This text is a part of Hyperallergic’s 2025 Delight Month sequence, spotlighting moments from New York’s LGBTQ+ artwork historical past all through June.
It’s inconceivable to recount queer historical past in New York Metropolis with out acknowledging the piers — primarily these alongside the Hudson River waterfront in Greenwich Village. As soon as central business and ocean liner hubs, Piers 34, 45, 46, 48, and 51 had been abandoned by the Sixties with the arrival of the business airline business and containerized transport coupled with shifting reliance on New Jersey’s higher geared up ports. Although the Manhattan piers had been traditionally a website of homosexual relations for maritime employees earlier than their post-’60s abandonment, these developments additional opened the areas up as underground areas for cruising and creativity within the coming many years.
Frank Hallam, “Tava (aka Gustav von Will) Painting Pier 46, 10/20/1979” (1979/2012) (assortment of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Artwork, reward of the artist)
Whereas they could have been a haven for unfettered queer proliferation on the time, the piers had been certainly not protected. Left to crumble, the unmaintained buildings and docks had been harmful to entry and rife with vermin. Moreover, the piers had been a website of refuge for New York Metropolis’s most weak demographics through the ‘70s crime wave — specifically teen runaways, homosexual and transgender folks of shade, survival intercourse employees, drug seekers and sellers, and transient folks. Those that convened on the piers hesitated to contain regulation enforcement over fears of being outed, criminalized, or brutalized.
Shelley Seccombe, “Sunbathing on the Edge, Pier 52” (1978/2012) (assortment of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Artwork, reward of the artist)
Sadly, pivotal Black transwoman activist Marsha P. Johnson, who frequented the piers to supply shelter and supply materials assist to these in want, was discovered lifeless within the water close to the Christopher Road Pier in 1992, and the circumstances surrounding her loss of life nonetheless stay a thriller, though the case was reopened in 2012.
Regardless of backlash from the town’s queer neighborhood, the town destroyed the piers all through the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s and developed the manicured, family-friendly Hudson River Park that suited the gentrification of the West Village. There are nonetheless odes to the previous piers’ homosexual and creative historical past that had been enshrined by the town, together with David Hammons’s set up memorializing Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Day’s End” (1975) at Pier 52, however the true tales stay on within the reminiscences of those that had been there, in addition to a number of publications and archives.
David Hammons, “Day’s End” (2014–21) (picture Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)
Anybody searching for extra info and pictures surrounding the queer historical past of the town’s piers can get began with artwork historian and curator Jonathan Weinberg’s Pier Teams: Artwork and Intercourse Alongside the New York Waterfront (2019), the huge archives of the Lesbian, Homosexual, Bisexual, and Transgender Neighborhood Heart, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Artwork’s collections.
