Though now known for their hockey rinks and bowling alley, the Chelsea Piers used to be a hub of commerce and travel. A portal to the world, passengers would stream on and off the immense steamships docked along New York's shores.

Wedged between the West Street portion of the West Side Highway and bustling 9th Avenue, the history of this site tells us about the many lives of this particular swath of Downtown Manhattan. This area was first largely industrial, then a hub of slaughterhouses and packing plants, and now an area densely populated with galleries as well as the latest home to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

West Washington Market, August 18, 1936. West Washington Market consisted of ten two-story brick buildings between the piers and West Street, west of the Gansevoort Market Stand, an enormous, open-air produce market. Access lanes ran between the buildings (Loew Avenue is pictured, at left), which were erected in the 1880s to replace an earlier market complex. West Washington Market was demolished in the 1950s and replaced by the Gansevoort Garbage Terminal, where garbage was loaded onto barges to be dumped off-shore. The garbage terminal closed in 1981, but the site is still occupied by the Sanitation Department.