Nont Only New York,
Photos from the 1980s
14.03. – 26.04.24
- Artist
- Michael Bielický
- Opening
- 13.03. at 7 pm
In December 1973, a highway repair truck totaled the structure of the West Side Elevated Highway, New York City, leading to the highway’s closure and thereby severing of the City area until 1988. Michael Bielicky had started living at the intersection of West Side Highway and Bethune Street in Westbeth housing complex seven years after the disaster and stayed there from 1981 to 1982.
Pier 51 was one of many abandoned ruins visible from Michael Bielicky’s Westbeth apartment: the immediately facing West Side Elevated Highway and the crumbling industrial shacks adjacent along the piers, today known as the Christopher Street Pier and the spanned piers 42, 45, 46, and 51. Their namesake was the vibrant gay scene, then thriving and reanimating the ghosted piers with social interactions of all kinds. This namesake, though, masks the reality that these piers were also unsafe sites of violence, theft, and homicide, especially at night.
Since then the area underwent drastic urban planning changes, was plastered with green spaces and playgrounds and is now famously used for recreation by families, completely concealing its edgy past. (Paul Kenig)