![]() He’d been a photographer before the draft after Vietnam, Baltrop drove a taxi and sold jewelry during the day so he could shoot New York City streetscapes at night. Like the grimy, unwanted things that retreat under rocks, they learned to flourish in the dark.īy then Alvin Baltrop had returned from war. Under that cover of neglect, a new social ecosystem took shape - queers, the homeless, and artists made use of the empty space left behind by merchants and dockworkers: tricking, cruising, working, surviving. ![]() ![]() What economics started, the era’s grandiose urban renewal projects hastened: In a swipe of Robert Moses’s “great scythe of progress,” the northward construction of the West Side Highway severed the piers from the rest of Manhattan Island, leaving them quite literally abandoned on the side of the road.īy the 1970s, the piers had become so dilapidated that even the NYPD mostly stayed away. In the 1950s, new commercial ports across New York Bay began drawing business away from the piers. Built throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, the grand terminals were the primary port of call for the city’s shipping businesses, commercial cruise lines, and the Navy. Manhattan’s Hudson River piers were a hub of industry. ?Untitled, from the series “Pier Photographs” (1975–86)
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