cruising among the ruined architecture. The former American Seamen’s Friend Society Sailors’ Home and Institute (now The Jane), at Jane and West Streets, subsequently became a transient hotel and theater venue Hedwig and the Angry Inch had its Off-Broadway premiere here in 1998.īetween 19 the vast interiors and offices of the piers’ ruin-like terminals were the site of a diverse range of artistic work, including site-based installations, photography, murals, and performances. The ground floor of the former Keller Hotel (Barrow and West Streets) housed the Keller Bar, which was reputed to be the oldest gay “leather bar” in the city from 1956 to 1998. Waterfront hotels that once served seamen were converted to new uses.
Six of the 14 buildings in the adjacent New York City Weehawken Street Historic District housed gay bars from the early 1970s to the present, including the location of the former Ramrod. Gay bars replaced former waterfront taverns on the western end of Christopher Street and adjacent blocks. The dilapidated structures – including Pier 45 (known as the Christopher Street Pier) opposite West 10th Street, and piers 46, 48, and 51 – were reappropriated as a destination for gay men to sunbathe naked, cruise, and have public sex by the early 1970s. They were used for commerce during the day, but were empty and unlocked at night, becoming a popular locale for public sex through the early years of the AIDS epidemic.Īround the time of the June 1969 Stonewall uprising, Christopher Street became an important gay thoroughfare and, thus, the main corridor to the waterfront. A 1966 guidebook states “Go to the piers…between the trucks…” referring to the trucks that were parked at night under the elevated West Side Highway. This enabled the area to retain its popularity for gay men to cruise and have sex at night. The concentration of men, numerous bars and warehouses, and nighttime isolation established the waterfront as one of the main centers for gay life that thrived well after World War II.Ĭhanges in the maritime industry and the growth of the airlines made the piers and the large shipping terminals obsolete, leading them to be abandoned by the mid-1960s.
The area was surrounded by thousands of seamen of all nationalities and more than half a million unmarried and transient workers came into the port each year.īy World War I, the area had become a popular cruising area for gay men, and by the 1930s the opening of the elevated Miller (West Side) Highway (now demolished) cut through the area making it more of a backwater.
In almost the same span, rapes and burglaries tripled, car thefts and felony assaults doubled, and murders went from 681 to 1690 a year.ĭepopulation and arson also had pronounced effects on the city: abandoned blocks dotted the landscape, creating vast areas absent of urban cohesion and life itself.By the early 20th century, Greenwich Village’s Hudson River waterfront and numerous piers with Beaux Arts style shipping terminals comprised the busiest section of New York’s port for cargo and trans-Atlantic passengers, with merchant ships, steamships, barges, and commuter ferries. In just five years from 1969 to 1974, the city lost over 500,000 manufacturing jobs, which resulted in over one million households being dependent on welfare by 1975. Reeling from a decade of social turmoil, New York in the 1970s fell into a deep tailspin provoked by the flight of the middle class to the suburbs and a nationwide economic recession that hit New York’s industrial sector especially hard.Ĭombined with substantial cuts in law enforcement and citywide unemployment topping ten percent, crime and financial crisis became the dominant themes of the decade. These startling 1970s New York photos reveal a city undergoing an unparalleled transformation fueled by economic collapse and rampant crime.