Editor, writer and photographer:
Kevin Walsh

Of course, the far west end of 14th Street isn't dead; it's arguably more active than it ever was, with celebrity-bait restaurants, clubs and fashion boutiques. However, with the impending closure of Western Beef on 14th Street, one of the last active links to the neighborhood's 100 years as a slaughterhouse and meat wholesale center are gone forever. On this Forgotten NY page, we'll show you the last vestiges of the Meatpacking District when blood, gristle and flesh caked its Belgian-blocked streets. And I'm not referring to the muggings.

GOOGLE MAP: Meatpacking district

Restaurateur Florent Morellet (who has been here since 1985, long before the cognoscenti arrived) provides a succinct history of this previously mysterious, shadowy area on the area's official website:

The area began as a trading village for the Sapokanican, an Algonquin Indian tribe. After the famous sale of Manhattan Island for a few beads and bobbles, it became a Dutch tobacco plantation, then English farmland, before America built Fort Gansevoort to protect New York during the War of 1812. After the war, New York City began negotiations with John Jacob Astor, who owned most of the Gansevoort area, to purchase the underwater rights for the Hudson River. When the deal was complete, the shoreline, west of what is now Washington Street, was filled in, and became the terminus of the Hudson River Railroad. A farmers' market emerged, taking advantage of the railroad and the ever-present ferries across the Hudson from New Jersey. In 1886, the city declared the area as a public market to ensure that they participated in the profits!

At the turn of the last century, with the advent of an underground brine-cooling system, the city market was able to sustain a safe meat-market. The buildings that were once dwellings, stores and warehouses were quickly transformed into meat businesses - the vestiges that we still see today. In the past few years, many of the meat businesses have relocated to the Bronx, but a variety of new businesses have replaced them, and adapted these remarkable, historic structures once again - so that the neighborhood retains a vibrant, 24-hour energy that defines Gansevoort as unique in New York City. Meat guys work next to famous retailers, restaurateurs, art galleries and production houses in a wonderful cycle that ensures there is always something for everyone in Gansevoort Market!

What Florent Morellet doesn't say is that landlords have raised rents to the stratosphere, making it no longer feasible for many of the old meat marketers to remain in their traditional neighbohood, clustered along Washington, Gansevoort, Little West 12th and West 13th Streets. In the 1990s, restaurants, boutiques and galleries, who were more willing to pay NYC's exorbitant real estate prices, gradually moved in and took over. Gay clubs had begun moving in as early as 1970, with the Zoo followed by the Mineshaft.

Your webmaster arrived in the area in mid-January 2006 after an absence of over a year, on one of the rare cold days in January. It was a day of bright sun, yet little light since the sun at its highest was only about halfway up to the zenith. Here, I photographed what I assume to be the last days of the region's fading raison d'etre; it joins in oblivion the now-deceased Fulton Fish Market; Soho's Machine District*; Radio Row, Washington Market and Little Syria, razed for the World Trade Center between 1969 and 1973; and the Sewing Machine and Flower Districts of Sixth Avenue will also soon succumb. The Meatpacking District will be gone over the next decade. As I've said here before, sick transit, Gloria.
*this is a New York Times link; the stingy Times removes free links after a few days, so it will probably require a fee for you to read it.

In an era when our 5 billion dollar mayor is firing factotums for having the audacity to take a break with solitaire from their exciting, fulfilling office jobs, and the middle class is running to the exits again, not from the tyranny of crime as they did in the 1960-1970s but from the tyranny of the wealthy in the 2000s, here are some of the last venues of actual work where cigarette breaks are not firing offenses.

Washington Street

The "gut girls" of Walmir Market
Peter Luger buys its meat at Walmir
Luger's "meat doctor" [New Yorker]		 Diamond Meat Packers (839)
Now a Meet locker, formerly a meat locker, Washington at Gansevoort (817). Jim Naureckas, in NY Songlines, claims this was a memorable scene-setter in Sex and the City, not that I'd know. I do see packed tour buses gingerly negotiating the Belgian blocks, stuffed with modern-day desperate housewives retracing the steps of the previous set of TV comediennes.

I dislike repeating photos, but I took this in 2001 just outside what is now Meet looking across Washington Street at Maggio Beef and the truncated end of the "High Line" railroad. Since then Maggio has closed; it is planned to become the site of the Dia Museum when the High Line becomes a high-end, glitzy urban trail if current plans are realized. Dia would also take over the Premier Veal building, which we will see presently.

Not only are the meat purveyors moving out...the art of handlettered signs is too. The old butcheries still feature a lot of them.

Hogs & Heifers Saloon (859) is also an area veteran making the transition from a primarily neighborhood crowd of meat cutters to a genuine tourist attraction.

Since Julia Roberts and other celebs discovered the place in the 90s, it's been home to what some online reviewers disparagingly call a "bridge and tunnel" crowd, illustrating some New Yorkers' intolerance for 'inferior' out-of-towners.

 By 2006 Lamb Unlimited at 837 Washington was one of about twenty active meat businesses in the area, down from about 150 in the district's heyday in the 1940s.
New boutiques along Washington between Gansevoort and Little West 12th.

As noted above, the old West Side Elevated Freight Railroad has been spared from demolition and will likely become a highly stylized urban trail.

It would have been much better served as the home for a southern extension of the #7 Flushing Line; as it is, billions of dollars will have to be spent to tunnel the line instead of simply running it above ground here...if the extension is ever built.

Gansevoort Street

The street runs where old Fort Gansevoort, constructed for the War of 1812, was built. It was named for General Peter Gansevoort, one of Washington's officers. Gansevoort was the grandfather of author Herman Melville--who worked on the docks here as a customs inspector in the later years of his life, believing that his work would be forgotten. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham ("The Hours") has written that Gansevoort "is probably the only street in Manhattan, and maybe in the world, where you could procure, in one easy trip, a side of beef and a 1970's sectional sofa in pristine condition."

One legacy of the Meatpacking District is its sidewalk overhangs, which may be maintained by whatever businesses replace them. They do provide neeed shade in this tree-baren area especially on hot summer days. This building was built 1880-81 by John Glass Jr.

R&L Restaurant, opened in the 1920s at 69 Gansevoort, became Florent, named for its founder, in 1985. Florent has kept the 1942 vinyl and chrome exterior as well as much of its diner atmosphere within, while offering a menu that is a mix of American and French bistro fare. It has boisterous Bastille Day celebrations, with costumed wait staff as well as Florent himself, who may be seen in drag for the occasion.
Florent waitstaffer Miss Marisol occasionally features some tales from her night shift.
North side of Gansevoort west of Greenwich. The lettering on the side of the building, at least the part I can make out, says "clam chowder," "boullion" and New England buiscuit."

Little West 12th Street

The naming of this street, which runs from the junction of Gansevoort and Greenwich Streets west to West Street, is a little complicated. Apparently the city was at a loss about what to call it in its early days in the 1830s and 40s when it was laid out. If you look at it on a map it occupies the same space where West 12th Street would logically be. However, it cannot be called West 12th Street, since West 12th turns southwest at Greenwich Avenue and also reaches West Street. (The original name of that stretch of West 12th was Troy Street, with the renaming taking place in the mid-1800s. For many years Little West 12th was shown on maps but without a name.

With the West 12th Street name already taken, the city at first called this now-orphaned two-block street North 12th (1870) but that didn't really work. Instead of giving it a name it was decided to call it Little West 12th, and it starts appearing on maps by 1902. Two other streets in NYC have such a preface: Little Nassau Street in northern Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn and Little Clove Road in Sunnyside, Staten Island.

Street Necrology: Greenwich Village

The junction of 9th Avenue, Gansevoort and Little West 12th Streets is one of NYC's unique public spaces. Most of the MPD's streets, for so ong sparsely trafficked, have retained their 1800s Belgian-block pavements, and the wide plaza formed by the junction provides "cobblestone" street enthusiasts with plenty of textured pavement.

Till the early 2000s, the junction was also punctuated by one of NYC's few remaining original Type G Corvington lampposts, although it was 'defaced' by a modern sodium lume for its last couple of decades. The post was listing badly by the time I snapped it in 2000, and it has now been replaced by a modern retro-Bishop Crook.
Forsythe Meats still holds down a place on Little West 12th; across the street, you can still make out the word "meat" on an awning.

9th Avenue

Ninth was the first avenue in New York City to get an elevated train, in 1870, and the el shadowed the MPD until 6/12/40. Unlike other north-south NYC avenues, which begin somewhat prestigiously (3rd, for example at Cooper Square and 5th at Washington Square) 9th begins rather anonymously, at the Belgian-blocked junction of Greenwich, Gansevoort and Little West 12th, and picks up traffic from Hudson Street when it reaches West 14th.

Long after the meatpackers leave, the Old Homestead Steak House at 9th and West 14th will probably remain; as the sign says, it's been in business since 1868. The Old Homestead introduced Kobe beef to the USA and offers a $41 Kobe hamburger. The Homestead has always finished below Peter Luger and other NYC steakhouses in the publicity game though.

Your webmaster will stick to the Gold Star Diner in Bayside.
The new crossroads of the MPD, 9th and 14th. The old Nabisco factory, which has turned out thousands of Oreos in its time but is now the popular Chelsea Market, is in the background. RIGHT: sign on 9th between 14th and 15th.

10th Avenue

The odd street layout of the MPD makes for some interesting building plots that include a few triangle buildings, like the Liberty Inn at 10th and 11th Avenues and West 14th Street. The Liberty was once a hot sheet locale.

The NYC DOT still dutifully marks the dwindling meat market area.
The rusted facade of Pier 54, a former White Star-Cunard berth. In 1912 the Titanic was due to dock at nearby Pier 58.

CONTINUE TO DEAD MEAT, PAGE 2

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