THIS photo of the long-gone West Side Highway in Manhattan has been making the rounds today (it’s in Facebook’s Lost New York page) so I thought I’d wade in. Surprisingly much of what you see here, except for the highway itself, is still intact. The view is looking north at 11th Avenue and West 20th Street, where the WSH took an S-curve before resuming its uptown march.
The West Side Highway, officially called the Julius Miller Highway after the Manhattan boro president when it was built, was constructed in the early 1930s with this stretch in use until December 1973. The structure was gradually torn down in sections south of West 59th Street with the last of it removed in 1985. I remember passing beneath it to attend concerts at Pier 84 in 1983, but this was way before I conceived of Forgotten NY and began to tote a camera everywhere.
The WSH opened to traffic in 1934 and shared a number of design elements with the West Side Freight Railroad, now known as High Line Park, that included wrought iron railings. Cross streets on the trestle were marked by medallion-like devices, one of which can still be seen on Harrison Street in Tribeca. Those friezes were intricate, Machine Age in design, and very well done; it’s a shame more weren’t preserved.
The road itself was paved with Belgian blocks which made driving on it an adventure in the rain; I rode in cabs as a kid on the WSH then and even I was a bit nervous. Moreover, autos were obliged to move to the center when exiting, as on. and off ramps were located in the center of the road. This may be more frequent in Europe or Asia, but I haven’t seen that feature on any other elevated highway I have been on.
The lamps you see here are the originals (I call them the Westies), but the original Acorn fixtures were updated with SLECO “cuplights” in the 1950s. Both burned incandescent bulbs, which didn’t cut through fog well, and we’re right by the river here. A couple of these poles, equipped with Junior Bells, can be seen on a dead-end intact ramp south of West 72nd Street. In some stretches of the WSH, Donald Deskey poles replaced the Westies.
The Department of Traffic failed to maintain or repair the road, and this was before the bulk of the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s. A truck partially fell through a large crack or pothole in the road in December 1973 and the entire roadway was shortly closed to traffic after that. In the ensuing decade and a half, it became a park of sorts as locals went up to the roadway to hang out, and as you can see, car wrecks were dragged onto the road via the ramps.
That reminds me of an incident one night at Photo Lettering in the 1980s. One of my colleagues, named Dean Smith (not the famed University of North Carolina basketball coach) lived in Staten Island and offered to lift me back to Bay Ridge in the wee hours after our shifts. He used the Gowanus Expressway and almost got us killed twice, though neither occasion was his fault. Once he had to avoid a wreck in the middle of the road like you see above. This was when the city was turning off every other streetlamp to save money. On the other occasion, he had to swerve out of the way of a crossing vehicle and slammed into the guardrail. I lost my glasses and got bruised ribs, but the belt saved me going through the window. After that I resumed taking the mugger moving subway instead of riding with Dean.
The two large buildings in the photo are still there. On the right, the loft building with the chamfered (slanted) edge at 11th and 20th is still there. Out of the photo on the south side of 20th is a building that was once a women’s prison. In the center of the photo is the House of 1000 Windows, the Starrett-Lehigh Building, a huge freight terminal and warehouse occupying an entire block from 26th-27th Streets and 11th and 12th Avenues completed in 1932. It was jointly built by the Lehigh Valley RR and the Starrett Corporation (William Starrett, the builder of the Empire State Building, was called “the founder of the American skyscraper.”) The Lehigh Valley Railroad could once enter the building, with its cars accessing floors via elevator (trucks use them now). Traces of carfloats and tracks can still be seen at the waterfront. The building was a forerunner of the International Style glass walled design popular later in the century.
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