Pier D Stands Out in the West Side’s Industrial Past
By David W. Dunlap
A new pier in the Riverside Park South project offers a vantage of the ruined Pier D. (Photo: David W. Dunlap/The New York Times)
It isn’t your conventional luxury amenity.
A large rendering in a glossy new brochure from the Extell Development Company promises prospective residents of its Avery and Rushmore apartment houses on the Upper West Side that they will enjoy commanding views of a rusting, twisted, melted ruin that has been jutting skeletally out of the Hudson River since it burned down 36 years ago.
The growing appreciation of Manhattan’s industrial past has yielded few monuments as unlikely or as poetic (if you catch it on a misty morning or under a piercing sunset) as the ruined Pier D, which once served the New York Central Railroad’s sprawling 60th Street Yard, now the site of Riverside Park South and the Riverside South residential development, from 59th to 72nd Streets.
Pier D, at the foot of 64th Street, was built of wood in the 1880s, then rebuilt with a steel frame after a fire in 1922. According to a historical plaque placed there by the Department of Parks and Recreation, it was used by longshoremen to unload bulk cargo, much of it grain, milk and vegetables. The pier was abandoned by June 1971 when it and two others were consumed in a spectacular blaze. Smoke was so thick that it forced the closing of the elevated West Side Highway nearby.
After years of inaction, Pier D — also called the “Frank Gehry Pier,” after its almost organically random angles — and the nearby “Spaghetti Pier,” a tangled mess of steel from the 1971 fire, were finally to be removed in 2003 as part of the Riverside Park South project. (Pier I, at the foot of West 70th Street, reopened in 2001 as a pedestrian promenade and fishing spot.)
Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, who had favored the preservation of Pier D, said he was alerted one day that a crane had begun dismantling the pier, severing its connection to the landside bulkhead. He raced to the site. “I basically gave them a field order to stop,” he recalled.
“The combination of the accidental artwork and preserving a piece of our industrial heritage was compelling,” Mr. Benepe said.
Because approved plans for the site had called for the removal of Pier D, however, he said its preservation had to be negotiated. The parks department agreed to undertake a new study of the effect of structural coverings along the river on fish habitats below. In the 1980s, a project to build a highway called Westway through 200 acres of landfill in the Hudson was upended when it was determined that it could pose a threat to striped bass.
Westway was never a popular idea. But Mr. Benepe said that keeping Pier D was. “People are really interested in their history,” he said. “It’s very important to remember that we once got our food in Manhattan because trains were able to pull up into the middle of Manhattan.”
It will be especially worth recalling when the Fresh Direct trucks begin pulling up at the Avery and the Rushmore.